Illustrated Agile
I’m writing this in near total darkness during a planned power outage (called load shedding) in a time zone 7 hours ahead of my home in Chicago. Hang on battery…hang on! It’s been almost 8 weeks since I landed abroad to start an Agile coaching assignment. Admittedly, I was nervous. Would I be able to […]
In Part 1 of Help! My Company is Stuck, we discussed a few of the stagnating scenarios found when organizations are attempting transformative movement towards greater agility and improved culture. In part 2, we’ll dig into a few of the more challenging situations you may be experiencing. Admittedly, many of these will require a coordinated, herculean, […]
The phrase “servant leadership” is frequently used when current leadership styles (typically command-and-control) clash with an emerging culture of empowerment and self-organization. “We need our leaders to embody servant leadership” is a comment I recently heard. But what is servant leadership? Do people really know what they are asking for? As Patrick Lencioni states “I’m tired of […]
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 […]
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. […]
Earlier this year, I published 9 blog posts walking through an Agile Leadership Engagement Model. You can now download all 9 posts in one convenient document. To be a nimble, adaptable, and agile organization facing new challenges and complexities, traditionally accepted leadership practices from the past must be radically changed. This will require more than […]
The words we use with our people will leave a lasting impact. This will always be true for leaders and there is no way around it. When we use critical, demeaning, or harsh words we leave “scar tissue” and it may never go away. This scar tissue often takes the shape of guilt, fear, or […]
Becoming an organization with agility at its core will require a natural pull and flow between leadership and product teams. Especially as companies grow larger, this conduit between the organizational vision created by senior leadership, strategic planning by mid-level leaders, and the product vision created by the product owner has a tendency to become smaller […]
If a product has been flagged as “invest” during planning, the product owner and team should be in a continuous flow of discovering valuable features to deliver for that product. They should be learning everything about who is (or could be) using their product. The output of learning and discovering our users is captured in […]
One of the most challenging situations an Agile organization will encounter will be the coordination of dependencies and releases across product teams, operational or support groups, and areas of the company not using Agile methodology. With the organizational vision in place and agile teams established, product owners will begin to determine the features to be […]
While mid-level leaders are planning how to build out the vision (part two of the series) and when the product owner and teams are creating product roadmaps (covered in the next post), senior leaders should play a supporting role. Depending on the size of your organization, the planning (or portfolio management) for your product teams […]