quality

Elements of Effective Management

I am fortunate to have worked on a team led by Anne Cawley early in my career. Experience working with her enabled me to know, rather than speculate, about the power of an effective manager. What elements of her management style made her effective? Congruence: She conversed with members of her team as equals rather [...]

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Rethinking Employee Rewards 2 of 3

In my first entry on employee rewards, I emphasized the importance of knowing the recipient well enough to reward them with something that is meaningful to them. But there is more to effective reward programs than providing a meaningful award. Let’s take a step back and explore answers to the questions: What is the purpose [...]

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Rethinking Employee Rewards, Part 1

I surveyed ten of my colleagues from different high-tech companies about the state of employee rewards programs at their company. One colleague told me about the outstanding reward programs where he works. The other nine colleagues told me something much different. Their feedback is easily summarized as follows: “Our reward programs are pathetic!” What’s the [...]

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Short-Circuit Chaos?

Managers who like to be in control have a predictable reaction to their organization grappling with a change which creates chaos — they want it to stop. When? Now, right now. What happens if management decides to short-circuit chaos with a magical solution? What happens if management accepts chaos as a necessary but uncomfortable period [...]

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Influencing Management

In response to my post entitled Check the Box where I suggest that you choose not to argue with your manager about doing a task whose primary purpose is the furtherance of a PR campaign with their manager, my colleague Bob Lee writes “How much Fantasy Experienced As Reality is building up above?” It depends [...]

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Check the Box

How many times do you complete a task that you don’t believe in just so that you can tell your manager it’s complete?  Susan was asked by Jerry, her manager, to do a knowledge transfer to her geographically dispersed teammates about a recent internal meeting at HQ. The internal meeting had been the typical three [...]

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PowerPoint Confession

I confess. In the mid-1980s, I really liked Powerpoint. I was a Systems Engineer for the Amdahl Corporation who gave hundreds of presentations each year. Up until PowerPoint, my choices for media was either a slide projector or overhead projector. So, I could use the corporate slide set or hand draw my own overheads. The [...]

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Looking Back, Looking Forward

Have you every compared your skills to another person? How about upping the comparison by comparing yourself to an earlier version of yourself? In this article, I compare my skills today with my skills 20 years earlier. First published by Software Testing and Quality Magazine Volume 2 Issue 2 March/April 2000. <> I’m forty-five, with [...]

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