Articles for category: Leadership

November 15, 2020

Greg Thomas

One On Ones – Remotely

I thought One-On-Ones were this secret tool that I had in my toolbelt that no one knew about. Turns out, many of us know about them. But sometimes they are a mess. And they are definitely something that can take a while to master. And doing them remotely is an added complication that you might not have seen coming. That’s okay, the good stuff is always hard to do. Here is the full episode here on Remotely Prepared.

Yes, But what do you want?

This is the question that many of us can’t answer. What do we actually want? We look at user stories and features, what is in the backlog, what was discussed in a meeting and we assume that is “what the user wants”. But it really isn’t. How many times have you built something, thinking it was the right thing to build only to have an end user go – “that’s not what I was looking for.” It’s not until that you ask someone – “What do you want?” – that you get the answer you need, unencumbered by technology, domain

November 11, 2020

Greg Thomas

The Truth about Remote Leadership

It sucks. Yes it sucks. It’s not easy (I don’t think it was ever meant to be). A fantastic interview with Heather Caudill on how she has navigated the last year of leading teams remotely and not shying away from the hard conversations that need to happen for her team to succeed. Full episode is here.

November 7, 2020

Greg Thomas

5% Better

What does 5% get you? In school it was the difference between a C and a B or a B and a A. If you were to increase the throughput or download speed of your application by 5% that would be significance. If you were starving for space on an overcrowded 5 Terabyte Hard Drive, that’s 250 GB of saved space. Now what if you were able to get an additional 5% out of your team? What about if you were to get 5% extra from that person struggling on your team? You don’t need to get them to do

Outcome-Based Conversations

You might be talking a lot these days. Your calendar might be completely blue. And you might be having great discussions. But two weeks later you might also be wondering why nothing is changing and why what you thought were the actions never happened. It could be because you are not structuring your conversations around outcomes you want to see. Outcomes are bigger then agenda items, they are what you need to see happen next, what the next step is, what you want to come from these discussions. The are the next piece. If you aren’t having conversations that look