One of the great mysteries from my 35 years of working life is why workers who “everyone knows” is trouble not only keep their jobs, but sometimes get promoted. Their bad behavior is talked about all the time by line workers and other managers, yet they stay employed. I wrote years ago about one answer. …
Anyone who, as part of their job, tries to get individual workers or managers to cooperate, has dealt with people who feel they can accomplish more on their own. Sometimes openly, more often without admitting it, they follow their own agendas. The science in this post may or may not be useful in persuading them …
During the pandemic lock-downs, some executives finally learned something scholars have known for a long time: Most people are just as productive at home, if not more so, if the nature of their work allows it. However, a mountain of research shows physically collocated teams outperform similar virtual teams. Put those two points together, and …
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 …
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 …
Back when “team building” was the hottest fad in management, no activity garnered as much derision as “trust falls.” The self-proclaimed team builder would have the team gather behind one member and ask that person to fall backwards, trusting their peers to catch them. The ridiculous, and much-ridiculed, idea was that somehow not letting another …
Any systematic approach to managing work is better than no system. And any of the existing Agile frameworks are better than a “waterfall” method where Agile is more appropriate, the majority of cases. But you don’t need Crystal or SAFe or even my Full Scale agile™ to be Agile. At the same time Scrum was …
Presenters often extol the value of more communication. At the same time we hear complaints about “information overload” and “too many meetings.” I am among those who have advised managers to err on the side of overcommunicating, and in The Truth about Teambuilding I cover evidence that talking more improves team decision-making. However, I added …
I trained four administrative teams to meet the principles of the Agile Manifesto seven years before it was written. Their story busts several myths about Agile that continue to hinder its adoption 25 years later. As mentioned in a recent post, Los Alamos National Laboratory faced a major risk in 1994. Their equipment management system …
