Why Wait for Value?
I have often heard different perspectives on how long you can expect to wait before a new hire is productive. Usually the numbers come in around 3 to 6 months, and in many shops where there isn’t a sound infrastructure for communicating the company’s business sector, products and practices, this seems a reasonable timeframe. What is important to recognize, though, is that in those initial months, we should at least make sure that this new hire is not a liability. Read more
Testing That Team Agreement
I wrote a couple of weeks ago about what can happen when a team agreement is hastily put together: it can actually be worse than no team agreement at all, and can serve to tear a team apart. It is one thing to observe this and note that the team agreement was part of the root cause. What tests can we apply to our team agreement to determine if it is good enough to pass muster to begin with? Read more
Consulted
I’m in the process of putting together a project that will involve a number of external resources from different disciplines. The intent is to build a product that will require technical, sales and marketing resources, and likely some branding and analytics effort, most of which will come from external consultants that I know. Being a consultant myself, I have learned the cost of totally missing the mark with a proposal, but I think this is the first time it has happened to me. I feel I have not been listened to, I feel insulted. I realize that this is the concern I often have to battle against with prospects, that they are going to feel ‘consulted’. Read more
WTD
What happens when something that has been hastily crafted to hold a team together is used in ways that were never intended? A team agreement can easily become a Weapon of Team Destruction. Read more
