At the start of the great wave of WFH, a comment about using PTO for child care during the day scrolled by. No one can seriously be expecting people to switch to PTO each time their kid needed some attention, can they? How could that possibly work? 7 minutes here, 22...
I visited an organization making an Agile transformation. It looked like the teams were making great progress. But the managers asked, “How can we tell they are working hard?” Team members seemed happy with their cross-functional teams. They solved...
I’ve been hearing various people speculate about how work will look after things get back to normal. (First, they aren’t going to go “back” to normal. There will be a normal, but I doubt it will be what existed pre-pandemic.) It does seem likely that remote work will...
On the first day of widespread work from home brought about by the pandemic, I heard a workplace “expert” talking about the new reality of remote work. “Performance expectations and standards must remain the same as in the office,” he declared. There is so much wrong...
Many people who are accustomed to going to the office are now working from home, including me. That means more remote meetings, working sessions, and social catch ups. What can we do to make the best of remote meetings? I advocate having a lightweight structure for...
Problems can’t hide when information is public. Trouble is, some organizations make it difficult for people to bring up unwelcome news. But problems can only hide for so long. The questions is, when would you rather know–late or early? Most issues are...
Middle management gets a bad rap. The comic strip, Dilbert, depicts middle managers as clueless micro-managers. Obviously, Dilbert is a caricature. But something in it rings true enough that those cartoons show up in offices all over the world. It is not just...
Recently, while discussing how job descriptions and evaluation criteria impact collaboration, a director commented, “Behavior. That’s what we’re after. Behavior!” Her comment struck me as both familiar and very odd. However, the director’s comment did...
This time of year is associated with giving gifts to others. But I think it is also a good time to think about the gifts we can give ourselves. One that we can all afford is the gift of reflection time. Let me tell you a story. I have a friend, Jen, who is a pure...
I had the privilege to study with a renowned artist, Nancy Crow. It was a wonderful experience. Of course I learned about art —design principles, use of color, figure ground tension. I also came smack up against an issue that I see in so many organizations: the desire...
