leadership

Articles

Indispensable Employee Management Myth 36: You Have an Indispensable Employee

An employee may become indispensable through arrogance or happenstance. These employees can cause bottlenecks and often prevent others, as well as themselves, from learning and growing professionally. "Firing" these indispensable employees sets your team free to work even when the expert is not available.

Johanna Rothman's picture Johanna Rothman
Friendly Competition Management Myth 35: Friendly Competition Is Constructive

Competition between teams does not improve performance. In fact, the added stress may shift team members' focus from creating a quality product to self-preservation due to fear of failure. Johanna suggests managers emphasize collaboration between teams over competition.

Johanna Rothman's picture Johanna Rothman
How to be Empowered Myth 34: You’re Empowered Because I Say You Are

Do your managers truly own their decision making or are they only "empowered" to come to you for approval of every idea and dollar spent? If you don't trust your team leaders to make decisions, how can you expect stakeholders to? Setting boundaries and defining expectations are two ways to empower managers and encourage initiative, giving them the opportunity to gain your trust.

Johanna Rothman's picture Johanna Rothman
ScrumMasters Failures Slipping into ScrumBut

ScrumMasters don't like to talk about their own troubles or failures, even though they say it’s good to fail. They don’t like to admit it happens to them, too. Sometimes it just creeps up. If you've started relaxing your Scrum principles and feel yourself slipping into ScrumBut, take hope: You and your team can recommit.

Natalie Warnert's picture Natalie Warnert
World Cup and Agile What the World Cup and Agile Development Have in Common

There are a surprising number of similarities between successful World Cup and agile teams. Both must be diligent in four areas in order to reach their “goals.” This article explores the parallels between the two for selecting the team, getting up to speed, consistency, and game plans.

Michael Rosenbaum's picture Michael Rosenbaum
Agile Team Challenges Five Agile Challenges for Distributed Teams

The framework for agile development empowers the diverse environments of modern business. While some project teams can be collocated, many projects are undertaken by teams who are distributed geographically or organizationally. This article focuses on five challenges faced by these distributed agile development teams and provides some solutions.

Harsha Vemulapalli's picture Harsha Vemulapalli
Making Difficult Choices Myth 31: I Don’t Have to Make the Difficult Choices

"Don't bring me problems; bring me solutions." Sound familiar? Sounds like a management cop out to Johanna Rothman. A primary purpose of managers is to help their teams perform to the best of their abilities, and that includes stepping up and making tough decisions to help solve problems.

Johanna Rothman's picture Johanna Rothman
Management Value Management Myth 30: I Am More Valuable than Other People

Just because you have a fancy job title doesn't mean you can manage your team members by bossing them around. Servant leadership is an important skill for managers, as the best managers are those who serve the people who work for them.

Johanna Rothman's picture Johanna Rothman
 Myth 28: I Can Standardize How Other People Work Management Myth 28: I Can Standardize How Other People Work

Johanna Rothman writes that organization-wide standards don’t help if management imposes them. If people ask for help with standards, then you can provide local help to each team. And if the teams are part of a program where you have one business objective common to multiple projects, make sure the program understands the problem.

Johanna Rothman's picture Johanna Rothman
QA Management: All Bark and No Bite? QA Management: All Bark and No Bite?

Mike Talks shares with us the unlikely story of how his pet German Shepherd inadvertently became his team's QA manager. Talks explains how his German Shepherd was able to gather people together and have them talk to each other, similiar to what a QA manager does—keeping people on task, handing out assignments, and following up with team members.

Mike Talks's picture Mike Talks

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