People don't resist change, they resist being changed. Awareness enables individual, organisational, and social transformation.
The fireball: my first feedback story It was one of my first jobs, the debut of my career. I was working for Procter & Gamble, in Bucharest. The Romanian branch had just opened a procurement center (intending to transfer all procurement activities from Brussels and Geneva) and I was employee number four of the new... Continue Reading →
Empathy and emotional intelligence emotional intelligence are the focus on management and leadership research. Not only that, but it's considered a core skill for just .. being human. The success of teaching children empathy brought the idea that adults can be taught too. Fortunately, there are a lot of tools to learn empathy, and here's... Continue Reading →
I've been living in Malaysia for over five years, working for a company that employs more than 60 nationalities. My first Scrum team had 8 nationalities (of 8 team members), spread across all spectrum of cultural differences. My family is also multicultural (my son has Romanian-Malaysian genes, plus influences from Romanian, Chinese, Malaysian and Indian... Continue Reading →
An Agile Coach wears many hats - coach, trainer, teacher, mentor, consultant, conflict navigator - but my favourite role as a Coach is by far is facilitating groups. There is an immense satisfaction in being the force behind group problem-solving, helping a group navigate through their issues or conflicts or get clarity and create ideas.... Continue Reading →
Scrum is currently the most popular product development framework. It's also the framework I used the most and I am most comfortable using. It's a simple framework, but not easy to implement. I am going to write a Scrum series, where each post will tackle a part of Scrum, with information on its purpose and definition,... Continue Reading →
“All that is necessary for effectiveness is output judged acceptable by those who receive or use it, a team that winds up its work at least as capable as when it started, and members who are at least as satisfied as they are frustrated by what has transpired. The challenge is to generate ways of... Continue Reading →
You know all those books that teach you how to make your team great, or how to push your team to rock star performance? Toss them aside. You can't make a team great, says Harvard Professor Richard Hackman, a world-leader researcher in group performance, leadership effectiveness and self-managed teams. Thankfully, there's a but: you can... Continue Reading →
The team is at the core of agile practices and frameworks: "team of experts", "development team", "product team", "squad", etc. Software development requires the work of a team, as individual work can only get you so far. But is that assumption correct? To answer this question, I looked into organisational psychology and group dynamics research. The... Continue Reading →
Self-managed or self-organised teams is the premise for any Agile framework or organisation. But what does that mean? The meaning varies from organisation to organisation, and from person to person, but there is a standard definition for it. Let's look into it! Late J. Richard Hackman, Harvard psychology professor and one of the leading experts... Continue Reading →
