No one enjoys conflict in the workplace, least of all the managers who have to deal with it. And the best way to deal with it is to minimize bad conflict through prevention. “50% of employees say they accomplish less when dealing with an office related conflict, and 46% say they have thought about quitting.”… »
If your company’s still scaling, there’s a good chance you’ve read Scaling Up, by Verne Harnish, and you are interested in mastering the Rockefeller habits. More than 40,000 business leaders have reportedly relied on it to grow their businesses, and with good reason. This book is one of this century’s most important for startups, CEOs and… »
If there’s one thing we’ve learned about managing teams, it’s this: For an entire team to succeed, the productivity and happiness of every individual matters. A lot. In fact, when it comes to reaching goals, many managers will tell you that an effective one-on-one meeting is far more important than daily status updates and water cooler conversations.… »
The best one-on-one meetings are those that are 90% focused on the employee. The best way for any manager to focus on the employee is to actively listen. And the best way to be an active listener is to get good at asking great questions. For some people, asking good questions comes naturally. For the… »
You know how to hold a one on one meeting? Rackspace. The senior manager of software development at Rackspace regularly blocks off time to sit down with each member of his team and see how things are going. So do managers at Dropbox, LinkedIn and Atlassian. So does Ben Horowitz. You know which companies have experienced… »
At Jell, we’re focused on reducing the need for unnecessary meetings while making fewer meetings more successful. Which begs the question: How much time did you waste in meetings over the past year? Since we wanted to know the answer ourselves, we built a nifty, free app: meeting calculator Our Meeting Calculator connects to your… »
The saying “quality over quantity” holds true in many facets of life—so why not use this mindset to plan productive meetings? If you read our last post on the psychology of routine meetings, you know the difference between meetings that make teams more efficient and ones that aren’t truly essential. In this post, we’ll look… »
If you view weekly status updates or daily check-ins as a necessary cost of managing a team, this is the post for you. If you regularly multitask or tune out during meetings, this post is for you, too. And if you routinely attend or schedule meetings because you’re afraid of missing out on important details,… »
For generations, employees have endured a peculiar workplace tradition. They spend hours a day deleting, filing, forwarding and searching a form of communication called email. Endless chains are created as people seek to solve problems, get answers, showcase accomplishments, demonstrate progress and keep everyone in the loop. Now Slack is poised to kill these age-old… »
Have you ever wondered where daily scrum standups started? Or why yours are starting to feel more like mindless meetings than productivity-boosters? In this post you’ll get a short history of the daily standup trend—and how to make standups more effective for your team. Today’s standups can be traced back to World War I. Military… »