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Your Boss’ Opinion of You Really Does Matter

Eliza from My Fair Lady is a classic representation of the Pygmalion effect. 
Photo Credit Wikimedia Commons

The Pygmalion effect is one of the more fascinating aspects of psychology, and should be one of the most understood aspects of modern management. It suggests that our performances can be directly influenced by the perceptions of our bosses. So if they think you’re going to be great, and act as though you’re going to be great, then the chances are, you will be great.

There has been no shortage of evidence to support this hypothesis, but one more will certainly do no harm. It comes from a Chinese study into teaching at a couple of universities in southern China.

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Scrum Is All About the Working Agreements We Choose to Make

Our Scrum is only as strong as our voluntary working agreements.

In many organizations, I see Scrum not producing its anticipated value. The concept of value varies across organisations, but there is also a universal anticipated value of Scrum.

The Scrum Guide says about Scrum's purpose:

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Managers: For Effective Stand Up Meetings, Do Your Homework

Stand up meetings don't have to be the worst. It just takes a little management preparation.
“The daily stand up meeting is not another meeting to waste people's time. It will replace many other meetings, giving a net savings several times its own length.” --  XP Rules

One of three things happens at every standup:

  1. Issues are omitted.

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True Servant Leadership Places Followers First (and the Results Are Staggering)

A true servant leader is (literally) worth his weight in gold.

The concept of 'servant leadership' is certainly not new, but it's perhaps also fair to say that it's a concept that many still struggle to adopt.

Why Is Servant Leadership Crucial in an Agile Organization?

If any evidence were needed, a recent study from the University of Exeter Business School aims to provide it. It shows that tailoring training and recruitment to help managers with empathy, integrity, and trustworthiness has a profound impact on the productivity of the company.

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When Scaling Agile Is Not the Answer

Scaling may seem like the obvious choice, but when it comes to Agile, not so fast.

At the Influential Agile Leader workshop earlier this year, I led a session about scaling, and how it might not be the answer. My experience is that when people use frameworks for larger efforts, they experience these unexpected side effects:

  • The framework actions often require more manager-type people to control the actions of others.
  • The framework creates less throughput, not more.
Agile Scaling Frameworks: An Executive Summary

One of the participants asked, "But what if we have to scale?"

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How to Keep Your Software Developers’ Job Satisfaction High

These software developers are clearly satisfied.

There is always time to talk about work ethics and rules that influence the turnover rate of a software development company. It doesn’t matter what kind of bonuses or incentives you offer – if the company doesn't have strong leadership and clear guidelines, chances are high that employees won’t stay there for long.

At DashBouquet, we value the fact that our employees have been with us for quite a long time and new people keep joining the team. We think one of the reasons for that is our 'Blackbook of Rules.' Thus, we’d like to share some of it with you, so that maybe you'll be inspired to come up with your own.

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Managers and Agile: Where Do I Fit In?

Agile is about self-organizing teams, isn’t it? As a Manager, what does that mean for me? Should I fear for my job? As a Manager or Director, Agile transformation can be disconcerting because you want to trust your teams and let them be self-organizing, but at the end of the day, it’s still your organization and your responsibility.

Let’s start with a proper view of the term “self-organizing”. Many leaders and teams incorrectly think that self-organizing teams don’t need leadership. Agile is about flexibility, not anarchy. Esther Derby explains it well: “Self-organizing is a characteristic of a team, not something that is done once and for all. Self-organizing teams experiment, create new approaches and adapt to meet new challenges within the boundaries of the organization.” Mike Cohn says: “Self-organizing encourages teams to fully own the problems they encounter.” Empowerment is the key to self-organizing. Management must empower Agile teams to experiment, fail and learn, which in turn gives team members higher personal investment in outcomes. Agile pays people to think, rather than to blindly follow instructions.

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A New Way for Developers to Tame Their Notifications

This morning, I woke up with 52 new emails from Jira. 52 is actually an okay day, it could be much worse! And like every day, I spend half an hour going through all the updates. I go through those updates and open a page in my browser for the tickets I need to have a better understanding of. After that, I have dozens of Jira browser tabs open, and then I go through each one of them, one at a time. This is a loooong process every day. And the worst of it is that when I’m done, I feel like I should be happy about it, but hey — here comes a new update. So I don’t even get that feeling of relief. The only way to cope with this is to book some notifications-off time in my day. I know some people who just turn them off; I feel like I should do that as well…

Does that sound familiar? But maybe, just maybe, there could be a better way…well, a LOT better way.

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Inversion of Control (Explained Non-Technically)

I will use how businesses evolve to provide an analogy for Inversion of Control.

Businesses don't set out on day one to be a Fortune 500 company. Typically, they start with you in your garage (maybe with a friend).Over time, your business grows and you hire people, assign clearer functional responsibilities, and start to scale up your business. Businesses have to do this, while also changing quickly to stay competitive.

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How to Get Your Engineering Team Involved in Product Efforts

At Anaxi, we don’t have a product manager. Seem weird? We’re not the only ones to do that. For instance, that’s also the case at Apple. But in our case, this role is spread out across our remote engineering team. In this article, I will detail why we do this and how we do it. To be honest, there are many things we’re still iterating on, and refining our processes will just be a constant effort, as it should be in every company. Note that our process works for any engineering team, working together in the same office or remotely.

Why You Want Your Dev Team Involved in Your Product Definition Efforts

In our particular case, our target customers are developers and engineering managers (and later on, product managers). So our engineering team also happens to represent our own customers. It stands to reason that they should have deep insights on what has value and what has less, probably more than a non-technical product manager who thinks they can understand the audience.

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Use Development for Discovery

Before you begin to build a house and break ground on the foundation you better have a blueprint and know exactly what you’re going to build. In physical construction, we really need to plan things out ahead of time to ensure that we have the right materials at hand and that things come together as we want them to.

This is a fundamental constraint of physical construction and it forces us to think about and construct physical things in certain ways. Virtual things do not have the same limitations and so in many cases, we can find more effective and efficient ways of constructing virtual things then if we were to just follow a similar plan that we would for constructing a physical thing.

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How Do Gantt Charts Make Project Managers’ Lives Easier?

Do you want to have a way to see how tasks are progressing? Want to see what roles are there in a project and how others depend on them? If you’ve always wanted a quick view of how far behind or ahead of schedule your project is, then it’s time for Gantt charts.

We believe that you might have already heard about Gantt charts considering their popularity in the project management domain. As a new project manager or team leader, it’s absolutely fair on your part to have some apprehensions about them.

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The One Job You Need to Do to Be a Great Manager

I hate articles where the headlines are provocative, but you have to read all the way to the end for the answer. So I’m going to give you the answer right now, and then explain why.

Your one job as a manager is to give a clear direction to your team and remove any roadblocks in its way.

(Well, technically I suppose that is two but they are so closely related I consider them one.)