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Joking Around and Taking Work Seriously You may be totally serious about your job yet give the impression that you’re not. Laughter and fun help some people tackle the high-priority, stress-inducing problems they face every day, but it can also be misinterpreted by others that they aren't taking their work seriously. How are people perceiving your behavior? |
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Collaborating with a Highly Distributed Team Being distributed can cause challenges for team collaboration, such as insufficient communication and a lack of visibility. However, advancements in tools, technology, and best practices have helped to lessen some of those challenges. Here are four ways to make collaborating with distributed teams more seamless. |
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Don’t Ask for Permission or Forgiveness—Use an Agile Alternative Some teams get around bottlenecks by taking a “better to ask forgiveness than permission” approach. This may be expedient, but it doesn’t provide a path to changing the organizational dynamic, and it can lead to wrong decisions when wider input is advisable. A more agile way is to take an “I intend to” approach. |
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When Customers Attack: Dealing with Rude Clients It seems like the only way some customers know how to communicate is to accuse, complain, and verbally attack. This only gets worse if there are delays. But when you do your best to build trust with customers early on, they are more likely to accept explanations about setbacks, even if they don’t fully understand them. |
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Stop Fanning the Flames of Constant Firefighting Continually having to address unexpected problems interrupts your original sprint activities, causing stress on the team members and fanning the flames for future firefights. But with due diligence, you can lessen the need to constantly put out fires. Here are some steps that can break the cycle of work and rework. |
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4 Tips to Refocus Stale Standups The daily standup is supposed to get everyone on the same page and make teams more productive and efficient. But it’s easy for this short meeting to become stale and stop providing any real benefit. Here are four ways to get out of the slump of merely delivering status updates and re-energize your daily standups. |
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Is Your Culture about Responsibility or Blame? When things go wrong, it can be helpful to understand what happened and who was involved. However, all too often organizations (and the managers within) confuse responsibility with assigning blame. The former is essential for improvement. The latter works against an effective, collaborative, productive culture. |
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Beware of Success Stories The tendency to look back and think you know what contributed to a success is called survivorship bias. It occurs when you make a decision or take some action based on past successes while ignoring past failures. That's why it's important to approach reports of successful projects with a healthy dose of skepticism. |
