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…
If you’re on a call and it’s going nowhere, it’s okay to leave. Actually, it’s great to leave. If you aren’t contributing, if you aren’t participating, if you aren’t part of what is being discussed – your time is worth more spent elsewhere. Sometimes you get invited to the wrong call, it doesn’t mean you have to sit through it.
At a new job, new project, we all need help to get started and figure out what we’re actually supposed to do. “What is this bug? What am I suppose to do with it? Where is the code? How does it work?” In the back of my head, I’ve always had a hidden evaluation metric running where I want to see how far you can get to after Step 1. Do you go from Step…
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.