Illustrated Agile
Recently, someone very close to me had to leave a leadership position at their company due to health reasons. This person invested deeply in the relationships of her team and created deep and long-lasting bonds with them. She inspired them, cherished them, cared for them, and fought for them. She empathized with them and created […]
As a leader in an organization one of your many expectations would be to determine when one of your direct reports are ready to be promoted into a leadership position or deciding who should be hired from the outside into an open leadership position reporting to you. When promoting internally, this often means deciding when […]
As a part of the Scrum Master Performance Review series of posts, an emphasis was placed on obtaining feedback for the Scrum Masters reporting to you. Step 5 focused on receiving feedback from the product owner while step 6 focused on gathering feedback from members of the team. In the past, I have used a […]
This was a question posted as a reply to the post Make Performance Reviews Meaningful. If you have questions of your own, feel free to reply to any post or submit your question on our Ask Anything page. One big question though: what do you do in the big reviews if an employee has had […]
For many leaders, the sprint review (or demonstration) is one of the few chances they have to see their direct reports functioning with their Agile team and to witness the outcome of their work. My recommendation would be to attend as many sprint review sessions as you can. Everything you need to know about the health […]
What do managers really think about the people who report to them? I have been in many conversations with managers about their direct reports and it’s fascinating how the dynamics of the conversation shift based on who they are talking about. Some people are their “rock stars” and when mentioned a manager would often perk up or […]
Last fall the CEO of AOL made the news by notoriously firing an employee during a “company all” conference call. The recording of the audio and transcript of the event was subsequently released to the internet. While the real-time firing made all the news, reading the transcript further reveals the following ultimatum was directed towards […]
I have always been a proponent of keeping most Agile events and rituals open and transparent. If anyone in the organization would like to stop by a daily stand-up session or experience a sprint review, the more the merrier… …with one exception. If you are a manager with direct reports on an Agile team (you […]
In Part 1, we discussed a few of the reason why current performance management systems may be flawed and are contributing to the employee disengagement epidemic facing many organizations today. So, if what we have isn’t resonating with many of our people – if it is not inspiring greater performance and engagement – what are […]
It’s that time of year again…performance management review season. The topic of performance management seems to be in the spotlight more than usual with recent news from Yahoo! and Microsoft. For many of the early years in my career I was an independent consultant but in 2004 I joined a large company as an employee. […]
The success or failure of leaders are often measured with quantifiable metrics – stock price, shareholder value, revenue, expenses, sales, profit – to name a few. In a capitalistic system, focusing on results-based metrics are an important dimension to remaining a viable enterprise… …but something seems to be missing. While preparing for a presentation later this […]
A friend of mine shared a negative experience he recently had with their boss. I won’t get into details of this specific incident but it sounded like this was one in a string of behaviors in which he was left feeling, in his words, “totally unimportant.” The dictionary says we know something is important when […]