Lead Engineers are promoted to Team Leaders typically because they were great at completing engineering tasks. A new Lead Engineer will transfer the techniques that worked in managing her own work, into managing the team.  Most often, this does not work as planned. If Lead Engineers managed their team exactly as they did their own [more]

I have recommended that team leaders set objectives through a team discussion.  At a minimum, you should ask the team about their understanding of the objective. But team leaders still report their team is not “on the same page”.  They reformulate what the team said – and everybody seems to agree. But at the design [more]

I advocate defining objectives instead of itemizing the steps of the task. But when Team Leaders try it, it does not work too well. At the design review they still don’t get what they were looking for. They discover that the objectives were not understood the same way by each team member. Is something wrong [more]

I have often been asked how the High-Performance behaviors of successful teams differ from the not-so-performing teams I have met or worked with over the years.   Here’s a selection of topics – by no means all inclusive – that show this.   Look at this as a spectrum: most teams fall between the two [more]

“Whether you believe you can do a thing or not, you are right”  (Henry Ford) People are capable of doing great things. Whether they do great things is up to you, the Leader. As leader, you must believe that the team can achieve great results.  In fact, believe more than the team itself is willing [more]

(for reference: my definition of Objectives ) From the coaching file, here’s what engineers tell me: I hate to go to design reviews to find out what I did is not what They wanted – never mind that the specs weren’t clear about it in the first place. I am being micro-managed by my Lead [more]

(this post refers to my definition of objectives) When I led my first electrical engineering team, we did not discuss Stop Criteria. We did not discuss objectives much either. We talked about how to do the tasks. We asked “how long do you need to get it done?” And answered: “That’s too long”. Call us [more]

There are two parts to a good objective:  Purpose and Stop Criteria (also called “the end state”). Purpose: Reason(s) why the task needs to be done End state/Stop Criteria: Explains when to stop working on the task, because the desired quality and characteristics of the results have been achieved. These are typical questions to ask, [more]

We are creatures of habit. We operate within our comfort zone and resist change that makes us act outside of it. The resistance level is proportional to how far outside of the comfort zone we are asked to go. Thus a change program must move our comfort zone by increment towards new practices. But that [more]

I have argued that improvement only occurs if we change our current actions. From books to seminars to training programs, finding best practices that will give better results is straightforward. Getting the whole team to adopt these is the problem. To implement change it helps to understand what we’re up against. We individually resist change [more]