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
Summary: Many of us have horrible experiences with distributed teams where we can find no possibility of collaboration, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Even if a team is distributed, those team members need collaborative opportunities and space. What’s important is the team’s time for collaboration, not time zones. Here are some ways
Summary: Consider how your team currently organizes: for resource efficiency, optimizing for the individual; or for flow efficiency, optimizing for the team? Successful agile teams—distributed or not—should collaborate to optimize the flow of work through the team. This approach lets you understand your capacity, learn together, and deliver more effectively. Too many “teams” feel like
Steve, a software development manager, thought John was a “10x” developer. He explained that John could: Coded faster than anyone else. Write and release full applications over a weekend. “Mind-meld” with the users. No one else in Steve’s group could do this. Was I willing to support and coach the other people in Steve’s group
One of my reviewers for the Modern Management Made Easy books asked a fascinating question: I’ve never seen this many women in management or in senior leadership positions. Do these stories reflect your experience? Yes, the stories reflect my experience. Let me offer a little history. My History, Not Anyone Else’s History I started to
One of my colleagues, Al, private-messaged me. “I’m so much more effective now that we’re remote. I get a ton more work done. I’m so much happier. I love where the product is going. How can I do more of this?” Al feels productive and engaged. Why does he feel this way? When I spoke
My agile transformation clients struggle with this big question: How do we effectively reward managers? The more the organization wants or needs an agile transformation, the less the current reward structure works. How do you incent the managers? What makes sense for management compensation? Cindy, a director in a 500-person IT organization struggles with this—for