I wrote about general meeting problems in Recognize the Problems That Prevent Effective Meetings (Collocated, Remote, Hybrid). But “hybrid” teams have much worse meeting problems. During the pandemic, most of us understood how to create nebula team meetings that worked. (Dispersed teams are nebula teams. See How To Understand Your Team Type: Collocated, Satellite, Cluster, Nebula for
How to Describe All the Value When You Want to Influence Do you ever wonder how to describe the value of the changes you’ve led or want to lead? Fred, a project leader, needs a new job. His company—despite his project’s success—laid him off. He needs to influence hiring managers to look at his resume
Ginny, a project manager, had a frustrating meeting with her boss, Henry, the VP of Engineering. His exact words to her were, “I don’t care how you get it done, but we need all of these two feature sets done. Now!” She explained she needed more teams to finish the work. Otherwise, people would be
Jim, a relatively new manager said, “I don’t have nearly enough time. I’m in meetings all the time. And I still need to do some of my previous technical work. I feel stretched from one end of the work day to the other.” We spoke for a few minutes. I asked him to eyeball the
If we want more ease and better results, we need to be able to change when the world changes. Yet, we don’t always notice these changes, so we don’t create options and experiment. Too often, we feel as if the world drags us down. We double-down on what we’ve been doing. Instead, we need to
Work Solo or Collaborate? How to Choose Based on What Benefits You Do you prefer collaborative or solo work? Some of us prefer to work alone because we know how to be effective, even if our work is not independent of everyone else’s work. Or, if we work as part of a workgroup, such as
I started this series by realizing managers have (too) many decisions to make. The longer it takes managers to make any single decision, the longer it might take to make all the decisions. That’s Little’s Law, applied to decisions. In Part 1, I recommended that managers start with their oldest possible decision and decide what
Many managers feel pressure to deliver finished work. They plan and replan—and ask the teams to plan and replan. They plan to be able to predict the future. But there are several problems with all this planning: These plans require prediction at all levels, from strategy to product to what the team delivers. That’s a
I don’t know of anyone who likes layoffs. However, they are one tool in your management toolbox. But so many layoffs don’t return the results the managers expect. Worse, the layoffs alienate the previous employees and the survivors. And the customers? If your customers can tell you laid people off, you won’t get the business
Any time we mess with people’s money, status, or ability to work, we create emotions—for ourselves and the other person. As managers, when we offer a job or a promotion, those emotions tend to be happy. But layoffs? Those emotions are rarely happy—for anyone. If we try to bury those feelings, we might appear as