Agile
The Common Pitfalls on an Agile Journey and How to Avoid Them (via Leading Agile)
- Pitfalls: individuals spread across multiple teams, a lack of instantly available resources, too much WIP, limited access to SMEs, shared requirements between teams, technical debt and defects, low cohesion and tight coupling, large products with diverse technology
- Work on getting the systems agile-oriented, install agile practices, and the culture will fix itself.
- To scale, work on structure, governance, and metrics.
Communication
How to Write Concisely (via HBR)
- Delete words that don’t add anything to your sentence (e.g., generally, kind of, really)
- Cut the overlap; find ways to combine two sentences into one
- Instead of telling us what you’re going to do, just do it
Learning
“Sharing Interesting Stuff”: A simple yet powerful management tool (via SWLW)
This post describes a round-robin process of discussing ideas, sort of like a small book club. It encourages dialogue, isn’t about top-down sharing, and helps promote a learning culture.
Mental health
Gen Z Employees Are Feeling Disconnected. Here’s How Employers Can Help. (via HBR)
“New research by the mental health organization Sapien Labs shows that half of young people worldwide have experienced mental health decline and a deterioration of their “social self” in the wake of the pandemic. In this article, the author provides concrete actions companies can take to better connect and support young employees, including making onboarding more of a community-building exercise, supporting young talent with coaching, and trading screen time for connection time.”
Risk management
A Better Approach to Avoiding Misconduct (via HBR)
- Despite formal rules and strong compliance, people still do unethical things. Most enterprise risk management (ERM) approaches assume people are rational, which has been disproved.
- Traditional approaches of blame/punishment and surveillance make people more likely to create risks. It demonstrates a lack of trust and that some behaviors should be covered up.
- If you have more serious root causes — like toxic management, bro culture, etc. — typical mechanisms don’t address them.
- The authors have a company that comes in to firms and conducts interviews to expose the root cause and helps those firms ideate on solutions that are more likely to work.
Stress management
How to Fix Burnout (Hint: It Isn’t Another Yoga Session) (via Behavioral Grooves)
- For the past decade, we’ve relegated responsibility to the individual (here, you fix it).
- Many leaders are not great at modeling self-care. They grew up in a world that did not value this (legacy behavior).
- Why don’t we take care of ourselves? We’re working longer hours and are chronically stressed. This doesn’t leave much in the tank to support ourselves. Some people don’t have the privilege to put ourselves first.
- The WHO in 2019 identified burnout as “real problem,” and it can’t be solved on the individual level.
- Overwork
- Lack of agency
- Lack of fairness
- Lack of community, loneliness
- Mismatched values
- Lack of reward for effort
- Many examples of not walking the walk… A pool table in the breakroom, but nobody uses it. Here’s a week off (but no support for all the work that will pile up during that week). I need to see you in the office working, so we’ll provide meals for you. Companies provide perks, not solutions for preventing burnout.
- We need to promote leaders that have high emotional intelligence. There are people that have left jobs because their boss didn’t empathize with their struggles. People are leaving careers (teaching, nursing) and some are quitting with no other job lined up. You can learn EI as a skill; having it innate makes this go even faster (these typically are toward the top of the org chart).
- Leadership can no longer be transactional; there are so many more things that leaders need to care about (environment, social impact, etc.).
- Focusing on healthy culture is a long strategy and it takes continued effort to sustain it every day. It needs to be a habit.
- Play and curiosity are important. We want to hear other people’s stories. Listen between the sentences to connect better with others.
- Good leaders should know who (i.e., humans) they’re leading.
- Idea: With all the meeting fatigue, it’s still helpful to have a weekly non-work checkin (e.g., what’s a high and a low for the week and how can we help you). Zoom eliminates the organic chatter and serendipitous moments that used to happen in the office. There has to be some way to meet in person. Technology needs to augment relationships, not replace them.
- We traditionally spend time working on large projects that “have to” succeed. If we’re not iterative, we get stuck and try to solve new problems with old solutions.
- You can love your job and still get burned out.