One of the common questions that we get at agilityIRL is, “How do we find good Scrum Masters?” One of the crucial steps in hiring for any role is the interview. In this blog, I want to provide you with some of my favorite Scrum Master interview questions and techniques. This entry is not intended...Read More
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
As many of our regular readers know, we are huge fans of Seth Godin. For those of you who may be unfamiliar with his work, Seth is a leader, marketer, and author. You can read more about him here: https://www.sethgodin.com . While never formally identifying himself as an Agilist, Seth very much embodies an Agile mindset....Read More
One way to judge someone’s leadership maturity is based on the maturity they show in taking responsibility and the maturity they show in engaging others, be they subordinates, superiors, peers, customers, vendors or others. Adapting a Control/Responsibility Matrix presented by Seth Godin[1], we’ll present our “Leadership Maturity Matrix,” identifying four different leadership personas, representing different...Read More
Based on over 4-decades of observational research, I can confidently assert that intellectual laziness is an all-too-common leadership fail. It is a myth that managers manage by the numbers. So many leaders that I’ve observed in action simply were not skilled thinkers, having little understanding of data, statistical methods, empirical analysis, and probabilistic decision-making. In...Read More
I’m writing this in May 2021. It varies, but the global COVID-19 pandemic caused much of the world to push pause on “normal” life and go into and stay in emergency mode since March 2020, or earlier. Thankfully, amazingly safe and effective vaccines now allow us to realistically envision a return to “normal.” That said,...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
One of the concepts that core to achieving agility is “Servant Leadership”. There are many places that one can read about the concept, its precepts and how it can best be effectively practiced in the modern organization. The purpose of this brief blog post is to simply highlight a recent example of “Servant Leadership” within...Read More
