Everyday Kanban

Discussing Management, Teams, Agile, Lean, Kanban & more

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Five things managers should stop doing right now

 

Managers get a bad rap a lot. Heck, many agile officianados thing we should let Darwinism take us to extinction. Well, there are definitely those who give the rest of us a bad name. But, people forget to realize that managers are just people doing a job as well. We have good days and we have bad days and we’re learning on the job too. Despite all of that, it is useful to listen to all feedback, good or bad, and find that nugget of gold that we can polish and use to improve our job performance. Better performing managers usually leads to better performing teams. I’m currently in my fifth year as a manager, so I thought I’d post the top 5 things I think managers should stop doing now.

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The Castle vs. Shack Conundrum

I’ve begun to witness an all-too-common situation at work that I have dubbed “The Castle vs. Shack Conundrum.”

Problem

Customer A is adamant that we have to build a house in 4 weeks. When we begin to talk to our customer, we start to understand that the house that they envision is more like a castle. However, building a castle in 4 weeks is so unlikely that its barely worth discussing. When the team analyzes the situation, we are in agreement that, with focusing only on this project, we could build a house in 4 weeks. However, that house would be a very nice shack — most decidedly not a castle. The team begins to discuss this reality with the customer and we find that this news is deemed completely unacceptable.

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Put your WIP on a diet

If you’ve ever had a problem managing your weight, there is one consistent thing you’ll notice across most diets. Each one tells you that you have to visualize what and how much you eat. The theory is that you eat more than you realize. By visualizing what and how much you eat, you can begin to see what you’re doing wrong and then begin to make better choices to cut back. This theory can be directly applied to your work in progress.

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