All articles

🧪 How to learn from experience?

🧪 How to learn from experience?

This post is a sneak peek at an idea from the upcoming book 'Grow Together: Gain Clarity and Momentum in Your Tech Leadership Career' At various points in the lifecycle of our projects we like to a...

👉 What To Do Next?

👉 What To Do Next?

This post describes one of the key ideas from the upcoming book 'Grow Together: Gain Clarity and Momentum in Your Tech Leadership Career' When you feel stuck on the way to your long term goals or c...

🧱 Three false beliefs

🧱 Three false beliefs

The following are three harmful beliefs: 1. What I see is reality. 2. What I think is the truth. 3. What I want must be. What I believe is more accurate: 1. What I see is a tiny subset of reality, ...

😭 Three Pits of Team Despair

😭 Three Pits of Team Despair

Our purpose with Grow Together Academy is to help more great teams happen. Great teams that create and learn together. Great teams that get amazing results, without creating casualties. That is not...

Build learning into everything you do

Build learning into everything you do

Hello there! Around 2015, I believed that online training could be better than live training, so I started experimenting under the name “People Skills for Geeks.” By the end of 2019, I had proof. T...

📗 Get inspired by stories

📗 Get inspired by stories

To go far you need a large tank of high-octane fuel—or even better, a steady supply of renewable energy. You need to be able to tap into powerful drivers that actually move people to do things. And...

✍️ Make it easy for people to understand you

✍️ Make it easy for people to understand you

When you have something to say, say it in a way that makes it easy for people to understand you. Lack of clarity causes problems If you leve things unclear or ambiguous some people might just ignor...

Featured
💎 Know What You Want

💎 Know What You Want

* Mountains picture by Tobias Rademacher via Unsplash If you don’t know what you want, you’re probably not going to get it. So to help you figure things out here are three things that helped me: Ex...

🏋️ Train like an athlete

🏋️ Train like an athlete

What do pro athletes do all day? Barbell picture by Victor Freitas via Unsplash.com Let’s say you want to become a world-class athlete. You wouldn’t expect to get strong from lifting a barbell once...

✉️ De-noise Your Email

✉️ De-noise Your Email

If you’ve been reading One Minute Tips for a while or you’ve just downloaded your Meeting Overload Rescue Kit you are familiar with the idea that good communication is concrete, concise and meaning...

🤔 How might this make sense?

🤔 How might this make sense?

Owl photo by Joe Green via Unslash One problem with remote work is that it’s even easier for misunderstandings to occur. It’s hard even when we’re working from the same physical space and have mult...

Featured
🎖️ Encourage acts of leadership at all levels

🎖️ Encourage acts of leadership at all levels

Let’s look at leadership through the lens of action. I like the analogy to mindsports like chess, go or poker. It’s not enough to be a good player. To win you have to actually make good plays. If y...

🚦 You can't solve problems while angry or fearful

🚦 You can't solve problems while angry or fearful

Have you ever said or done something you regret while angry? Have you ever tried to reason with a person overcome by strong emotions? Yup, so did I. It’s a useful skill to be able to recognize emot...

🏴‍☠️ One of Us

🏴‍☠️ One of Us

How do you create a shared identity for a distributed team, without the benefit of physical proximity? Here are some things that I believe are most important: 1) Spend time in shared spaces Even if...

🤝 A fast decision-making method for teams

🤝 A fast decision-making method for teams

Here’s one way to get to the point faster and also to make group decisions that have a much higher chance of sticking. 1) Make your decisions in a concrete, concise and meaningful way A decision-ma...

🏆 How to become a great team

🏆 How to become a great team

Here’s a powerful framework that can help you lead your team to greatness. Part One: The Setup 1) Get clear on what matters most to you, your team, your customers and the organization you are part ...

🔎 When in Doubt Clarify the Outcome and Action

🔎 When in Doubt Clarify the Outcome and Action

If you want to do something, but you’re stuck it might be because you lack clarity about the exact outcome you’d like to make happen and the concrete action you need to take to get there. When? It ...

💎 Make Your Communication Concise

💎 Make Your Communication Concise

Use the pyramid principle Last week we covered the first C of good communication: Concrete Today it’s time for the second C: Concise 1) The best way to make your communication concise is to start w...

👀 Make Your Communication Concrete

👀 Make Your Communication Concrete

In the previous One Minute Tip we covered one of the three key skills of remote work, namely to communicate well in short chunks of writing. We ended that tip with the statement that good communica...

✍️ Communicate Well in Short Chunks of Writing

✍️ Communicate Well in Short Chunks of Writing

One of the key skills of remote work is to communicate well (in short chunks (of writing)). Let me explain: Communicate well What counts as communicating well depends on the purpose: 1. if it’s inf...

🤩 Don't rely on "wow" effects

🤩 Don't rely on "wow" effects

Live your differentiators If you want to create a successful product or service a common piece of advice I hear is to “wow” your customers. To deliver such moments of sheer delight that they will n...

⚖️ How to make Very Big Decisions?

⚖️ How to make Very Big Decisions?

Base key decision on estimated impact on quantified stakeholder values Will your project succeed? That question hangs on a simple commandment: Make things people want. Great, but how do we know wha...

⚔️ Heroic Adventurers vs. Brutish Invaders

⚔️ Heroic Adventurers vs. Brutish Invaders

Check Your Story Have you ever found yourself on one side of a situation like this? Ancient philosophers knew it and modern ones developed the idea: We do NOT have direct access to reality: 1. We p...

🔭 How to Start with WHY

🔭 How to Start with WHY

3 practical strategies Simon Sinek’s “Start with Why” is like a tsunami rolling over the business world. If you haven’t seen it yet or you’d like a reminder here’s Simon’s original TED talk. I used...

🥥 Don't keep valuable ideas locked up

🥥 Don't keep valuable ideas locked up

Meeting minutes are where great ideas are left to die One question: How often do you go back to old meeting notes? Yeah, … me neither. As I do more and more remote work one key discipline has becom...

💝 Assume Positive Intent

💝 Assume Positive Intent

Don’t Let Worst Possible Stories Win If you can count on one thing, it’s that whenever there’s limited information people will make up the Worst Possible Story to fill in the gaps. * “My boss hates...

🌲 Enable Knowledge to Grow Over Time with AsyncABC

🌲 Enable Knowledge to Grow Over Time with AsyncABC

The more useful stuff you have in a well-organized, densely interconnected team information system, the richer your interactions can become. A great TIM can be like a beautiful garden where things ...

🍎 First Find the Good

🍎 First Find the Good

Imagine you’re holding a magic sword. The only problem is that it’s wrapped in dirty rags. When faced with a worthy challenge it would make sense to unwrap the sword and cast away the rags. Once yo...

🖼️ Show, don't tell

🖼️ Show, don't tell

The first ever One Minute Tip for Remote Leaders is about making references concrete. When you’re talking about something (document, ticket, website, app) — share your screen and show it. If you ha...

Create Psychological Safety to Get Better Teamwork

Have you ever experienced that another co-worker didn’t want to listen to your feedback, even though it would clearly improve their performance? Did an important project fail because an employee di...

A new operating system for learning

The Challenge I believe that in order to create a better world for everyone we need to become better at working together and in order to unlock our collective potential we need radically better way...

Help Your Team Be More Effective (the Google Way)

(This is a short note about something I found useful in my role as a manager and coach at 9LivesData.) Project Aristotle was a research project conducted by Google. The goal of the project was to f...

Maximise Collective Intelligence With Empathy

(This is a short note about something I found useful in my role as a manager and coach at 9LivesData.) Notes: * teams are much better than individuals at solving complex tasks * individual or maxim...

A Note on Empathy and Compassion

Emotional intelligence and co-feeling There are two distinct aspects of empathy: 1. noticing and understanding feelings (your own and in others) 2. feeling what the other person feels, co-feeling I...

When making decisions as a team aim for soft consensus

Sometimes there are decisions to be made in a team and sometimes we don’t all agree on what to do. If the discussion is dragging on it’s easy to just vote on it and move on. For a high-performance ...

Ask for Feedback

The trouble with feedback I have mixed feelings about feedback. In my own life I have grown tremendously by accepting direct feedback from people I trust and respect. On the other hand I hate it wh...

How to Speak so that People Listen

The first topic is a simple but powerful model that has helped me greatly. Now it can also help you, so without further ado: Are people listening to what you have to say? How often do you try to co...

How (not) to begin your journey as a Scrum Master

In a strict sense the role of a Scrum Master is defined in the Scrum Guide as: “The Scrum Master is responsible for ensuring Scrum is understood and enacted. Scrum Masters do this by ensuring that ...

How to Design Highly-Usable Dialog Boxes

Software apps often ask their users to confirm (potentially destructive) actions. The method most often used are dialog boxes with a message and yes/no buttons. Unfortunately this is often bad desi...

The old WHAT vs. HOW debate

When explaining to laymen what a requirement is (or more importantly when telling a junior analyst what job is required of them) some people say: “Requirements specify the WHAT without going into t...