Adapting Your Communication Style
Guest blogger Kristie Santana, founder of the National Coach Academy, discusses communication styles for the Process Communication Model's 6 main personality types.
A Leader's Guide to Hiring Team Members
As a leader, hire for culture, capabilities, and diversity. Stop hiring for skills that can be easily taught and focus on the specific skills your team needs.
How to Never Issue a Command
Strong leaders don't need to issue COMMANDS - their teams just seem to know what to do without being told. Here's how to ABSOLUTELY make this happen for you.
What's the RIGHT Way to Use Metrics With a Scrum Team?
In many organizations, nothing wastes more time than metrics with no purpose. Here's help on the RIGHT way to measure team performance.
Was That Supposed to be Helpful?
Do you give your team feedback, but nothing seems to come of it? Here's some simple techniques for giving feedback to your employees, staff, and teammates.
No Talking Without a Manager Present
In 35 years of coaching, I've met workers who weren't allowed to discuss issues with another group without their manager present. Let's unpack this situation!
Embracing Change: The Scrum Master’s Guide to Leading Organizational Transformation
Change isn’t the enemy—stagnation is. Organizations that cling to the status quo risk falling behind as competitors innovate. As a Scrum Master or leader, your role is to guide teams and stakeholders to embrace change. This guide explores seven practical ways to foster a culture of experimentation and help your organization adapt and thrive. In today’s fast-paced world, those that resist change don’t just slow down—they vanish. 🚀
What Causes Conflict on a Team?
Change usually creates conflict, but a good ScrumMaster knows what types of conflict to expect and is prepared to handle it with correct conflict responses.
Has Your Company Chained You to Your Desk?
In my 35 years of coaching, many employees discuss managers who complain when a worker leaves their desk, but monitoring snack time and bathroom breaks won't improve productivity.
Dealing with Troublesome Team Members
Whether it’s conflicting personalities or just differing opinions, as a leader, you need to know how to deal with a difficult team member.
Gearing a Team for Maximum Outcomes
Creating a maximum outcome team is every ScrumMaster’s goal, but you must first understand how great teams form and what YOU need to do to create a great team.
Jim's 10 Tips for Scrum Development Teams
With COVID-19 forcing us all to learn about working from home, we're re-publishing our list of "Jim's 10 Tips for Scrum Development Teams," UPDATED for 2020!
What Does it Mean to BE Agile?
With the Agility mindset, it's critical to understand the concept of "being" Agile. Some people want "to do Agile", but you don't DO Agile, you must BE Agile.
5 Ways to At Least DOUBLE Team Performance
Here's 5 steps you can take as a manager or ScrumMaster to help DOUBLE your Development Team's performance (#5 is a shocker; it's easy but SUPER non-intuitive!)
Creating the Skills You Need for Agility
When beginning the transformation to Agile Development, it's hard to know exactly what skills the organization needs to adapt to the new way of working.
Speeding up Your Scrum Teams
Effective Scrum use is more than Sprint Planning, Daily Scrums, and so on. To see a big difference in your team's Sprints, make these workflow changes.
Self-Managing Teams
When I teach or coach people about Scrum, we talk about self-organization, but the importance of self-organizational principles cannot be understated.
Limited Skills, Great Demand
Specialists with a particular skill can get stretched thin! But there's ways to solve this dilemma other than assigning them to ten Scrum teams at once.
Ground Rules for Your Team
Some initial “rules” that everyone agrees to follow will help your team avoid misunderstandings and deliberate misconduct.
DONEness Definitions (DoD)
What's the one thing YOU could do as a Scrum Master to improve your team's reliability, quality, and productivity? Read on and find out!