TL; DR: Good leaders don’t decide whether to be hands-on or hands-off. They decide what the person in front of them needs today. We spend a lot of time talking about whether leaders should be hands-on or hands-off. My concern is that labels like these narrow our thinking. They encourage consistency when leadership often demands […]
Don’t Choose Between Hands-On and Hands-Off Read More »
TL; DR: Clarity saves time. Consensus feels safer, but it’s expensive. Clarity feels hard because it risks disagreement. Consensus feels easier because it avoids it. Instead of naming what’s there, leader hedge their views mistaking politeness for progress. Consensus becomes a way to obscure instead of decide so confrontation gets avoided at the expense of
Clarity Before Consensus Read More »
Some teams are like plants that never take root. We can water them, move them to better soil, even talk to them every day, but nothing grows. The team’s output is low. Accountability is spotty at best. The work gets done, but never in a way that pushes quality or the mission forward. Performance plateaus,
Let the Dead Teams Die Read More »
Ask most leaders what’s missing in their team, and you’ll hear the same thing: “People need to be more accountable.” We act like accountability is the cure-all. Deadlines slip? Hold people accountable. Output drops? Hold people accountable. But accountability isn’t the root. More often, the issue is a quiet mismatch between what someone is told
Accountability Isn’t the Problem Read More »
Meetings are the worst, aren’t they? They often feel aimless, provide us with little value, and a different agenda can be found under every rock we turn over. One on ones are no different. It begins as an opportunity for us to connect with our boss, but in the end we leave the meeting with
Your One on Ones Probably Suck Read More »
Look. I know I’m starting to sound like a broken record but for the 1,001st time. What the Corps calls leading Marines, others call agility. I talk about it here when I compare discipline to agility. And here where I share the Marine Corps’ method of decentralizing leadership. I even talked about it nearly a
What the Corps Calls Leading Marines Others Call Agility Read More »
I know a three-step way that’ll help you be an effective agile coach or scrum leader anywhere you go and improve your agile teams in the process. In fact, I’m surprised that I’ve never seen anyone offer this up previously, and it’s actually quite simple. The devil is in the details, and navigating the nuance
Perhaps You’re the Problem – Let’s Fix That Read More »
“The cost of being a bad Scrum Master is lower than the cost of being a bad engineer.” I remember hearing this from a team member who was double dipping as the team’s Scrum Master. And he was right. There wasn’t enough of him to go around, and the org didn’t have a dedicated team
The Cost of Being a Bad Scrum Master Read More »
I spent a decade in the U.S. Marine Corps as an intelligence operative and martial arts instructor. It was both some of the most formative and exciting years of my life mixed with excruciatingly long runs, incredibly high expectations, and several harrowing experiences. And it was a blast. After I resigned from the Marine Corps
Mastering the Signal in a World of Noise Read More »
Is it just me or does job hunting feel a lot like dating? You’re ghosted often.You get your hopes up only to be let down.You start questioning if there’s something wrong with you. I like how Chelsea Handler puts it. Dating is like job hunting. Sometimes you have to kiss a lot of frogs before
Why Dating and Job Hunting Both Suck Read More »
