Agile
Agile Doesn’t Work Without Psychological Safety (via HBR)
Most people get wrapped around the Agile axle talking about tools/frameworks; however, if you aren’t able to miss expectations and learn from it, you’re missing the point.
Business
How to Motivate Your Team When People Keep Quitting (via HBR)
- State what things are known (i.e., not uncertain)
- Solicit feedback to assess individual and team capacity
- Enable autonomy
- Give your team permission to push back
- Shield your team from unrealistic / low-priority requests
- Create connection
Corporate Political Spending Is Bad Business (via HBR)
“We can find no sound business justification for corporate political giving as it is practiced today. Putting aside the larger problems for society and for the basic fairness of our democratic process, pouring corporate money into politics solely for company-specific profit seeking completely lacks legitimacy. Investors don’t benefit from this state of affairs, nor do corporate executives, who are pressured into giving in ways that undermine their business focus and create substantial risk.”
Why Becoming a Data-Driven Organization Is So Hard (via HBR)
“Being data-driven has been a priority for companies for decades — but many have seen mixed results. Why? According to a new survey of executives, company culture is a harder hurdle to clear than any technical problem. On top of that, the continuing explosion of the amount of data and growing concerns over privacy and data ownership keep making the task harder.”
Org structure
Engineering Org Structures— The QRF Team Model (via Software Lead Weekly)
The Quick Reaction Force is a dedicated team that ensures important work that causes interruptions (read: context switching) is localized to one team. When not putting out fires (and protecting the Main Effort team(s)) they work on what I call “fire prevention”. Although I don’t know how this would work at scale, or in orgs where the breadth of roles if wide (i.e., lots of specialist roles), it lays out how to stand one up and measure it.
Overcoming the Messy Matrix for Platform Teams (via Jay Brown)
This webinar was mostly led by a Forrester analyst who looks at org structures for tech companies, accompanied by the author of Project to Product. This was an insightful discussion of how to recognize and balance the tension between interests (e.g., roles) and business outcomes.
Personal growth
To Reach Your Goals, Embrace Self-Compassion (via HBR)
- Drop words with baggage — e.g., “seek meaningful connections with new people” vs “network”
- Decide what you will do — approach goals are more effective than avoidance goals
- Celebrate progress — call out the incremental steps that get you toward the goal
- Embrace the process — if you get off track, pause and reflect why that’s the case
Psychology
Your attention didn’t collapse. It was stolen (via Houston Miller)
The author (Johann Hari) also wrote Lost Connections, which has a premise of anxiety and depression being borne out of societal ills rather than individual ones. This piece is about how our always-on, fractured attention landscape has cost us our ability to focus.
Sales
Sensemaking for Sales (via HBR)
There’s an overwhelming amount of information for potential buyers to sift through. The author suggests a simplicity over comprehensiveness. Usually when there’s too much information, we fall back on cognitive biases, which may be suboptimal. Effective salespeople use the Socratic method, avoid telling customers what to think and focus instead on helping them create a framework to make their own decisions.
Training
More Training Won’t Solve Your Company’s Problems (via HBR)
“Companies devote 16% of their budget on average to training, and that training often isn’t measured for effectiveness. Without addressing the core problem directly, setting clear performance objectives, and prompting managers to reinforce desired behaviors, issues will persist. The author outlines why training alone doesn’t fix problems, advises how to identify the root of those problems, and presents three questions to ask when determining whether or not to invest in training: 1) What is the gap you think training will bridge? 2) What’s causing the gap? and 3) Is training necessary to fix the gap?”