PLAN FOR IMPROVISATION

People make companies and products. Process helps support and grow good people, but fundamentally it's all about the people. There is a whole lot more to it than that, but this is the first thing to know.

As a manager I've always found it hard to get honest feedback from employees and my management. In larger companies the feedback culture in management often boils down to: positive feedback leads to good reviews - which leads to expectations of paying higher bonus. Employees will give their managers good reviews even in anonymous 360 reviews. The solution LinkedIn's endorsement feature can a be used to get good feedback from people. It will tell you directly what you're bad, but it will tell you which are good at. Here is how it works    If you want to know if people generally think you are good at something Look at how many people endorse you for that skill.  If you have lots of endorsements for other skills, but none for the the skill you are watching. Guess what? People are telling you you don't have it. If you have a skill that you don't use often but you're wondering if you're any good at it Make sure its on your profile. If you get a nu...

Photo credit: raphaelchekroun One my most popular posts of all time is one I put up in 2009 about Principled Leadership . I still get traffic from this post and once got a very aggressive job solicitation based on the principals outlined in the post. Recently I came across a quote that nearly sums up the whole list in one sentence: Smart leaders understand it’s not just enough to pursue, but pursuit must be intentional, focused, consistent, aggressive, and unyielding. *I'm afraid I don't know exactly where this came from so, if you are the owner, please let me know so I can link back to you.

I came across this article via LinkedIn. It reminds me of the Maker Schedule, Manager Schedule discussion except its from a maker perspective. Given that I have been doing a significant amount of development in Ruby on Rails for UrbanBound  for the past 3 months, I'm following a maker's schedule again. Being my own boss makes things simpler , however I think its important for makers to understand how to be productive and articulate to their management how they can be best managed. If this seems a bit counter intuitive to you. I can tell you that good managers do know how to manage. However, given all of the pressures around managing a business, its easy to fall into the trap of thinking about management objectives over the needs of the people who getting the work done. A healthy reminder: 7 Things Highly Productive People Do