Modern Management: Start with Congruence to Change Your Culture Do you want a more effective organizational culture that delivers more agility? Maybe you’ve tried agile framework for teams or products. While you’ve seen some improvement, you’re not where you thought you’d be. Instead of focusing on practices or team principles, consider changing your culture to
Dan, a CIO, needs the teams to work faster. The customers are moving away from the company’s products. If they can recapture the customers, the company will succeed. If not? Layoffs loom. Dan demands the teams start more work. And he demands they finish the work faster than the teams think they can. Even when
There was a Twitter discussion about XP not having crossed the chasm. Someone Lula Rodrigues posted this wonderful Kent Beck talk about that here: https://www.agilealliance.org/resources/videos/xp-as-an-incentive-system-kent-beck-xp-2018/. Lots of great insights. Watch all of it, including the Q&A at the end. Early in the video, Kent discusses the all-too-frequent sexism and racism I also see in tech.
All decisions are a form of power. We exercise our personal power (power within) in many ways: when we decide where to live, what to wear, and what to eat. Not only that, we also choose our jobs, who we vote for, and where to go on vacation. We have a ton of personal power.
Modern Management: Use Your Integrity Even if You Fear for Your Job Susan, the Platform Director, was worried about ProductA—still in development. The company received about 75% of its revenue from that one product. Worse, VeryImportantCustomer, VIC, accounted for half of that revenue. And from the demos, Susan could see the teams were not going to
You need a senior person at a meeting. The meeting is supposed to start at 2 pm. The leader strolls in at 2:15. When leaders act this way, they show their power. When I’ve asked why the person is late, they often say, “I had another meeting that ran long.” While that’s what occurred, people
Modern Management: Catch People Succeeding When was the last time someone noticed that you did something great? Too often, we hear plenty about what we did that was wrong. But we have research—and experience—that says when people notice what we do well, we tend to do more of that. Here are two examples. A Team Skills
You’re a leader in the organization. And you’re supposed to be at another meeting, that started 15 minutes ago. Your previous meeting ran long, so now you’re late. But the conversation you just had? That conversation prevented a bad product decision. (Or, it prevented a customer meltdown. Or something equally important.) At least, the decisions
More of my clients say they want business agility. (That’s a good thing.) Yet, we don’t share a common definition of business agility. My clients mostly discuss their mindset. Mindset might help people, but it’s not sufficient. Instead, let’s consider how to see management’s adaptable and resilient actions. Those actions show that managers change their
Modern Management: Encourage Experiments and Learning How much of your work directly supports the people you lead and serve? How much of your work supports the environment or the culture so the people can be more effective? If you work directly with the people you lead and serve, you work in the business. If you work to