Every team needs a goal. Small-town sports team, elite competitive mathletes, developer tiger team. If you don’t have a vision, direction or purpose for where your team is headed – how will you know when you get there? How will you know when you have achieved it? How will you know it’s time to tweak, adjust and grow that vision? If you never have anything to measure against it? And what about everyone on your…
Isn’t the most demotivating feeling in the world when your leader has no idea what you are doing, how you are doing it, why you are doing it and as a result why it’s taking longer than expected. After all, aren’t they the ones that identified the work to be done and triaged it to you? Aren’t they the ones responsible for the end deliverable? Shouldn’t they have a little more knowledge in what they…
The Angry Helper is the person who begrudgingly agrees to help you. They bemoan the process the whole time, bitter in the fact that they have to take time out of their day to help you figure out this “simple” problem that only they can understand. What you say and do is never enough to help, it was done wrong the first time and it will be done wrong the second and third and fourth…
If you were to measure the amount of hacks shipping in the latest release of your product by the date they were created. You would probably see a hockey-stick style graph. Up until that moment, you’ve done everything right, laid the foundation, put in the effort, plowed through your grunt work – making gains all day every day. But now the end is in sight and everyone is getting excited or worried about what is…
Then how do you expect to work together? If you can’t trust the person beside you, in front of you or behind you to be there when you need them the most. Then how can you lead them? You can’t. You need to know that when you ask for their help they will be there for you, or when the workload is too heavy they will all chip in to help or when it comes…