Culture, People and Systems Part II
A few weeks ago I posted about the relationship between organizational culture types defined by William Schneider in ‘The Re-Engineering Alternative” and MBTI types and temperaments. My theory is that as a change artist, whether it be an external or internal coach, can you increase the odds of creating a successful change by understanding these factors: organizational culture type type and temperament of the influential people or ‘change sponsor’ flow of power...
Read MorePre-AYE 2011 Thoughts
This year will mark my 3rd consecutive trip to AYE which is just awesome. Even better is that I’m going as a “resource/FTE/headcount” instead of a consultant which will give me a new perspective to approach the conference with. I was talking to my boss about Agile recently and it was interesting to hear his interpretation compared to mine. That’s reasonable to expect, “Agile” is going to mean something different to everybody. Some will see it as a...
Read MoreThere’s More Than Meets the Eye to Agile Coaching
This year at AYE Jerry Weinberg hosted a session titled “Coaching the Coaches“. Jerry split the group up into people who self-identified as Coaches (coaches or managers who do coaching stuff), people who have been coached and people who didn’t feel they fit into either category. Jerry asked the coaches how they received the title ‘Coach‘ and when it came to my turn I said it’s for marketing. All the cool kids are doing it, that’s what the industry...
Read MoreAYE Workshop Wrap-up
The last day at AYE was a full-day workshop on knowing your options when attacking problems. This session was particularly interesting as all the hosts, sans Jerry, facilitated. The goal of the session was to give participants the ability to figure out what approach to problem solving might work best in their situations. In this workshop there were 4 main approaches: Solve, Manage, Cope, Exit. We were asked to envision a work-related problem and then choose which particular approach we...
Read More2 Ways to Build Trust Between You and Your Team
During Steve Smith’s ‘Power, Authority and Teams’ session at AYE 2010, one of the attendees mentioned that her team has told her that they don’t know what she does. I’ve been a manager before and now as a coach/consultant, I’ve experienced the same issue and I’m guessing other managers probably have as well based on my experience. A couple of ways for handling this are: Make YOUR work visible: I’ve used personal task boards at previous companies,...
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