Agile Learning Labs

Listen!

From this article:

Next time you have a meeting, just survey the event. Who is talking? Who is really listening? Who is swimming in their own thoughts?

This post bemoans the ‘lost art’ of listening and recommends a book about active listening. I haven’t read this particular book, but I can attest to the power of active listening. It turns out that an excellent way to get someone to hear your point is to first convince them that you've really heard theirs. What’s more, sometimes other people's ideas are better than yours!

First, Do No Harm!

Jackie Danicki posted the following quote here:

The key question in organizations is not the typical one — how do you motivate people or engage people? It’s how do you keep management from destroying motivation?
- David Sirota

Part of the managers’ credo should be “First, do no harm.” Many managers feel that they need to assert their authority right away by instituting new policies and making big changes as soon as they are assigned to the team. While there are rare occasions where this is called for, it usually isn’t. It is far better to spend a bit of time getting to know the team, as well as how and why they do things today. Even when radical change is called for, you are better positioned to implement radical change when the team feels that you understand them. Otherwise, you are setting yourself up for morale and motivation busting fight with the team. This is especially true with bright creative types, such as engineers.

Distributed Team? You Need This!

I ran across this post announcing a new competitor to WebEx, called ZOHO Meeting. The article is glowing; though ZOHO is an advertiser on the site, so bring your grain of salt along. The comments following the post are fairly useful, as several other alternatives are mentioned.

I remember how a similar product, Microsoft’s NetMeeting, changed my world. I was working on a team that included people in London, New York, Connecticut, and California. The ability to easily share a pc desktop made it much easier to collaborate. We used it all the time for one-on-one sessions between developers, internal demos, trouble-shooting, and during meetings.

It caught on all over the company and very quickly sales and support saw how valuable this functionality was. While NetMeeting worked well behind the firewall, it wasn't the right solution for dealing with folks outside. We used WebEx for a while, and then we switched to another similar service. Both worked well and provided a ton of value.

If you have to work in distributed team, I highly recommend using this type of tool.

The Soul of an Entrepreneur

Whether you're an aspiring entrepreneur yourself or just an entrevoyeur, there's much to be gleaned from the musings of a distinguished group of business adventurers over at My Way, The Entrepreneur Collective, which aggregates feeds from a dozen individual entrepreneurs' blogs.  Blogging here are some really superb and entertaining folk, including Tom Evslin, whose post Why A Great Programmer is Worth 50 Good Ones is a classic all managers should read, the always brilliant Chris Yeh, and Ben Casnocha, whose Business Rules of Thumb wiki is full of gems like this:

First-rate men hire first-rate men...second-rate men hire third-rate men...these third-rate men will then employ the bulk of your company's employees and they tend to select fourth-rate people. - Richard M. White. 

Here be much wisdom.

Got a Career Plan?

I just ran across this article.

I was talking to a relatively young developer the other day. I asked him about his career plans. "Oh, I don't do career planning myself. I wait until my manager talks to me."

Oops. Your career is your responsibility.

The article then moves on to give some specific advice for growing your technical career.

I’m constantly surprised by how many people think that career planning is something that their manager will do. Oddly, when these same people become managers they very rarely help their reports with career planning. Maybe it’s because their manager didn’t help them? Maybe it’s because they don’t really know how to do it themselves?

What does this mean for you? First, take control of your own career plan. Second, if you are a manager, help your people with their career plans; it will make you stand out in their minds as an excellent manager.

SCORE!

I spent yesterday working on the business plan for The Technical Management Institute. It’s mostly there (like 20 pages worth), except for the financials. Even though we are not looking for financing, I think it makes sense to put a couple of days into building projected: balance sheets, income statements, cash flow statements, and a break-even analysis. A call to a good friend of mine at FactSet got me some good pointers and information about what to include. Then this page at SCORE set me up with templates for doing all of these documents. Life is good.

Hire Fast and Die

There are two emergent schools of thought (at least) about technical team hiring:  hire fast, fire fast (a play on the "hire slow, fire fast" adage), and no false positives.  FeedBurner founder Dick Costolo has this to say:

I buy the hire fast, fire fast line of thinking for Sales Reps or VP Sales roles but I don't buy it for Engineering, Marketing, Finance, etc. The problem with hire fast, fire fast in the engineering department is quite simple: you don't end up executing on the fire fast part of it and the bad hire infects the organization for an extended period before you figure out how to remove them. Engineering goals are more generally team goals, there can be lots of reasons code can ship late, and performance criteria are more subjective than sales performance criteria. The mediocre hire ends up becoming part of the team and it just ends up taking longer to fire that person on the team, by which point they've added more subpar work to the mix. So, I am a subscriber, outside of sales, to the thesis that you have to interview rigorously and that it's better to leave an urgently needed role empty than to bring in a "false positive" who will infect the organization.

Welcome

to the Technical Management Institute blog.