High-performance teams – Do they need leaders?

Recently I attended a training which highlighted some of the differences between team and workgroups. The discussion started with the team definition. The definition used was the one from ‘Wisdom of Teams‘ book:

A team is a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals, and approach for [...]

Performance Review – Weaving personal goals into organizational ones

Often times, setting goals for next year’s performance review takes into account only organizational goals set by the manager for the employee. This misses an opportunity to set the goals in a way that could benefit the employee’s career growth plan in the most direct way.
As an employee, you should look at goals set by [...]

What do leaders/managers give to organizations?

This is performance review time, and naturally I am thinking about what I have done over the past year as a leader/manager to warrant any reward. It is always hard to figure this out, because all the work is done by an Individual Contributor, and so it is hard to be objective when evaluating the [...]

Managing Performance

See my previous post for background on this series of posts. The question we are attempting to answer is: How does someone (in this case, my friend Ravi who has 9 direct reports) set performance objectives for teams and individuals so that he does not have to spend too much time directing day-to-day activities?
There are [...]

Characteristics of High-performance Teams

In this post, I would like to discuss about characteristics of high-performance teams as defined in The Wisdom of Teams. For more detailed review of the book that I wrote sometime back, see here: Part-I, Part-II and Part-III.
The book defines a team as follows (my formatting)
A small number of people with complementary skills who are [...]

Is Annual Performance Review a waste of time?

Recently someone forwarded me this post about the fact that Performance reviews are a big fat waste of time. This is a long post talking about why it is so and proposes that we should just lose them. Here are the reasons the post mentions as to why this is the case:

Everybody hates them

They try [...]

Doing performance self-appraisal well

As I was completing the performance reviews for my team, I was reminded of the fact that so few people actually do a good job of appraising themselves. I have noticed this over the past 5-6 years that I am doing performance reviews and have gotten similar feedback from several other folks, and it hasn’t [...]

Trust in Manager-employee relationship

In a previous post Do you think your manager is fair to you?, I proposed that trust is the most important part of the manager-employee relationship and it determines whether manager is considered fair or not by his/her employees. So the question is: how do you create trust in such a relationship? This is pertinent [...]

Performance Measurement – Team or individual?

Among many advantages of agile development is the one which produces efficiency by squeezing away the cost of interaction between various members (roles) of a development team (for example, QA doesn’t need to raise the bug and wait for it to be fixed and then verify it, he/she can walk up to the dev and [...]