A Manager’s Guide to Building a Relationship with the Team

“A talented employee may join a company because of its charismatic leaders, its generous benefits, and its world class training programs, but how long that employee stays and how productive he is while there is determined by his relationship with his immediate...

Three Ways to Foster Team Responsibility

How can managers support teams to truly support team responsibility? In the early days of Agile, some pundits (and developers) declared, “We don’t need no stinking managers.” They asserted that if teams were self-managed, management work was waste....

How Much Self-Management Is Right for a Team?

The  answer is (of course):  “It depends.” Self-management is a spectrum, not a point. How much self-management is right for a team depends on that team. I see many teams in small companies and start-ups who self-manage. They set product goals, make...

A Too Hands-Off Manager

Sometimes, wanting to give a team space to take more responsibility, managers step back. Sometimes too far back. However, a too hands-off approach can be just as bad as micromanaging. Both inhibit learning and effectiveness. A Struggling Team I recently worked with a...

But /My/ Team Needs a Leader

I talk with many managers–and some coaches–who complain that their teams can’t function without a leader. “Leader,” in these conversations, usually means someone who set standards, assigns work, tracks progress, tells people what to do.   That is not...

One-on-One Meetings with Self-organizing Teams

I’m a big believer in one-on-one meetings on manager-led teams. It’s a way to connect with people, stay in touch with progress, learn about problems early, coach, work on career goals, offer feedback, and more. But if you are the manager for a self-organizing team,...

Self-Facilitation Skills for Teams

Self-organizing teams don’t just organize their work. They make decisions. Not every situation requires facilitation, but when a team faces an important decision, applying facilitation practices saves time and yields better results. A Story… Jason was...

When to stand back, when to step in

Part of my definition of a successful team is that the members of the team increase their knowledge and capacity as a result of their work on the team. That means that giving the team the opportunity to learn is part of the job. One of challenges I see when managers...

system blindness

One of the big problems I see in organizations is that managers who want to improve productivity pull the wrong levers. For example, one company I know of decided to improve performance by ranking everyone in the company from 1…n, and firing the bottom 10%. Not...

A Poor Performer?

Mark Levison has an interesting post in response to a Scrum Development discussion about “bad apples” on a team.Before applying the label, look for reasons the person might not be performing. There are lots of reasons for a temporary dip in performance....

What’s a Manager to Do?

When the team self-organizes, the manager needs to step back, but not too far back; she needs to step in, but not to quickly.My article on the manager’s role in self-organizing teams is on the cover of Better Software Magazine and available on-line here. (link...

Magic Chemistry of Teams

George Dinwiddie has posted his notes from one of my AYE 2008 sessions, Magic Chemistry of Teams.During the session, I asked people to draw a time line that represented their experiences working on teams, then, working in small groups, identify the factors that were...

What trust means for teams

It’s a truism that trust is the foundation of teamwork.But trust is a big word. What do we really mean when we talk about trust?First, trust exists within a context. The sort of trust that you need for a productive working relationship is different from the trust you...

When is it time to move someone off a team?

When I talk to teams about self-organizing, people worry about what to do when some one on the team isn’t working out. If we’re a team, they posit, we have to work things out so we can work together. Not necessarily so. Teams need to manage team membership...

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