In a recent social media discussion, someone stated that the founder of Kanban would not consider it “agile.” I don’t doubt that, and I know some Agilists say Kanban was/is only Lean and not agile. My belief that Kanban is an agile method is based on the way it is taught for use in offices …
Tag: self-management
The Book that Tempts Me to Quit Coaching
As an experiment, make yourself read through the next paragraph without responding in your head. Just absorb it. Imagine a working world where line managers have 50 to 70 direct reports, made manageable because the teams are self-directing and include all functions needed to complete the work. Team members handle their own quality control, maintenance, …
Proof Empowerment Improves Performance
You wanted proof to give your managers about the need to empower your teams, and here it is: Two major studies prove that if workers have “a sense of control in relation to one’s work,” it improves performance by individuals and teams of all types. These are “meta-analyses,” drawing on data from a total of …
How to Become an Agile/Servant Leader in One Meeting
Forget Kanban, SAFe, LeSS, and even my own system Full Scale agile™ (FuSca™): If you are a manager pondering how to adopt Agile, your direct-report team can be there in just one meeting. Just as quickly, you will become the kind of servant/transformational leader generations of management gurus have talked about, but few managers actually …
Stop Calling These Practices “Radical!”
TED talks by managers who try radically weird leadership practices and get amazing results… those are the exceptions that prove the rule, right? If the way most companies are run is a problem, more would change, right? Sorry, but no. The reason companies succeed while using standard practices is because they are competing against companies …
Why I’m Dropping the Term “Scrum Master”
It was a dark moment, that day I realized many Agile advocates do not, in fact, “get it” regarding “self-organizing teams.” One indicator is the term used for people who facilitate Scrum ceremonies. For that reason I had already been thinking about changing the name, and then I started attending diversity and inclusion events. These …
How a Culture Change Guru Blew a Culture Change
Zappos, the online shoe and fashion retailer, is well known for its unusual organizational culture centered on exceptional customer service and worker freedom. “Our philosophy has been that most of the money we might ordinarily have spent on advertising should be invested in customer service, so that our customers will do the marketing for us …