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A Lightweight Performance Review Template for Monthly Discussions In my series of newsletters on preparing for your performance review, I mentioned a template you can use when talking with your manager during your one-on-one meetings (1:1s). A colleague and I have also mentioned this template in our talks on performance...

Phrases to Say to Demotivate Your Teams There is this one phrase that can quickly demotivate people. I’ve seen a number of executives use this phrase in several conversations I’ve had. It doesn’t matter whether I’m an engineer, a manager, or a director. Neither does location matter – I’ve heard...

Slicing Your Hiring Dinosaur to Pieces Many companies have gone Agile over the years, undergoing transformations and seeing their teams deliver quicker (hopefully). Organizations seem to lust after delivery teams going faster. And yet as an organization, we hamper them in other ways, such as hiring. Let me illustrate this...

Your Ineffective Job Descriptions are So Last Century I’ve been skimming over the Silicon Valley job descriptions for the past few months. And practically all the job postings look the same, with the trite conventional wordings that have been in use for the last 20 to 30 years. They contain...

PLAYING WITH DASH Apologies, I have not been posting anything the past few weeks. I’ve been hit with a double whammy. One is that I’ve been attending with several engaging webinars and MeetUps. The other is that I’ve had to debug my website. One of the plugin updates caused some...

Do you know what you’re doing? Do you know what you’re doing? You might be thinking right now, “What kind of question is that? Is JF off his rocker? Of course, I know what I’m doing.”  Let me explain my question by using the following exercise analogy. You might start...