Years ago, I was building a new deck, and there was a curve in the wood. It wasn’t perfect, it was pretty obvious and in my inexperience, I thought we could cover it up with deck boards. I was wrong, it would have looked horrible. Thankfully I had my father-in-law to set me straight. We then proceeded the next 2 hours unscrewing it, hammering, jacking it, doing whatever we could to gain leverage and bend…
Your team deserves to know what the plan is for the next year. They deserve to know what is coming next and what the plans are. They should know when the unknowns are coming at them and they are going to have to pivot and figure the rest out. They should know what the goals are and where you want to take them. Your team is an engine (huge difference from a factory) and if…
We all have ToDo Lists for all sorts of things. Depending on what you’re working on now, you might have one for a particular team activity – the upcoming project plan, the completion of a feature, the final code rush. Whatever it is, it’s a ToDo list for the team. And its only value is if the Team is following it – otherwise, it’s just a list.
It can be hard to read the room when you can’t see everyone, you can’t see how they are sitting, if they are slouching, what they are doing, are they listening, did they lean forward for that last comment, are they staring up at the sky. The kneejerk reaction is to tell everyone to turn on the video. The reaction of the leader is to figure out why everyone isn’t in engaged in what they…
I’ve written before about going into a cave. Sometimes you need to do it, sometimes you need to leave your team to do it. But you can’t do it every day. You can’t do it all the time when something goes wrong. The cave is where you are most productive without hindering your team’s productivity. If you’re always in the cave, you’re not doing you’re best work, you’re hiding.