Seven pillars of Servant Leadership
Often I get asked by Scrum Masters, who are in the process of adopting Agile Scrum, on references to servant leadership. How should one go about changing from “command and control style” to “servant leadership”. I used to share relevant examples from my experiences that has helped teams self-organize. Highlight instances, based on my observations […]
Communicating with the End in Mind
Most of us are familiar with the Basic Communication Model – with sender, channel and receiver. We all understand that the responsibility for effective communication rests with both parties, with a slight onus on the sender. What I have experienced is that by including an element, that focuses on the outcome, enhances the effectiveness of […]
Keeping Daily Scrum Focused (2)
Here is an update from Rekha, one of the team member from the teams I was coaching. I am working on TSK-206, I took the build, tried to test on ST-OS1 setup, was unable to test. Then I tried ST-OS3, then Nithin told me that he had changed the environment to test earlier build, he […]
Keeping Daily Scrum focused…
The Daily Scrum is one ceremony that the teams following Scrum adopt quickly. There are some hiccups initially, which are sorted out, often with inputs from the coach/guide. The ceremony is on time and at fixed time, occurs even if Scrum Master is not present, team members unable to attend do call in or provide […]
A Trip Report – Summing up multiplies the time
My first job, decade’s back was a six day a week job. An organizational decision was taken to make Saturday a half day. I was a Graduate Trainee and there were six of us. Three of us were in Engineering Dept. and three in Sales & Marketing Dept. It was the first Saturday after the […]
Initial coaching interventions for Retrospectives
As a coach, a recurring situation one faces, towards the end of the first sprint after the coaching has started, is the push and shove to the retrospective. After seemingly making the team understand that two key aspect of Agile Scrum are to surface the problems at the earliest and avoiding any kind of waste. […]
Coaching vs Command & Control style of Management
Leaders have only two jobs: 1) Getting work done 2) Growing the people Coaching as a leadership/management style achieves both. With Command & Control approach, managers may get the work done in the short term, by force. But that might have negative impacts on the team in terms of : – Lack of ownership – […]
Journey of a coach – theory & practice (Part II)
In an earlier article “Journey of a coach – theory & practice (Part I), we introduced the “circles of influence” which form the context (see diagram below) for coaching process. The circles in the diagram above have a significant bearing on coaching effectiveness and need to be addressed by the coach using the theory of […]
Questioning and Asking Questions – what is the difference?
A speaker finishes a great speech – at least, HE thinks it is great! He then asks, “Any questions?” What does he expect? If I were him, I would expect the audience to demonstrate a level of understanding of what the speech was all about and ask meaningful questions – clarifying the ground covered and […]
Co-location of teams and collaboration in Agile – are we making too much of it?
When I started as an Agile coach eight years ago, my only relative and somewhat debatable “agile” experience was some iterative development we did on a very large product over nearly 19 months. This was a project where we worked with 6-week iterations for 14 iterations!! One thing that project taught me was the value […]
