I love doing Planning Days. Why? Because everyone is focused on one task. Because the time limit is open and designed to hear people talk – there is no rush to finish. Because it’s an opportunity to hear people’s thoughts away from everything else going on in the day-to-day. Now having a successful planning day is altogether a different story and requires preparation, ensuring everyone knows what they are there for and what they need…
Can you grow your team remotely? And I’m not talking physically – I’m talking about leadership, development skills, scale, empathy, learning. Did you grow your team remotely? Did they develop over the past year when they were all separate? They probably weren’t attending any conferences this year so what did you offer them instead? It’s good not to have answers to these questions, it’s bad to now not do anything about it. Set the goals…
When you are small, everyone and everything is within reach – you are all close together, all next to each other. You can smell the excitement and fear as you push code into production. It’s not one person doing it, it’s everyone, waiting, with bated breath to see what happens. When a customer calls in with an issue, everyone is watching the chat conversation or listening to the speaker. Everyone is there, everyone is involved…
One-On-Ones are hard, they aren’t easy. If they were easy, we wouldn’t need to do them. Getting started with a team member where there is no trust is even harder because we want that immediate trust, that immediate connection, that quick win. If your one-on-ones are all walks in the park, you’re either not asking the right questions or you’re not putting in the right amount of effort. Embrace the struggle.
This could have been the title for our recent episode with Simran Chaudhry but we went with “Invest in Your People”. I loved doing this interview not because it was a great chance to catch up with Sim or to do the recording from the beach but rather just to hear about all the small investments they are doing in their company and how it is paying off for them. Build a great team and…