I wrote the first of a three-part series about looking at culture when you hire people last month. I posted that Pragmatic Manager, Your Culture: What is Okay for You to Discuss? and forgot to tell you. If you are on my email list, you received today’s Pragmatic Manager about what the organization values and
Jeff Haden, over at Inc, says that these three interview questions reveal everything. You are supposed to go down the person’s resume and ask them about each and every job they have ever had. The questions are: How did you find out about the job? What did you like about the job before you started?
In an interview, you have an opportunity to ask questions. Good interviewers will ask What Questions Do You Have For Me? What questions do you ask? It depends where you are in the interview process. Start with Culture I like to start with culture. As a candidate, these are ideal questions to ask in a
Rothman Consulting Group, Inc. Vol 9, #13: Your Culture:What is Okay for You to Discuss? June 13, 2012 ISSN:2164-1196 In This Issue:
A Workshop with Johanna Rothman and Shane Hastie, Pleasanton, CA, April 17-18, 2012. Geographically distributed projects are a reality in many organisations today; teams spread across multiple locations – diverse cities, states, countries, cultures and time zones. How can you work effectively in a geographically distributed agile team? Can a distributed team really go agile?
As I work with more organizations and across more cultures, I’ve been realizing that agile exposes a huge piece of the power in the organization that many people may not want exposed. I didn’t have a name for until I read Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success. In it, he talks about Hofstede’s Power distance
Another key piece of culture is understanding a candidate’s background and preferences around rewards: what do you reward, how do you reward, and when. Let me be clear: I am not discussing what the organization should and should not reward here, although I have plenty of opinions. I am discussing how to detect what the
I bet you’ve seen teams like this: people are quiet, reserved and thoughtful. They discuss issues in moderated respectful tones and words. And, I bet you’ve seen teams whose favorite word is “brain-dead” when discussing ideas or people, who seem to need to have high volume discussions, and are loud. I bet you’ve seen teams
Dave’s comments on my most recent post got me thinking about doing a series of posts about interviewing for cultural fit. In my recent talks about management, I talk about cultural fit. One piece of cultural fit is knowing what you can discuss and not discuss. When you interview people, especially managers, you can’t ask,
I’ve been at the PMI Regina PDC this week. I did a general session talk Monday, and am leading a two-day estimation workshop through tomorrow. Andy Nulman had a great riff on normal vs. abnormal employees. You can see a clip of it here. Warning: racy, not completely clean. If you think of normal as