Tag Archives: teams

Another post on too many meetings . . . at the wrong times

A recent post in the Journal titled “Is It Ever OK to Have an 8 a.m. Meeting?” got me thinking. Now, I’m not going to quote from any study or point you to some paper that backs up my habits.… (read more)

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Virtual Lunches?

Joel Spolsky takes on an important topic in his post today on lunches and I share with him a firm belief in the value of intentionally sharing a meal. It can be an important tool in your work-life balancing act. It can… (read more)

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Get your own team

Your company likes to promote from within. One day you come in to find that management has recognized all the leadership you’ve been providing and has promoted you to your first position as a team manager. Congratulations!(?)

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Breaking up the team

Last month I wrote about Team Development and the four stages a team goes through reaching high levels of performance. There are some who would add a fifth stage, Adjourning, that would follow the previous four. This stage covers what… (read more)

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Accidental Leaders

Michael Norton over at Doc on Dev brings up some interesting points today in his post on leaders. I’d like to focus on just one. “Leaders are chosen”, he says, and he’s right. A person can be assigned to your team… (read more)

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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)

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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)

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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.

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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)

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Managing in the White Space

A few years ago, I was given the task of improving an internal process at my company. Before this assignment, I had successfully managed groups of ten-to-twelve people: Unix administrators, web infrastructure experts and internet security technicians. But I managed… (read more)

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