Blog posts on build capability

Posts selected fromManagement Blog - Engineering Blog - Investing Blog and other blogs

• How to Build a Great Software Development Team

  "Without confidence, honest debate about ideas is suppressed as people are constantly taking things personally instead of trying to find the best ideas (and if doing so means my idea is criticized that is ok).

  ...

  This is also one of many areas where the culture within the team was self reinforcing. As new people came on they understood this practice. They saw it in practice. They could see it was about finding good ideas and if their idea was attacked they didn’t take it nearly as personally as most people do in most places."

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• Respect for People – Understanding Psychology

  I see building improvement capacity of the organization, which largely means building the capacity of the people, as an extremely important focus of improvement efforts. It is, at times, important to slow down the pace of change to ensure that people can adopt and incorporate the new concepts fully. If not, the improvements tend to only take effect on the surface.

  Improvements in results are important but it is also critical to have management improvement concepts adopted as the natural way of doing business.

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• Interview of Bill Hunter: Improving Quality and Productivity in Organizations

  Bill discusses the parallels to how a manager applying management improvement principles is very similar to an educator facilitating adult learning. Rather than an authoritarian approach where the boss tells subordinates what to do a manager helps employees achieve better results by supporting their efforts.

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• How to Lead From Any Level In the Organization

  Similar to helping other people grow their careers is the idea of helping other people to solve their problems. Again, this starts with a clear understanding of your sphere of influence. It determines what strategies you can pursue, and building your sphere of influence should be part of your decision making process.

  What it comes down to is proving yourself in this way—and doing so consistently. “It isn’t some secret sauce. Prove yourself to be valuable and you will gain influence. Help people solve their problems. They will be inclined to listen to your ideas. And helping people to solve their problems doesn't mean you are giving them the answer. It may mean you asking empowering questions.

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• Bring Me Solutions Not Problems

  What they are saying is: if you know of a problem but don’t know of a solution I would rather we continue to have that problem than admit some of my staff don’t know how to fix it (and then have to deal with it myself – maybe then having to accept responsibility for results instead of just blaming you if I am never told and there is a problem later…). I think that is setting exactly the wrong expectations.

  Employees should fix things. They should bring solutions to managers to improve things that might be out of their ability to fix. But if they know of a problem and not a solution and a manager tells the employee they don’t want to be brought problems then I don’t want that manager.

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• Circle of Influence

  You should remember, that there is a temporal component to your circle of influence. On some current issue, I may have a very low chance of success for getting the organization to adopt an improvement I think is best. But certain actions can build the understanding that will allow me later to have more influence. This can even be completely separate from how people normally think of circle of influence. By building an organization that moves toward data based decision making and therefore reduces HiPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion) decision making I increase my ability to influence decision making in the future.

  Long term thinking is a very powerful, and much under-practiced, strategy. Your influence within an organization is limited today but has great potential to expand, if you act wisely.

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