Trust Among Co-Workers, Especially Among Management and Staff Third is trust. Communication is easy; trust is hard. I’ll bet next week’s grocery money that someone who you know and trust may have fumbled their communication about something to you, yet, because there was high trust between you, you still got their meaning.     The...Read More

Appreciation When Work Is Done Well People want to feel appreciated when they do their work well. This is about so much more than money. In fact, unless you are working with mercenaries whose primary motivation is money (e.g., many sales people, just-passing-through CEO’s, etc.), money is not a motivator by its presence, but it...Read More

The Covid-19 pandemic has cast into stark relief the fact that, in this increasingly VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) world, THE key to competitive advantage is the organization’s culture. So, what makes someplace a great place to work? Based on my experience, there are five things. And I don’t care what kind of organization...Read More

In the last year, innumerable blogs have been written about how to do everything remotely.  On those days when our glass is half-full and COVID fatigue is low, we can appreciate that we live in a time with advanced remote working capabilities.  Despite our preference for colocation and face-to-face communication, Scrum teams are beneficiaries of...Read More

As many of us were forced to do, agilityIRL pivoted from in-person classroom to live, online classes in mid-March.  While our transition to online learning was forced by the pandemic, I’ve learned a lot about the environment, its challenges, and benefits over the past few months.  As a long-time CST used to in-person classroom training,...Read More

After years of experience in the field, I’ve found that there is a hierarchy in ways one can convince another person of something. Understanding this hierarchy is critical for effective communication from the C-level down. The Hierarchy of Effective Communication Manipulation: Lacking the Character Traits of Honesty, Integrity & Civility The lowest plane of communication...Read More

One of the most important pieces of the Agile leadership puzzle is the forming of effective working relationships between you and your colleagues. Without durable relationships, the optimization of an organization simply can’t happen. To build these effective relationships, two properties must exist: confidence in the other party’s competence and mutual trust. I first learned...Read More