Marcos Garrido gave us a fine summary of leadership lessons found in the book Extreme Ownership: how U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and win. These lessons are extremely important for any agile team: The leader is responsible for the team’s success or failure. Leaders who blame the team for failure are weak or cowards. A true… Read more »
Daniel Pink, in his book “Drive: the surprising truth about what motivates us” (2009), shares the results of studies showing that an employee’s motivation may work very differently from what we imagine. When work requires only basic, mechanical abilities, like a series of steps with a single result, bonuses work as expected: the more you… Read more »
This article is inspired by the TED talks “How too many rules at work keep you from getting things done”, by Yves Moriuex and “How to run a company with (almost) no rules”, by Ricardo Semler. Both videos made me reflect and observe organizations in the light of this brilliant provocation about wasting human intelligence. In… Read more »
Right from early childhood, we’ve become used to receiving compliments and praise. We start listening only to people who admire our work and inflate our ego. Praise is welcome, but it doesn’t reveal points we could use to improve our product, process, our professional or personal lives. What we really need is good feedback. Seeking… Read more »
Learn how to Optimize Your Team’s Performance. “At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.” (Agile Manifesto, 2001) In this ebook, you’ll find some of the most important techniques that we’ve developed in order to help teams overcome day-to-day struggles. Enjoy! Sign Up To… Read more »
At K21 I learned that, in order to achieve agile transformation results, you need to pay attention to the four domains of agility: Business, Cultural, Organizational and Technical. To be a good agile coach, I must know my competence in each of these domains. But how do I find out? Rodrigo de Toledo answered this question through… Read more »
There are three reasons we don’t call Humans Resources: 1. Creative work isn’t linear (a resource refers to the idea of linearity); 2. It ignores the main variable in the result of a team: collaboration; 3. It labels people as if they weren’t capable of learning new things. Here in Part 1 of ‘Humans yes,… Read more »
So-called modern companies count on a highly active and professional HR, with very well crafted Individual Development Plans (IDP’s), well-designed succession strategies and elaborate annual evaluations. But these policies and restrictions stifle the system and in the end, the HR becomes inefficient. One of the main principles of the Agile Manifesto focuses on individuals and… Read more »
Rewarding people without destroying their motivation has been one of the top management challenges in companies employing knowledge workers. Unfortunately, the reward systems used by these organizations incentivize recognition through imaginary performance rather than real merits, causing an extremely negative impact on employee motivation. Daniel Pink, one of the current greatest researchers on motivation, stresses… Read more »
Although the fact that good feedbacks may lead to high-speed human development was already proven many times, companies still neglect this practice, making it extremely formal, bureaucratic and expensive. A process that should be simple and continuous often happens to be annual or semiannual, conducted by people not knowing the nature of the work performed… Read more »
In this post, we’re going to talk about hostile work environments for individuals, and how agility plays an important role in breaking the patterns that foster moral harassment. What exactly would constitute a threat in the workplace? Losing your job? Losing your salary? Disliking the work that you do? Being treated harshly? Some examples Some… Read more »
My friend Paulo Caroli wrote in his blog about a project that K21 carried out for a large client. The service provided was inspired by McKinsey’s horizons nomenclature. McKinsey’s planning horizons: H1: Short-term horizon. This is the dedication to the business that currently pays your bills. H2: Medium-term horizon. Companies have to allocate part of… Read more »