CategoryTeam leadership

Transparency

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Transparency is a key value in Agile organisations. It improves employees' motivation and make the teams perform better. At the same time, transparency is difficult to achieve, because it usually requires serious changes to company's culture and mindset. You can't do it overnight, but fortunately, each and every step towards this goal counts.

Art of Delegating

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Empowering people and teams is critical for organisations to gain competitive advantage and succeed. Smart delegating of responsibilities results in more engaged employees, better culture and improved overall productivity of a company. Knowledge and experience are shared among a larger group of employees which in turn increases organisation's flexibility and agility. However, it's easier said...

Rewards and recognition

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An effective reward system can motivate employees and increase their work performance. It can have a very powerful influence on people's behaviour and, therefore, many organisations implement it as an integral component of their compensation strategy. However, not all reward programmes are beneficial. Moreover, inefficient systems are counterproductive, destroy creativity, hurt morale and disrupt...

100% utilisation myth and slack time

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In my recent blog post I covered a topic of limiting Work in Progress. I briefly mentioned that in many companies working on many tasks in parallel is somehow more important than accomplishing them. 100 utilisation myth Many organisation believe that their employees should always be busy with work which results in aiming for their constant 100% utilisation. At first glance it may sound reasonable...

Performance appraisals

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Traditional performance appraisals Most organisations have a formal process for evaluating the performance of its employees. Usually, it has a form of an annual performance review where employee’s work performance and behaviours are assessed, rated and documented by direct managers. The ultimate goal of a performance review system is to reward and retain capable employees by keeping them...

Meetings can be destructive

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I’ve just read an interesting article about meetings Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule which reminded me about 37signals statement that “meetings are toxic” Meetings Are Toxic. While I understand that meetings can’t be eliminated I also agree that many of them require urgent changes. The main issues I find destructive in far too many meetings are: No clear purpose. No...

Setting goals: OKRs

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I’ve recently come across a great video by Rick Klau about setting goals at Google. OKRs stands for Objectives and Key Results and are used at Google for setting goals at company’s, teams’ and individuals’ level. A great advantage of this system is that individual goals are aligned with company’s goal, therefore, everyone is rowing in the same direction. Key points...

Good Retrospectives

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Overview Retrospective is one of the inspect-and-adapt opportunities provided by Scrum framework. It’s a time-boxed event for the team to analyse their way of working and identify and plan potential improvements. Sprint retrospective is one of the most important, but probably also the least appreciated practices in the Scrum framework. Therefore, retrospectives have to be carefully taken...