Slack is easy to use, but it won’t fix your communication problems. Skype is a great conferencing platform, but it won’t make you a better speaker at your team meetings. Dropbox can store everything about your organization, but it won’t sort it for you by most important to client. Technology won’t fix your culture and it’s time we all started understanding this. If anything, technology is an incredible concealer (knowing nothing about make-up, only what this term sounds…
Performance Reviews are seen as one of those necessary evils that are sometimes seen as the metric by which bonus compensations are best paid out. I.e., what level of objectives did I meet that made earning this bonus relevant. This is a very tricky scenario because constant changing business conditions can throw the most adaptable performance review plans a curve ball making their content and criteria for compensation irrelevant. But the fault for performance reviews do…
Of course it’s easy – things are going well – you have the perfect team, the perfect set of projects, you are flush with cash, your customers are happy – you are potentially on cruise control as your team is doing so well and perhaps looking beyond to other opportunities. But when the chips are down… Budgets have been slashed. Too little resources, way too many projects that need to be delivered yesterday. Customers aren’t…
Have you ever attended one of these? Not knowing what you were getting into until the end of the meeting where you thought everything had been discussed, ready to go but then only to be informed that now everyone was all prepped, on point, had the same message for the real meeting? Did you then sit through the “real meeting” wondering why you were there, expect maybe for the proverbial show of team unity, wondering…
I’ve written about Failure a number of times – The True Cost of Failure and Insulating the Failure – and let’s be honest, so have many, many, many other people. Some of my most spectacular failures were not the ones where I was up late at night coding by brains away trying to figure out some new problemset or use some new language – “Okay, so that’s what happens when you take up all the memory”.…