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Author Archives: Jeffrey
Unexpected Slack
I’m re-reading Tom DeMarco’s Slack again at the moment, this time with the purpose of providing a thorough review for the bookshelf. It’s such a good book, it might take me several entries to get it all covered. Right now, though,… (read more)
A Charles Dickens Management Lesson
In Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, a ghost grants Ebenezer Scrooge the chance to look back into his past and see a company holiday party that Fezziwig, his employer at the time, threw one year. Scrooge observes Fezziwig and his… (read more)
Stages of Team Development
The stages of team development are already well-described in various places and so going into great detail here would serve little purpose. I will, however, provide a brief overview since I think more leaders would benefit from being aware of… (read more)
Dear Readers:
Management. Leadership. Administration. Hiring (and Firing). Performance reviews. Interviews. Teams (building, growing, leading). Projects. Managing up, Managing “down”. Authority. Responsibility. Communication. Delegation. Career growth. The list goes on and on.
Getting over the hump
I had lunch with a colleague this past week and the subject of long, large-effort projects came up. Projects with a big “hump” keeping you from finishing easily and quickly. (see graph) He manages a small team of folks who… (read more)
True Top-Down Org Charts
The traditional top-down org chart has become so standard in today’s corporate America that the first time I posted my alternate version for our team, very few people understood it. Let me describe it for a moment.
Interviewing
As a hiring manager, I’m very interested in many things about a candidate. I always use an interview team (or panel) during this process and assign specific aspects of the interview to individuals on that team. I do this for… (read more)
SSH behind the firewall
Please note that no warranty is being made here. Even if you follow these suggestions, there’s no guarantee that crackers won’t flood your network, your systems won’t go down and your hair won’t turn green. As they say, “Your mileage… (read more)
High Authority / Low Responsibility
Leading up to this last week’s post on the Responsibility/Authority Ratio, I was challenged to think about a special (and unlikely) case of responsibility/authority imbalance: high authority and low responsibility. I agree with @IAmRoot that few would admit to being… (read more)
Responsibility/Authority Ratio
It’s not uncommon for me to hear the lament that someone (usually the person lamenting) has too much responsibility. On closer examination, however, I frequently find what’s really happened: They have been given too little authority. Their responsibility level is… (read more)
Posted in Management
Tagged authority, management, Peopleware, responsibility, trust
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