Team Improvement

Improving as a Team

How do you become better in a particular field as an individual? Let’s assume, you want to master an instrument, and your vision is to one day play a solo in the Elbphilharmoie in Hamburg. You will practise, focussing on different elements such as rhythm, the accuracy of pitch and length of the notes,...

(Fast) Feedback for Workshops and Meetings

(Fast) Feedback during Workshops and Meetings

When people attend a workshop, they invest time or money or both. Thus, it should be in the interest of the organiser, trainer or facilitator to provide this value. To find out if the expectations of the participants are met, their feedback is invaluable. Thus, often the facilitator hands out a feedback questionnaire at...

Moving Motivators

Moving Motivators

What motivates people? Scientists found out (see appendix) that extrinsic motivators, such as payment, bonuses or promotions only have a positive influence on repetitive mechanical work. When it comes to tasks where creativity, decision-making, and cognitive skills are necessary, these extrinsic factors might even lead to lower performance. Dan Pink illustrates this in his...

Delegation Poker

Delegation Poker

Quite often, I encounter situations where no clear responsibilities are defined between two entities, such as a manager and a team or between two teams. They kind of figure it out when a situation occurs. They prefer to avoid general commitments. This can lead to confusion and misunderstandings, which in turn lead to dissatisfaction...

Personal Map

Personal Maps

How does it make you feel when someone remembers personal facts you once told them, e.g. “How is your son Mateo, did he like the Lego Avengers you gave him for his birthday?”. I feel appreciated, that someone has an interest in me and even remembers details I told them. Even though this person...

Teams

Team Competency Matrix

Each member of a team has their set of skills that contribute to the overall skillset of the team. However, quite often, these skills are not aligned with the skills that are necessary to develop the future product or service. To determine and to subsequently decide how to close these gaps, the so called...

Kudo Wall

Show Appreciation with the Kudo Wall

As mentioned in an earlier post, most creative thinkers are driven by intrinsic motivation. Some of these motivational factors are the approval from teammates or the relatedness with their team. One way to achieve this is by (positive) feedback from teammates. A way to express this feedback can be either on a personal level...

Cover Story Title

Visual Goal Setting: Cover Story

A while ago a client was working on an internal product. This tool is used to measure the SEO-Performance of one of the largest online shops in the world to subsequently derive actions that boost SEO performance. It seemed to me that the team had lost its direction. Their product vision sounded very general, vague...

Management 3.0 - Agile Gardening

What is Management 3.0?

What is Management 3.0 is all about? Jurgen Appelo explains the background in his videos and blog posts. Some years ago, he was working as a manager at an organisation that had just adopted agile practices. Most of these frameworks or methods do not define the role of a manager or something that has...