QualityHU

While preserving the necessary anonymity, please share the dysfunction you encountered. What were the difficulties and how did they impact the team? This situation happened a few years ago. I was part of a team working on some high-profile projects for a Fortune 100 company through an LSP. The LSP's leadership - somewhat inexperienced and young - wanted to create high-functioning teams based on languages where team members help each other. The projects were assessed individually but the team’s collective quality score decided how well the LSP performed.  How did you or your team leader (or anyone else in the team, for that matter) try to address the problem? What strategy(ies) did you or they use? The problem is that while they had a theoretical idea about creating a positive team, they did not have any strategy in hand. Naturally, the team started out positively but after a while because of miscommunication, misunderstandings, lack of instructions, and training fear started to cre...

  We live in a world where success is a matter of solving problems and coming up with the next big idea. It’s not enough anymore to be smart and hardworking. Organizations need their employees to collaborate, experiment and respond to their business needs that are constantly changing. But in many workplaces, people lack the confidence to do this silenced by fear and failure, judgmental colleagues, or unapproachable bosses. When leaders use fear to motivate, people can turn to extremes and dangerous methods to get the job done. And when fear gets in the way of people speaking up at work, it’s not only the individuals who miss out. No one wakes up in the morning saying and thinking that as soon as they arrive at the office, they want to look ignorant, incompetent, intrusive or negative. Well, it’s easy to manage that: if you don’t want to look ignorant, don’t ask questions. If you don’t want to look incompetent, don’t admit your mistakes and failures. If you don’t want to appear inco...

Growing as a Leader Creating Change in My Leadership Last week I did a SWOT analysis about my leadership skills and characteristics and I came to the conclusion that the weaknesses I identified can be changed if I work hard on them and create a plan of how to change my leadership. The following weaknesses were identified: I am not a good public speaker and I tend to become shy if I need to speak up. I tend to become impatient when things are too slow and what I realized is that compared to other people almost everything is too slow for me. I sometimes tend to judge people too quickly based on obvious signs. I don’t ask enough questions. I am not strong at defining my expectations or establishing my rules to others. They also say 80% of the people tend to have optimistic bias but I can see both the optimistic and pessimistic tendencies in me when I look at myself and my prospect of becoming a successful leader. It’s somewhat the same with this assignment; I don’t entirely believe that t...

  Managing Stakeholders Have you ever heard the phrase “the stakes are high"? When we talk about “stakes,” we are referring to the important parts of a business, situation, or project that might be at risk if something goes wrong. To hold a stake in a business, situation, or project means you are invested in its success. Every successful team needs strong leadership and membership and program managers need to be able to manage stakeholders successfully as project managers need to deal with the specific tasks and activities of the project itself. Technical problems are not hard, people are hard and it’s inevitable that we run into a situation when we need to deal with difficult stakeholders. Let’s review quickly the steps for managing stakeholders: Steps for Managing Stakeholders Step 1: Identifying and analyzing stakeholders which is the process of identifying and analyzing the people, teams, or organizations that could impact or be impacted by a decision, activity, or outcome of ...