Charlotte Dillon - Author Articles

Daria the Developer Hates Daily Standup

April 19, 2016 by Charlotte Dillon 6 Comments

This week’s post is a guest article by Dillon Forrest, Product Manager & Growth Hacker

Daria the Developer shows up to work at 8:55am, a bit early for her daily standup at 9am. Most of her coworkers roll into the office in the next few minutes. Nobody’s gotten their coffee yet.

At 9am on the dot, the project manager power walks through Daria’s section of the bullpen and says, “Standup time, good morning everybody, let’s go everybody, come on everybody, standup time, let’s go! Starting at 9am sharp!”

There are 12 people on the calendar invite for this team: 5 developers, 1 designer, 1 product manager, 2 QA managers, 1 project manager, the VP of Engineering, and the CTO.

The VP Eng and CTO aren’t present, but that’s normal. They never show up for daily standup. They haven’t attended a daily standup since Daria joined the company. They are both adamant about everybody showing up at 9am sharp for standup, but they themselves might roll into the office around 10:30.

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Two developers and a QA manager are late. The seven present team members stand in a circle in the center of the bullpen, and the project manager insists on starting the daily standup without the absent coworkers. The project manager is quite impressive at following orders from the higher-ups when it comes to starting meetings on time.

The two tardy developers roll into the office at 9:05am, and sadly they’ve missed the daily update from three people already. Tardy Developer #1 hasn’t taken off his jacket or bag yet, but the project manager jumps at the chance to suggest that Tardy Developer #1 give his update.

Google’s Unwritten Rule for Team Collaboration

April 5, 2016 by Charlotte Dillon 9 Comments

This week’s article is a guest post by Paul Berkovic. Paul is Co-founder and CMO at ScribblePost (productivity software for capturing and sharing task and project information with anyone, anywhere).

We do a lot of collaborating these days. But despite the number of open offices, designated “thinking” areas, and our managerial focus on small teams, we still haven’t mastered collaborative work.

In fact, we’re really bad at it.

The point of collaborating is to get everyone in a group involved and exercising their strengths. But according to the Harvard Business Review, “In most cases, 20% to 35% of value-added collaborations come from only 3% to 5% of employees.” In most collaborative teams, the bulk of the work still comes from a minority of participants.

In response to this imbalance in their own organization, Google launched Project Aristotle, an internal research project studying Google teams to discover why some were superior collaborators.

Google has a known penchant for quantifying everything. Project Aristotle expected to find something quantifiable, like the optimal team size or the most productive structure for group meetings. But Project Aristotle hit the ultimate irony: the key to collaboration is not a quantifiable. In fact, it wasn’t even codified. The best teams don’t have a measurable, highly visible solution to collaboration—they have an unwritten social code.

What I Learned From Managing an International Remote Team

March 2, 2016 by Charlotte Dillon Leave a Comment

Guest post by Nils Vinje of Glide Consulting. A version of this post appeared on the Glide blog.

Let me start with the good part: when I managed a team of customer success managers in San Francisco, we were really successful. We worked together seamlessly.

We met often to talk about long-term strategy and problems that were coming up, we chatted over lunch about how things were going, and when someone had a question, they came and knocked on my door.

So when I moved into managing a distributed team of CSMs, I applied the same communication strategy: always be available. It didn’t matter that my coworkers were in Tokyo and London instead of down the hall—I would be the same resource I was before.

Now for the bad part: it didn’t work. Simply put, “always be available” isn’t a system.

It took some time to hammer out, but I learned that remote teams need to be much more systematic, document everything, and communicate constantly. Our international team eventually ramped up to become one of the most productive teams I’ve ever worked with, time differences aside. Along the way, I learned that international remote teams can actually be more efficient than co-located ones, as long as they adhere to these processes.

How to Sell New Tools To Your Team

February 11, 2016 by Charlotte Dillon Leave a Comment

In 2013, public schools in Greensboro North Carolina received a shipment of over 15,000 iPads as part of an initiative to bring technology into the classroom. Now, those very same iPads are collecting dust because teachers either refused or didn’t know how to incorporate them in their workday.

New tools, however shiny, don’t automatically make a difference to your team. It’s up to managers to get the ball rolling.

As a manager, you might be really certain that a new tool will make a huge difference. That new CRM is going to make finding information so much easier. That communication tool is going to make everyone so much more productive. And that new email provider is going to make your data so much more secure.

But new tools don’t make any difference at all if your team doesn’t get on board. It’s a really common phenomenon: you bring in new tools, but everyone is so stuck in their ways that they’re not willing to budge when it comes to changing how they do things. Even though you’re convinced it could help them.

To Be More Productive, Work Less

February 8, 2016 by Charlotte Dillon Leave a Comment

Guest Post by Daniel Tay, Piktochart

Daniel is a Content Strategist at Piktochart, where he writes regularly about creativity, design, and storytelling. His motto in life: Always be improving, always be loving. Check out his latest articles over at the Piktochart blog.

Back in the 1800s, American author Herman Melville was facing a problem while writing his to-be masterpiece, Moby Dick. Like many famous creative people who would come after him, he struggled against mankind’s greatest nemesis – procrastination – and even had to resort to chaining himself to his desk to be productive.

That particular story turned out pretty well. Moby Dick went on to become one of the greatest literary works of all time. Sitting at our desks mindlessly scrolling through Facebook, though, it’s hard to imagine that we could ever overcome the Instant Gratification Monkey, and get to work on the ever-increasing mounds of assignments and projects ahead of us.

Even if we did chain ourselves to our desks and get started, distractions continually attempt to try and lure us away. And unlike Melville, we live in an age of perpetual distractions which are easily accessible at the swipe of a finger. Stanford sociologist Clifford Nass says that we are “suckers for irrelevancy.”

Each time we get distracted, we mess up our flow – defined as an “optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and perform our best.” Not being in the flow is naturally very, very bad for doing actual productive work.

People Management for Rookies

February 3, 2016 by Charlotte Dillon Leave a Comment

Most people who start their own business do it because they have a great idea. Whether they’re setting out to start a new social media site or an environmentally-friendly sock distribution company, they do it because they’re excited about the business concept. People management is usually far from their minds.

It’s one of the least sexy parts of starting your own business. And it’s also the most important one to master.

In fact, people management is one of the things entrepreneurs struggle with the most, in part because it requires such a different skill set than other entrepreneurial qualities. But new entrepreneurs often make the mistake of dismissing it as a secondary task, instead focusing their efforts on what they think are more important duties.

Managing teams—especially remote teams—is hard, but really important. Poor prioritization leads to breakdowns in communication, which lead to mistakes in your team’s work, which spell out failure for your company.

The good news is, managing teams is a learnable skill. It boils down to a handful of daily processes that you can accomplish to be a competent and successful manager.

5 Resolutions to Boost Your Team’s Productivity

January 12, 2016 by Charlotte Dillon 2 Comments

Over time, teams develop bad habits that hurt productivity. They slowly stop adhering to processes. They let standards slide. They communicate less. What’s worse is that as these bad habits creep in slowly over time, you can forget that your team is even doing them. Productivity suffers and no one even notices.

The problem is only exacerbated for remote teams. It’s hard enough for any group of people to stick to a regimen of healthy team habits. But when individuals don’t see each other every day, and they’re not regularly checking in to make sure everyone is adhering to office-wide standards, the slow creep of bad habits is even more dangerous, and leads to poor productivity.

All too often, working remotely means working separately. That leaves you without regular times to check in, re-assess how the team is doing, and make the necessary changes to reach peak functionality.

Enter New Years. Here’s your chance to make adjustments and define the tone for the next 12 months. That’s why so many companies introduce a yearly theme when everyone comes back from the holidays.

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In 2016, resolve to take on these fundamental problems that plague teams at work—especially remote teams. They’re what Patrick Lencioni calls the 5 Dysfunctions of a Team, and they lay out the main reasons teams aren’t as productive as they could be, why so many aren’t aware of them, and what they can do to fix them. Here’s how.

The Definitive Guide to Daily Standups

November 17, 2015 by Charlotte Dillon 1 Comment

When the business world seeks new productivity tools, it often turns its gaze to Silicon Valley, an industry famous for its ability to eliminate the cruft of the workday. But there’s one productivity tool that has its roots not in open-plan offices, but in military strategy boardrooms: the daily standup meeting.

The daily standup has its instructions in the title. It’s a daily meeting where participants stand. That’s it.

Ideally, the lack of chairs promotes a quick and effective meeting. If the conversation prompts a deeper discussion about a specific topic, it’s tabled for after the daily standup.

It’s a technique that American General William Pagonis used during the First Gulf War, where he served as director of Logistics. Each morning, he had 40 officers meet together in a conference room without a table or chairs. It minimized the need for pleasantries and unnecessary comments. Even military officers, it turns out, have a tendency to digress. Pagonis found that the format maximized productivity crucial to military success. Norman Schwarzkopf, in fact, salutes Pagonis as the “logistical wizard” of the Gulf War.

After hanging up is uniform, Pagonis brought this military precision to his corporate job as a Sears executive. He brought workers into a conference room sans chairs and had a quick run-down of the day. Under his leadership, Sears streamlined its business model, cutting delivery times in half. The standup, Pagonis says, was crucial to Sears’ success. When asked why the daily standup was so effective, he said, “When you sit down, a meeting goes for over an hour or an hour and a half, and you lose everybody. When people are standing, they talk faster or they say I don’t have anything to add.” It’s that simple.

The daily stand-up takes a lot of forms. Some offices do it once a week—others, twice a day. Some use chairs, some do it electronically. Some, as it turns out, are more successful than others. This guide looks at how and why daily standups are so effective, and the best way to implement one into your workday.

Why Google Got Over Brainteasers

November 10, 2015 by Charlotte Dillon 1 Comment

You’ve probably heard stories about Google’s interview process. The web is littered with examples of brainteasers interviewers have posed, including “How many golf balls can fit in a school bus?” and “How many piano tuners are there in the world?”

Brainteasers were another one of Google’s trailblazing company culture quirks essential to its “Googlieness,” like casual dress or napping pods. These head-scratching puzzles were touted as a meritocratic way to hire. The logic was, no matter where you went to college or what your SAT score were, if you could solve one of these questions, you deserve to work at Google.

But Google’s brainteasers are a thing of the past.

“We found that brainteasers are a complete waste of time,” Laszlo Bock, senior VP of Google’s people operations stated. “They don’t predict anything. They serve primarily to make the interviewer feel smart.” In fact, the people who succeeded at brainteasers were often the opposite kind of employee Bock wanted to hire.

While buzz-worthy, brainteasers have been abandoned for straight-edge processes and questions. Interviewers ask boring questions that you might hear from any other company. And they get better results.

Bock overhauled the quirky interview process in favor of hiring policies that yielded employees who would work hard and work smart. Here’s what he did.

Your Employees Are Underperforming…They Just Don’t Know It

November 3, 2015 by Charlotte Dillon 1 Comment

As an executive, criticism is an essential part of your job. Your role is to get your team working as efficiently as possible. This means reminding employees of impending deadlines, hounding them to finish tasks, and firing off nit-picky memos. It’s important work, but it comes at a high cost: employee confidence.

Hard and fast criticism might seem the quickest way to get your team to work better. But if negativity is all they hear from you, you’re harming your company’s productivity.

Unconfident employees are less likely to approach you with out-of-the box ideas, teach themselves a new coding language, or apply for that promotion where they would excel.

Confident employees are productive employees. The problem is, most people aren’t as confident as they should be, since they don’t accurately perceive their abilities and competency.

If they’re not cognizant of their capacity, they probably aren’t working at it. If they’re under-confident, they’re underperforming.

Here’s the good news: confidence isn’t fixed. By applying a couple of positive psychology tools, you can boost their confidence and their productivity.