The Humanizing Work Show

Developing effective leadership skills can be challenging. It's difficult to even describe what makes a leader effective, let alone create a practical plan to improve your own leadership capabilities. In this episode, Peter & Richard introduce their favorite leadership development tool: The Leadership Circle. This model provides language to identify behaviors that limit a leader's effectivenes...

In this episode, Richard and Peter interview world-class mountain bike coach Lee McCormack. If you’re a coach or leader of any kind—or if you just care about your own growth and development—this episode is packed with advice and inspiration. Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/lee-mccormack-interview/ Connect with Humanizing Work: https://twitter.com/HumanizingWork https://twitter.com/rsl...

In this episode, Richard and Peter talk about sprint goals. When are they useful? What might you do instead? Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/sprint-goal/ Connect with Humanizing Work: https://twitter.com/HumanizingWork https://twitter.com/rslawrence/ https://twitter.com/tptman/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/humanizingwork https://www.facebook.com/HumanizingWork

In this episode, Richard and Peter answer a question that’s essentially: “Most of the standard Product Ownership advice doesn’t seem to apply to my situation. Am I just doing Product Ownership wrong?” They discuss two modes of Product Ownership—visionary and facilitating—and when each one is the right approach. Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/visionary-vs-facilitating-product-ownershi...

Complex problems, whether in product development or organizational change require an experimental approach. In this episode, Richard and Peter answer a question about how to design good experiments (or probes, to use the Cynefin term). Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/designing-good-experiments/ Connect with Humanizing Work: https://twitter.com/HumanizingWork https://twitter.com/rslawr...

In this episode, Peter and Richard sit down with Melissa Boggs to talk about the unique challenges senior leaders face in Agile orgs and how that led us to create our 2019 senior leader retreat. Melissa talks about her experience as a participant at the 2019 event, and the trio shares their vision for the 2023 retreat, now that Melissa has joined Richard and Peter as a co-facilitator. Episode page...

In this episode, Peter tell the story of a time where his own reactive tendencies limited his effectiveness—in a big way—in an interaction with his CEO. Richard interviews Peter about what he learned from the experience, how he’d handle it now, and what advice he has for other leaders in challenging situations. Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/peter-apologizes-to-the-ceo/ Connect with...

In this episode, Richard and Peter share their favorite tool for figuring out what to do in a frustrating situation where you don’t have the power to just fix it, including a few real examples. Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/own-influence-respond-episode/ Connect with Humanizing Work: https://twitter.com/HumanizingWork https://twitter.com/rslawrence/ https://twitter.com/tptman/ https...

In this episode, Richard and Peter look at how customer research tools are useful in all kinds of contexts beyond product development. Got a relationship with a stakeholder at work that you’d like to improve? Learn how you can use customer research tools to better understand that stakeholder’s needs and how you and your team can help solve them. Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/theyre-...

How do you assess the health of a team? You could conduct surveys and interviews of team members and stakeholders. You could look at the results the team produces. You could watch them work for a week or two. Or, as Peter & Richard explain in this Humanizing Work Show episode, you could just observe a team’s Daily Scrum (aka Daily Standup) and learn 80% of what you need to know about health of...

In this episode, Richard and Peter answer the question: “Our team is adopting Scrum, how does my role (as a developer) change?” Obviously, you’ll be doing Scrum now and you weren’t before, but beyond the obvious, there are three big ways you can expect your work to change. Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/developer-in-scrum/ Connect with Humanizing Work: https://twitter.com/HumanizingW...

In this episode, Richard and Peter answer the question: “How much should we standardize across our organization? Is it important that our sprint lengths match, that we estimate the same way, that we use the same tools, that we report the same metrics, etc.?” Obviously, standardizing everything isn’t going to work, but neither will standardizing nothing. So, where do you draw the line? Episode page...

In this episode, Richard answers the question: “What should I focus on as a new Product Owner?” Being a Scrum Product Owner is a big job, and it’s easy to get overwhelmed, so Richard breaks down what’s most important to focus on in the early days and in what sequence. Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/new-product-owner-focus/ Connect with Humanizing Work: https://twitter.com/HumanizingW...

In this episode, Richard and Peter answer the question: “What should I focus on as a new ScrumMaster?” They explain why focusing on making your team do Scrum well is tempting but a dead end and what you should focus on instead. Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/new-scrummaster-focus/ Connect with Humanizing Work: https://twitter.com/HumanizingWork https://twitter.com/rslawrence/ https:/...

Why does Zappos celebrate wildly inefficient customer service calls? Why did FAVI brick up the window that allowed managers to see what was happening on the factory floor? Culture signals. In this episode, Richard and Peter explain how culture signals work and how leaders can design their own culture signals to create the changes they want to see. Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/cultu...

In this episode, Richard and Peter answer the question: “I get the basic definitions of the Scrum roles. In the real world, though, what do these roles look like when they’re done well?” Hear their take on what it means to be a great ScrumMaster, Product Owner, or Scrum developer, beyond the “by the book” Scrum Guide answers. Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/scrum-roles-in-the-real-wor...

In this episode, Richard and Peter answer the question: “What are your thoughts on including managers in retrospectives?” Even if a manger wants to be helpful, the answer is complicated… Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/managers-in-retros/ Connect with Humanizing Work: https://twitter.com/HumanizingWork https://twitter.com/rslawrence/ https://twitter.com/tptman/ https://www.linkedin.co...

In this episode, Richard answers the question: “Our team is trying to use Scrum, but we get a lot of interruptions, a lot of work that pops up mid-sprint. How do we handle that kind of thing well?” He explains how to borrow a couple of concepts from Kanban to accommodate emergent work on a Scrum team in a healthy way. Episode page:  https://www.humanizingwork.com/dealing-with-interruptions-on-a-sc...

Just saying “you’re empowered” doesn’t make it happen. In this episode, Peter and Richard offer a more nuanced way to think about empowerment and a structured path to increase the level of empowerment for your employees and teams. Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/path-to-empowerment/ Connect with Humanizing Work: https://twitter.com/HumanizingWork https://twitter.com/rslawrence/ https:...

In this episode, Richard and Peter share an agenda you can use for a Sprint Review meeting—or for any meeting where you want to share and get feedback on complex, meaningful work-in-progress. Too many Sprint Reviews are a demo with no useful feedback or a deep dive into the weeds on problem-solving. The best review meetings combine a deliberate demo with a well-structured feedback session. Learn h...

Feature Mining is a technique for figuring out where to start on a big, complex idea. Following up on a Feature Mining webinar on February 6, 2023, in this episode, Richard and Peter answer questions from the webinar and from other workshops on the topic of Feature Mining. If you’re not familiar with the Feature Mining technique, don’t worry, there’s a short intro to it before the Q&A. Episode...

In the previous episode of the show, Peter and Richard mentioned the importance of team coaching to increase your chances of a healthy, successful team. In this episode, they look at the seven skills all great coaches master. Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/seven-skills-all-great-coaches-master/ Connect with Humanizing Work: https://twitter.com/HumanizingWork https://twitter.com/rslaw...

The health of teams has a direct impact on organizational results as well as on individuals’ happiness in their work. In this episode, Richard and Peter outline the 6 conditions that researchers J Richard Hackman and Ruth Wegeman have discovered are critical for a team to be healthy and effective. They also cover what you can do to contribute to those conditions, whether you’re a leader or a junio...

People often assume prioritization—whether for a Scrum product backlog or a personal todo list—is an analytical problem best solved with value calculations and spreadsheets. But it turns out that great product people tend to use intuition, gut feel, rather than analysis to prioritize. In this episode, Peter and Richard introduce a set of heuristics gathered from the best product people that you ca...

The Sprint Retrospective is perhaps the most important event in Scrum. In this episode, Richard and Peter share their two favorite ways to make the Sprint Retrospective meeting way more effective. If your team’s retros have become boring, repetitive, or just a waste of time, these two key moves will bring them back to life. Episode page: https://humanizingwork.com/better-sprint-retrospectives-epis...