Johanna Rothman, Management Consultant
Expert in Managing Product Development
Three Tips for Coping When You’re Supposed to Lead We’re several weeks into the COVID-19 crisis, and we still don’t know much about the future. We have some data about the present. But the future? Nope. You might have a title with “lead” or “manager.” And, you might not be sure about what to do …
Continue reading “Three Tips for Coping When You’re Supposed to Lead”
Three Tips for Coping when Change Might Make You Nuts (Support Others) We’re still living in substantial uncertainty and chaos. We don’t know when we might be able to return to work. The kids are home from school for the foreseeable future. Where I live, in Massachusetts, all “non-essential” businesses are closed. (I did not …
Continue reading “Three Tips for Coping when Change Might Make You Nuts (Support Others)”
Three Tips for Coping when Change Might Make You Nuts (Start with Yourself) Given COVID-19, whatever we “knew” about our organizations or work is out the window now. I thought I might help with this three-part series about how you can manage in this time of crazy-making change. This three-part series is: How you can help …
Continue reading “Three Tips for Coping when Change Might Make You Nuts (Start with Yourself)”
Three Secrets to Building Your Influence, Part 3, Shared Interests If you want to change anything in your organization, you need to influence at least one other person to succeed. I wrote about showing your competence in Part 1. Part 2 was about building trust. Now, let’s talk about creating win-wins with shared interests. I bet you’ve met people who …
Continue reading “Three Secrets to Building Your Influence, Part 3, Shared Interests “
Three Secrets to Building Your Influence, Part 2, Trust If you want to change anything in your organization, you need to influence at least one other person to succeed. I wrote about competence in Part 1. This part is about trust. How do people trust you? They might expect you to be predictable in two ways: …
Continue reading “Three Secrets to Building Your Influence, Part 2, Trust”
Three Secrets to Building Your Influence, Part 1, Competence If you want to change anything in your organization, you need to influence at least one other person to succeed. Mary, a leader in the organization, wanted to help her colleagues consider a variety of agile approaches. The organization had chosen a framework, and the framework …
Continue reading “Three Secrets to Building Your Influence, Part 1, Competence”
Three New Year’s Tips to Ease Your Team’s Agility I hope you are all having a terrific holiday season. A reader asked me about tips I had to ease her project’s transition from waterfall to an agile approach. Woo! I have plenty, so I decided to select three tips I have seen work. Tip 1: …
Continue reading “Three New Year’s Tips to Ease Your Team’s Agility”
Three Collaboration Secrets to Create Your Agile Culture I’ve been working with managers and technical leaders on a big problem: How to create an agile culture. The managers and leaders want to create a successful agile culture. The people on the teams—they often want to be “left alone” to do their work. That’s not horrible. …
Continue reading “Three Collaboration Secrets to Create Your Agile Culture”
What Happened to the Beautiful Plans? (They Became Experiments) Tim, a senior manager, loved seeing plans for work and roadmaps. Then, the organization decided to Embrace, Not Manage Change. Tim wasn’t sure how to track the work. This image helps me frame the need for an agile approach. (See the blog series: Where I Think “Agile” is …
Continue reading “What Happened to the Beautiful Plans? (They Became Experiments)”
Create Your Agile Culture: Embrace, Not Manage Change Stu, a manager who’d been successful throughout the years by managing risks and managing change was concerned. “I don’t want to move fast and break things,” he said. “I don’t want to move too slowly. I’d like to move fast. But I don’t want to break anything.” …
Continue reading “Create Your Agile Culture: Embrace, Not Manage Change”