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There’s a lot in common between leadership and the improvisation that you find in music and comedy. Improvisers aren’t just “making it up.” They are crafting a story in real-time that represents everything they’ve learned over years of honing their skills.
Hiring for your team comes down to being able to effectively describe your ideal candidate. Adding rigor to and removing bias from the interview process involves a great deal of introspection, peer review, and iteration. This post provides a guide you can follow.
Time is a finite resource. Our responsibilities and expectations, however, are not. To ensure we are able to make the best use of our time, it is valuable to analyze the work that we take on, the attention we’re able to devote to it, and the context switching that is required throughout the day.
For those who struggle to get meaningful feedback from their manager or peers, there is hope. The way we ask for feedback can help influence how it is delivered and improve the odds of it being constructive and actionable now and in the future.
As an organization grows in size and complexity, process and structure will be introduced to make sense and codify that complexity. However, it carries with it the risk that these systems will begin to interfere with the type of collaboration that breeds creativity.
Having team members organized in different cross-functional Product Teams or Scrum Teams can bring a tremendous amount of value to an organization. Unfortunately, the role of the manager of those team members can be ambiguous if not deliberately established.
The root cause of the frustrations that many teams experience adopting Agile or Scrum is that they embrace the ceremonies, rather than the communication framework that it offers. If teams focus on the types of conversations available to them, they will more effectively be able to operate as a team.
As increasing emphasis is put on developing leaders, an often-overlooked aspect is if the employee actually has the right manager for them.
Companies of a certain size — that is, somewhere after “hmmm, we really should get some managers…” and before “crap, our managers don’t have time to manage people because they’ve got too much work to do!” — start to encounter growing pains.
