Category: General
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A tale of a leadership team workshop
Day One: Coming Together For some leaders from different organizations that will merge into one in the upcoming weeks, the face-to-face meeting is the first opportunity to meet in person with each other and their new manager. Even if the three facilitators made sure to greet everyone as they entered the room, the tension was…
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Invest a few hours to excel at public speaking
A few months back, I was doing some research on public speaking, and I stumbled on this short video of one of the world’s experts in public speaking Conor Neil. What I learned in the video changed forever the way I envision starting and finishing a talk. Yes, there is a grownup way to say: Once upon…
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Emile wants to solve consistency the open source way
Do you remember Igraine from the Primary Team story? Igraine leads the EMEA region of a global company. Bob, Igraine’s manager, told the Field Leadership Team that he wanted to get more consistency from the three main regions and that Igraine, leading EMEA, Yun, leading APAC, and Aileen, leading Americas, should come up with proposals.…
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Start with Music
A few weeks back, I joined yet another online meeting, and something felt instantly different. Smooth music was playing in the background while the host welcomed me to the meeting. The host was Michael Doyle, and that was the first time I was exposed to that approach of welcoming people in online meetings. I tried…
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Are you at the right table?
In Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose, Tony Hsieh, the former CEO of Zappos, shared how he learned to play poker out of boredom. Poker is not like the other gambling games played in casinos with odds stacked against you. With Poker, you don’t play against the casino. You play against the…
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Hand Signals for Virtual Meeting
One person asks a question, not even a rhetorical one, followed by an awkward silence.
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Primary Team
In The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Patrick Lencioni tells the story of an executive team. To avoid having the functional leaders be only interested in their own department, the CEO asks them to consider the Leadership Team as their primary team. The idea of a primary team that takes precedence over all the others…
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Resolution for the Exhausted
What seemed to be a long time ago, I started my first post of the year by telling you that I opened a Gym Club in January and told you what happened to that club in February. More important, you will find in the post mentioned above suggestion to keep up with your resolutions. The…
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What a Coding Dojo taught me about agile
In their article, What is agile?, Jen Krieger, Daniel Oh, and Matt Takane discuss what we at Red Hat consider the most important sentence of the Agile Manifesto: “We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it.” I like this sentence because it helps to understand why we could apply…
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Another book discussion club
I believe I already told you a lot about the benefit of participating or facilitating a book discussion club. Last week, I received in a tweet another proof of that. I was amazed by the quality of the visualization the people from the book discussion club at Conserto came up with. Sebastien tweeted the visualization…
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Chief of Staff Academy
A few weeks back, I attended McChrystal Group Chief of Staff Virtual Academy. I was looking to stretch my thinking to further grow in the role. Since then, I keep a copy of the Chief of Staff four quadrants on my desk to remind me where the focus should be depending on the topic, and…
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Three Questions to Replace You
What are the three questions you would ask a potential Chief of Staff that would replace you?