The backbencher is a tough one to crack. They sit at the back of the room, hidden behind a notebook or laptop, never looking up. They don’t contribute to solving problems. They don’t offer suggestions for growth and/or improvement. They do, wait, patiently, patiently, when everything has been laid out, to submit their criticism of the idea once fully fleshed out by all those around you.  Depending on the problem set and political climate they might…

The NitPicker is a frustrating person to work with, for one debilitating reason – they pour through all of your work, all of your team’s work for the sole purpose of finding something out of place and exposing it. Not to help make it better. Not to improve the customer experience. Not to stabilize a peer’s code. Not to improve relation’s with a partner’s product. Simple to find something that shouldn’t be there and making it known…

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…