Teams – Leading Answers

March 28, 2024October 3, 2026Agile Project Management, Emotional Intelligence, Leadership, Teams, Warning Signs

People Problems: Dealing with Dark Triad Traits

Most of us will experience challenging and downright toxic people at some point in our careers. If you ever have, then you can probably see, in retrospect, how much those individuals differed from ordinary people. Yet, at the time, their impacts may have seemed so upsetting and jarring that it is quite common to question whether we had it wrong or contributed in some way toward the situation. So, having some strategies for dealing with these people can save your sanity and provide pathways through the issues while also protecting others. Fortunately, truly toxic people are few and far between. Most people we deal with are generally helpful or at least neutral. Occasionally, we encounter people with challenging personalities: people […]

August 9, 2023October 3, 2026Agile Project Management, Books, Planning, Tailoring Approaches, Teams, Visual Learning

Suitability Filters – Team Discussion Tools

Suitability filters are models that offer simplified views of a decision-making process. They help people identify and discuss the variables at play and make a recommendation. The British statistician George Box said it best “All models are wrong, but some models are useful.” A good model provides insights, usually a basic view of how something works or the interactions between variables. From this perspective, models are interesting and can speed up our comprehension of something. However, the greatest benefit of models is as a group alignment tool. Visual Models Create Group Consensus Much of today’s work is knowledge work. Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) contribute their expertise and collaborate to solve problems or build new products and services. This work […]

April 18, 2023September 27, 2025Events, Personal Agility, Teams, Travel

Agile Open Canada

I am excited to be attending Agile Open Canada in Banff this May. If you are free May 29 and 30, please come and join us! It is a great Open Space unconference that brings people together to share their latest ideas, challenges, lessons learned, and experiments around agile approaches. Hosted at the Banff Park Lodge and only $130 CDN for two days of events with food, drinks and optional activities. Why not stay a day or two longer? Late May / early June is a great time to visit Banff National Park. I hope to see you there. Full details here.

August 6, 2022September 27, 2025Books, Emotional Intelligence, Leadership, Teams

Extending Servant Leadership with Host Leadership

This article talks about adding tools to the servant leader toolkit. However, let’s start by examining what servant leadership already contains. Servant leadership was popularized by Robert Greenleaf and described as a mindset and set of practices. It flips the power pyramid, so instead of the team working to serve the leader, the leader supports the team. Servant leadership is a mindset and value system which recognizes that the team members deliver the project benefits. So, the best thing a scrum master or project manager can do is serve the team and help them succeed. This maximizes the amount of value they can produce and increases the capabilities and capacity of the group. Scrum masters and project managers […]

June 22, 2022October 3, 2026Agile Project Management, Books, Emotional Intelligence, Leadership, Tailoring Approaches, Teams

From Servant Leadership to Shared Leadership

This is part one in a series on leading agile teams from the Beyond Agile book. We will examine what leadership entails and how it applies to agile teams. Then discuss the transition from servant leadership to shared leadership. EQ as a Foundation for Leadership As we saw in the previous articles about Emotional Intelligence (EQ), leadership is built on top of EQ. We need good EQ to be able to recognize and manage our own emotions. This is a prerequisite for others to consider us credible and worth listening to. So, a firm grasp of EQ, either gained intuitively or improved through study/training, brings us to the starting line with engaged stakeholders. Then leadership involves bringing this collective […]

June 11, 2022October 3, 2026Books, Emotional Intelligence, Teams

The Evolution of Leadership

Thanks to Improving for inviting me to speak at the recent Improving Edge Summit. It was a great conference dedicated to leadership this year. A topic near and dear to my heart and the focus of my Leading Answers blog. My talk was on the Evolution of Leadership and featured ideas from my Beyond Agile book about how organizations are moving from Agile’s empowered-teams/Green/values-driven leadership model to Organic/plural/Teal/shared and host-leadership models. The session was recorded and I will make it available here at www.LeadingAnswers.com when it is available. We had some great attendee suggestions for the true role of leadership and explored how agile’s servant leadership can be augmented with newer shared and host-leadership approaches. We mapped agile transformations to […]

March 9, 2022October 3, 2026Agile Project Management, Books, Emotional Intelligence, Teams

Emotional Intelligence for Scrum Masters, Team Leads and Project Managers – #3

<This is post 3 in a multi-post series about EI and leadership taken from my book Beyond Agile. Check out Post 1 and Post 2 first if you have not seen them. In this article, we will dive into personal growth and the power of discovering the space between stimulus and response.> EI’s origins – Mayer and Salovey Four-Branch Model The precursor to Goleman’s EQ and Bar-On’s EQ-i models was created by John Mayer and Peter Salovey, who published their research in 1990. The Mayer and Salovey model extends the maturing idea we looked at in post #2 and adds layers of sophistication. It is called the Four-Branch model because it describes four branches of emotional skills, going down the […]

March 2, 2022October 3, 2026Agile Project Management, Books, Emotional Intelligence, Leadership, Teams

Emotional Intelligence for Scrum Masters, Team Leads and Project Managers – #2

This is post #2 in a multi-post series about EI and leadership taken from my book Beyond Agile. Check out Post #1 first, if you have not seen it already. In this article, we will explore what EI is and why it’s often such a tricky topic to define due to the proliferation of different models with similar-sounding components. EI – Better Results by Becoming More Effective Let us start the EI exploration journey with a process we are all familiar with, growing up and becoming independent adults. Stephen Covey talks about a progression of maturity and effectiveness that people go through as they get older. We start as children, dependent on our parents for food, shelter, and support […]

February 27, 2022October 3, 2026Agile Project Management, Books, Personal Agility, Teams

Emotional Intelligence for Scrum Masters, Team Leads and Project Managers – #1

I am long overdue for posting to LeadingAnswers.com. I have been busy finishing the content and games over at PMillustrated.com. While explaining project management through cartoon animals is fun, I wanted to post some meatier content here. This is the first in a multi-post series about emotional intelligence (EI) as the foundation for team leadership. The material comes from my Beyond Agile book and explains why a firm basis of EI is critical to becoming an effective Scrum Master, team lead, or project manager. This first post introduces EI and explains its significance. Leadership and EI work together to create cohesive, cooperative teams. The two approaches support each other and enable organizations and team leaders to build teams that overcome […]

October 21, 2021Agile Project Management, Books, Leadership, Personal Agility, Tailoring Approaches, Teams

Beyond Agile Gratitude #1 – Weaving People and Process

Now that my Beyond Agile book has been published, I would like to thank some people who helped shape its content and ideas. Alistair Cockburn and Joshua Kerievsky helped me appreciate the balance between people-focussed activities and effective processes. “…Agile approaches combine a mixture and equal balance of people and process approaches to delivery. One way to picture these interwoven elements is like the twin strands of DNA. In figure 4.1, we see a blue thread of people elements such as empowerment, collaboration, and team decision-making, mixed with gold process elements such as backlogs, prioritization, and short iterations. If you have not noticed it before, agile approaches weave people elements and process elements together through the agile mindset, values, and […]