Middle Managers & Leadership Styles (Blogging with AI)
As you can make out from the title, I am targeting two objectives for this blog: Leadership styles depend on context, role and typical followers, do they not? So, let’s look at a comparison of senior managers and middle managers along those dimensions. Senior managers Middle managers Context: Broader market, competitor and company growth perspective […]
Technology and Business Chasm – A Techie’s dilemma
Prologue For most techies, especially those working in Tech industry – these questions ought to have crossed their minds at some point in time. Should I remain a techie all through my career? Is gaining a modicum of business perspective even relevant to me as a techie? I like my technical domain and I don’t […]
“i-fi” – A Model for Designing Your Future and Personal Change
Abstract This article is the author’s narrative based on his ongoing journey of personal change. Emphasis is on proactive personal change fueled by the desire to shape one’s future. The author progressively outlines a model that could help the readers in their journey. Many ideas are stitched together in a unique way based on author’s […]
Do we really understand Empowerment?
The term “Empowerment” has been bandied about for several decades – much before Agile approaches became popular. With Agile and self-managed teams, empowerment has almost become a sacred mantra at both a team level as well as in an organizational context. Yet, when you speak to different experts, you will hear different perspectives / interpretations […]
CHOW#299 – Expectations Management – Key to lasting relationships
Satish is a new Manager with Keaton International. Keaton is a large Financial Organization with its presence in more than 20 countries. They have a large software unit in India, where they support all the IT needs of the organization. Keaton is known for its culture of on-time delivery. They have a very competitive work […]
Chow # 283 – Objective or Key Result
One of the frequently asked questions I get from teams starting out to adopt the OKR framework – Objectives and Key results, is how to distinguish between an objective and a Key result. Additionally, how do we word these – so that there is less or no ambiguity. While a detailed treatment of OKRs would […]
Six imperatives to move from on-prem to cloud development model
For new age companies born in the cloud era, their development approach has always been in tune with the demands of cloud delivery and their user base. For software product vendors with enterprise-grade solutions, transitioning to the cloud can be quite a challenge. They need to examine the way value is created all the way […]
CHOW # 274: How to share bad news with your team member?
Sudha is a project manager with a Global IT services organization. She joined this company 8 years ago as a fresh software engineer, grew to a tech lead and now she is an architect. She has been a consistent performer over the years. Sudha’s company has been practicing an annual performance appraisal cycle. They use […]
Do you feel psychologically safe at work?
Context Several years ago, I conducted a skip-level exit interview with a software engineer on my team. I did not work directly with this person in the past year, but I had heard good things about him. I was surprised to learn from him that the main reason for his decision to quit was feeling […]
CHOW #268 – Who do you support?
You are an agile coach working with a group of middle managers as part of an enterprise transformation effort. There are coaches at senior leadership level up in the hierarchy and lower in the scrum team level. Middle managers are going about the transformation effort sincerely and they are feeling stretched to meet the deadlines. […]
