You want business agility. The teams have worked hard to change how they work. And you realize your current career ladder isn’t working for you—or the people you serve. The people and teams continue to experiment with agile behaviors. You would like more lateral, not just vertical options to support any person’s growth. What can […]
As people gain experience, they often want new and different responsibilities. In a typical career ladder (Part 1), they had one direction: up. That often creates a problem: great technical people become insufficient managers. Let’s not blame these people—many of them didn’t want to become managers However, if people want more responsibility, the career ladder
Part 1 discussed a typical career ladder. I said that when we focus on individual achievements and deliverables, we ignore the agile system of work. Worse, when we reward individual achievements we prevent an agile culture. That’s because agile teams learn together as they create the product. We need career ladders that reward working together.
As I’ve been speaking about the Modern Management Made Easy books, people ask these questions: We’re pretty good with our agile approach. It’s time for performance reviews. How do we reward someone based on individual work when we want teams to work together? What do we do? Can we extend whatever that is to our
I’m not going to summarize each part, but to treat all of these as a whole. Let me circle back around to what HR does, as in Part 1: Administration and Benefits Compensation and rewards Education and training Recruitment Hiring If the organization wants to create an agile culture, it makes sense to change the
What can we make more “agile” in HR? Aside from an agile approach to recruiting and hiring, we can make feedback and coaching much more iterative and incremental. Add in collaborative feedback and coaching, and appreciations, and it starts to look like an agile approach to “managing performance.” Performance “Management” is Really About Power In
I wrote about career ladders in Creating Agile HR, Part 5: Performance Management, the Career Ladder. Once you have a career ladder, it’s easy for everyone to understand the criteria for a given level. That means you can use an “agile” approach to manage compensation. Compensation is part of career management. Career management includes: Recognition (what
One of the big roles of HR is to shepherd the assessment of people and their fit for their jobs. That’s called “managing performance.” Managing performance is about: Creating and curating a career ladder for all jobs. That’s exempt (salaried), non-exempt (hourly), and all management. Manage salary parity. HR might help a manager learn how to provide feedback and coaching. (I
Sourcing, how and where you recruit possible candidates is a great way to use small, safe-to-fail experiments. That’s because the recruiting landscape continues to change. A little history: in the past, we read newspapers—on paper! Before the Civil Rights Act, employers advertised for “Men Wanted” and “Women Wanted.” (I don’t remember if that was women
One of the problems with agile hiring is this: what data do you collect? Let me digress for a bit and talk about cycle time and lead time. This image explains cycle time and lead time for a cross-functional team. Everything starts in the Ready column and proceeds through the possible progression through development and