Devops for Growth

None of us are born toxic leaders, but anyone can easily become one. In the past several years, workplaces have started to feel the effects of “toxic leadership.” Now is the time to educate everyone on the importance of speaking right, doing right, treating each other right in the workplace, and above all, being a non-toxic leader.

Stop Neglecting the Basics: Take the Two Pills

Want to learn how to become more effective as a team, both in terms of joint efficiency and creativity?

Try the red pill (psychological safety) and the blue pill (common ground) as a team. Even more, make sure that every team member is accountable for nurturing these two requirements.

Both pills are needed to solve complex problems together in a time of Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity (VUCA model). Team innovation starts by building and nurturing a solid team alignment and a safe climate. Guess where? During these team meetings that are so criticized, and rightly so.


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The red pill increases your team ability to achieve

A large internal study conducted by Google highlighted that psychological safety is the main enabler of high-performance teamwork (Duhigg, 2016). Team members engage in a productive dialogue that fosters the learning behaviors required to understand the environment, the clients and solve problems together.

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The blue pill maximizes your team effort towards the mission

Team members remain constantly aligned on what needs to be achieved and how. Execution of tasks is more efficient and personal contributions integrate more successfully. Teams with higher common ground perform tasks 4 to 12 times faster than teams with no or insufficient common ground.(*)

I’ve written about the guts to make a decision when the time is right, and the guts to demand that your vendors treat you like a valued customer. In this post I’d like to discuss taking a principled stand within the organization.

Mark says sport has taught him how to be a leader and coach. You can make a significant difference in the world when you find the primary drivers that allow you to coach and lead.

Mark is the Director of Coaching for Sport Nova Scotia and the Canadian Sport Center Atlantic. In 2015, he was the Chef de Mission of Team Nova Scotia at the Canada Winter Games.

As an athlete, Mark won 3 Pan American Games gold medals, 3 World Championships, 1 National Championship, 19 Provincial Championships, 3 State Championships, plus numerous individual awards.

As an international level coach, he has won two Pan Am gold medals and has had multiple podium finishes at the World Championships. In July of 2015 he led Canada’s women’s national team to a Pan American Games gold medal in Toronto.

Mark is the winningest coach in national teams history with 280 over international victories.

Mark is a member of the Nova Scotia Sport Heritage Hall of Fame, the Canadian Softball Hall of Fame, and the International Softball Congress Hall of Fame. He is married to former Olympian Ann Dodge and has a daughter Jasmine. Mark and his family reside in Falmouth, Nova Scotia.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

Facts Don't Change Our Minds. Friendship Does.

Convincing someone to change their mind is really the process of convincing them to change their tribe. If they abandon their beliefs, they run the risk of losing social ties. You can’t expect someone to change their mind if you take away their community too. You have to give them somewhere to go. Nobody wants their worldview torn apart if loneliness is the outcome.

The way to change people’s minds is to become friends with them, to integrate them into your tribe, to bring them into your circle. Now, they can change their beliefs without the risk of being abandoned socially.

The British philosopher Alain de Botton suggests that we simply share meals with those who disagree with us

Disclamer Si vous n'avez pas vu ma conférence sur la structuration du temps et la dynamique de groupe en analyse transactionnelle à l'échelle à Agile France et à la Xebicon (ou encore en meet-up) cette année, vous risquez d'être éventuellement perdus. J'ai déposé le support de cette présentation dans un précédent article. Cela vous permettra…

To build a portfolio of innovation projects you can't just reward successful projects. Its just as important to celebrate the failures as much as the wins.

The modern workplace disregards the fact that engineers feel best creating quality work, which often requires the right space and opportunities to think about the solution they're working on.

Many companies push for faster development cycles, impossibly tight deadlines and a management approach that treats people like they're easily replaceable parts. It's not an easy task to reverse this reality for your team, but this book is the blueprint you need.

Peopleware is divided into six parts:

Managing the Human Resource
The Office Environment
The Right People
Growing Productive Teams
Fertile Soil
It's Supposed to Be Fun to Work Here

The BetaCodex Network´s 14th white paper. Published February 2013. Revised and with three additional heroes added, in January 2015.

Over the past few weeks, I introduced you to a sense-making model developed by Dave Snowden. His Cynefin framework can serve as a map to give you some orientation in challenging situations of decis…