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Absentee Leadership: The Worst Kind of Manager Absentee leaders are managers who are physically present but psychologically absent. They are incompetent and disengaged, to the extent that they don't support their teams adequately. If you have an absentee manager (and don’t have the luxury of seeking another position), here's how you can try to handle the situation. |
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To Be a Better Tester, Ask the Right Questions Critical thinking is a core trait a software tester needs to succeed, and asking questions is a great skill to help. Questioning brings out the required information, breaks assumptions, and enables everyone on the team to give their perspectives. But there's an art to asking the right question at the right time. |
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Scrum Roles, Goals, and You The Scrum Guide specifies that there are three roles: product owner, developer, and ScrumMaster. It’s essential that a Scrum team have each of these roles to help it work well. But depending on how you implement the roles, you may end up hurting rather than helping your Scrum process. Focus on goals, not job titles. |
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The Problem with the People-Management Bell Curve Conforming team performance evaluations to a tidy bell curve is a simple, quantitative solution to the challenging problem of rating employee performance. However, it doesn’t work. It’s unrealistic (not to mention counterproductive) to force-fit employee evaluations to the curve when that doesn't reflect their work. |
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For Professional Communication, Check Your Grammar and Punctuation If you want to be taken seriously at work, you should pay careful attention to your grammar and punctuation in proposals, formal emails, instructions, presentations, blog posts, resumes—pretty much any important written communication. If you frequently make style and usage mistakes, your credibility can take a hit. |
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One-on-Ones: A Framework for Feedback Regular one-on-one meetings between a manager and employee are a forum to provide safe, timely feedback. They can be short or longer, but you should discuss successes, challenges, and how to improve. Having a framework for the conversation helps you make sure that the meetings don’t routinely become chat sessions. |
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3 Common Scrum Anti-Patterns and How to Fix Them For a Scrum team to operate successfully, the entire team must honor the Scrum values of commitment, courage, focus, openness, and respect. But it's easy to fall into practices that can erode trust and collaboration. Here are three common anti-patterns that emerge in Scrum, as well as the solutions to overcome them. |
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3 Reasons Managers Struggle to Build Compatible Tech Teams Managers should try to find candidates who not only have the right technical skills, but also will ideally complement each other and be able to collaborate. But that’s not easy. Here are three main aspects managers struggle with when building compatible tech teams, so you can try to mitigate them and achieve harmony. |