Tag Archives: Leadership

Listen to Experts but Trust Your Team Members

Posted by on 2012/01/08 No comments

Back when I was working in a project as a team leader, on a cloudy Thursday an expert took me aside to talk about the time reporting of one of my team members. He pointed out that the team member in question spent about 6 hours doing a certain task which he – the expert – could have done in 15 minutes. He insisted that I called her to account for the time spent on this task. It was an awkward situation, because I knew that she had worked hard all day – I sat with the team and I knew that she hadn’t spent more than 5 minutes away from the task -, but still I was unable to explain the huge difference. Practically, that task consisted of two sub-tasks and unfortunately I had no experience with either of them.

Instead of talking to her immediately, I chose a different option: I decided to gain some experience on the matter and see how much time it really took to finish that task. I needed to choose this way, because if I had confronted her with the feedback from the expert, I would have only been able to tell her what he told me, that is that the task should have taken only 15 minutes to complete. Instead, I wanted to understand the situation and be able to help her to be more effective next time – provided that the expert was right and her time had indeed not been well spent in this case. Additionally, I wanted to leave the expert out of the discussion, because he wasn’t part of the team, and I felt that these discussions had to be done face-to-face: no need for a third person, an outsider to be there.

I scheduled our discussion for the next Monday, and I spent the preceding Sunday afternoon with the task at home. I needed 2.5 hours to complete the first sub-task, but I felt that I had already gained the necessary technical experience in order to have a constructive discussion on Monday. I assumed that the second sub-task was an easy one considering her technical level, so I estimated half an hour for it, adding up to a total of 3 hours to complete the whole task. Read more »

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Speaking at Ericsson Hungary

Posted by on 2011/11/06 No comments

It may sound strange at first, but I was ask by my former employer Ericsson Hungary to give an invited talk. There were two sessions: first I talked about how to use measurements in practice and second I shared several team leader tips and tricks I collected during the last five years. I used the feedback from my last event and refactored my presentations. So here are they:

The revised Measure and Manage Flow in practice slides:

 
A short introduction to the difficult life of a lean team leader:

Thank you folks for coming and thank you for the constructive and helpful feedback, I really appreciate it.

My next talk will be in two weeks at IT Rend 2011 about how to use agile and lean for handling change in the demand.

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Visit at Cluj Napoca

Posted by on 2011/10/30 No comments

My old friend Victor invited me to Cluj Napoca, Romania to talk about software development in practice. There were three talks in the morning at his company evoline and a fourth talk late afternoon at the local meetup group.

We started the day with an introduction to Kanban, because the audience knew about Agile, but Kanban was something new, and additionally we needed it for the maintenance-related presentation:

After a short break we continued with a longer talk about maintenance and how to use Agile, Lean, Kanban and leadership techniques in order to stabilise a maintenance situation:

The last presentation was about how to use Agile techniques without saying Agile:

My talk at the meetup became a bit longer than I expected, but we had – at least I felt like that – a great discussion how the software development process evolved at Digital Natives – my current company – and, uniquely, we talked about what we were doing right and where we failed:

I promised a list of books worth reading. So here are they in a recommended reading order:

  1. Taiichi Ohno – Toyota Production System
  2. Henrik Kniberg – Lean from the Trenches
  3. Daniel H. Pink – Drive
  4. 37 signals – Rework
  5. David J. Anderson – Kanban

Even though it was a long journey and an even longer day, I enjoyed it very much. The audiences were great, and I got some very usable feedback on the style and content of the presentation (I’d like to specially thank Dragos, Cătălin and Victor for the detailed and more personal feedback), so I can improve my future talks. My next talk will be at my former employer Ericsson, and I’m going to talk about leadership and measurements.

Thank you folks for the possibility, it was my pleasure!

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Local Leadership Fail

Posted by on 2011/09/27 No comments

Today’s post isn’t about software development, it is about an epic leadership fail I had the honour to live through. As it happened, I had to go shopping several days ago. There is a nice store nearby, I go there all the time, but this time I got into the middle of an unpleasant situation between the cashier ladies and a customer. Actually, they were shouting at each other, and I was standing right in the middle of their little war. As it turned out, the problem was that the customer wanted to – and did – pay with small change. Actually, she had a bag of coins. The customer didn’t like the tone of the cashier ladies, and they didn’t like the bag of coins. The cashiers insisted that the proper way to pay with a large amount of coins is to have them in rolls, which is not true any more.

There are too many fails in this situation, for example

  • although the customer isn’t always right, her money is as good as anybody’s, so take it
  • even if a cashier is underpaid, there is no reason to be primitive. If she doesn’t like working as a cashier, then she should quit and look for another job
  • don’t ruin somebody else’s day (like mine) with your frustration

But somebody was missing, at least for me. Oh right, the shift leader. Actually, I saw him in the store: he was sorting tea boxes about four meters away from the danger zone. There was no way that he didn’t hear anything from the fight, and yet he chose to mind the teas instead. How nice of him, because everybody wants to buy tea on a hot Sunday afternoon.

Actually, what he did is a nice example of bad leadership. Hide when the heat comes and let the employees take it. It is not a surprise that the cashier ladies always complain about him to the customers, including me. This is another interesting “feature” of the store: complaining to the customers. The cashiers don’t respect the shift leader, and the only thing he can do in order to keep up his status quo is to abuse his power and set a schedule for the cashiers they definitely don’t like, and show them who the boss is. Still, it wasn’t him who deserved the fail prize from me: it was his boss, who also happened to be in the store! She was the one who was supposed to tell him: “Get over there, solve the problem and after that, come to my office!“.

Nice little company, I have to admit. But they have to change soon, because the competition is coming and it is coming fast. Another German store is being built right next to this store. They are famous for their great but cheap products, and their customer service. How will they compete with them? Using their very weak leadership skills and attitude? I hardly think so. They’ll certainly fail.

When I was in Germany several years ago, I was in a store of this chain – the new one -, and I had a lot of coins with me. It’s worth spending them abroad because they are kind of useless in Hungary – you cannot exchange coins, only notes. So I paid about 20 euros with a handful of coins. Literally, I had my hand full of change. Nothing happened. They took my money, I got my goods and everybody was happy, end of story.

There are several lessons here:

  • Always be with your team, and help them no matter what
  • Take the heat from the customers, it is part of your job
  • Never abuse your power
  • Don’t give power to those who cannot handle it

And the last one is for myself:

  • Find a new store
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Weekly – CW15

Posted by on 2011/04/17 No comments

While I spent most of my time with learning more about Ruby on Rails and RSpec this week, I found the following links worth sharing. So here is my collection for calendar week 15, 2011:

  • I found an old article about the eXtreme Programming Simplicity Rules. In nutshell:
    • pass all tests
    • expresses every idea that we need to express but nothing more
    • do not duplicate code or configuration
    • have short methods, classes and modules
  • Roy Osherove talked about influence change at companies in an interview recorded at QCon London 2011. I checked his website and found his old post about the topic. The six forces that influences behaviour are something every team leader or change manager should be aware of, otherwise all the efforts put into the change will evaporate. The mentioned forces are:
    • personal motivation
    • personal ability
    • social motivation
    • social ability
    • structural motivation
    • structural ability
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