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Showing posts with the label agile teams

DYSFUNCTIONAL QUESTIONS IN ONE-ON-ONE MEETINGS

The team meeting. A necessary evil, an exercise in wasting time, or our organization’s secret weapon? Sometimes we wonder why our one-on-one meetings tend to feel unfruitful. Stock questions might be effective once or twice. But when we ask them during every one-on-one, every week, and over time, the effectiveness of the questions erode. The person grows sick of answering the question. Or they do not think we really care to know the answer anymore. Before too long, they start looking at the clock, staring into the distance, and giving us those short, nondescript answers. To avoid this, we will want to avoid the routine questions we lean on. Some of them maybe: 01: “How’s it going?” It seems like a solid way to break the ice and initiate a one-on-one meeting. Yet it’s unusual that we ever get an answer other than “Fine” or “Good” in response. While someone might truly be fine and good in reality (which is great!)… the conversation usually stops there . Anything personal we wanted to

SELF MANAGED TEAMS: KEY SKILLS TO FOSTER

The best team members you’ve ever worked with likely had one thing in common :  Strong self-management skills . As a manager, we don’t want to be pulled into double-checking every detail of a project or answering minute questions incessantly. After all, we have our  own  responsibilities to focus on.  The best employees are the ones who manage  themselves . How do we optimize for this? When hiring and training a team, we will need to pay attention to our potential team member’s self-management skills. Here are some self-management skills to look out for and continually hone within the team: 01: Do they know what to work on first? One of the most important self-management skills a team member can enact is how they manage their time . In particular, this means they internalize priorities well , and know precisely what to work on first . Our team can only make strong progress if everyone is each working on what is most important for the team, in any given moment. An employee with