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Culture makes language, then language makes culture. When you arrive at your destination but your bags don’t, the baggage handler shapes the context by asking “Did you lose your luggage?” This presupposition may have been originated by the airlines and taught quite intentionally in the handler’s training, but by now it’s completely unconscious. You [...]

Busy management is bad management. To engage others, you have to be available, and availability is cited by new managers as one of the three most important characteristics in a mentor. The other two characteristics are setting high standards, and orchestrating developmental experiences, both of which also require a lot of engaging. Irrelevant managers keep [...]

You cannot possibly prohibit blaming one hundred percent. People blame when their self-esteem is low, and there’s no way you can ensure that self-esteem is always high for everybody in the organization. However, managers can create conditions in which blaming cannot thrive, even should it spout.
The key to a non-blaming organization is openness. Like the [...]

Placating occurs when self-esteem is low. Raising self-esteem - through management style, training, and affirming feedback - can help to block placating, but in itself cannot prevent it. For instance, IS customers often have high self-esteem, but not in the context of computers. Feeling technically incompetent, they must humble themselves to the sole source of [...]

In the nineteenth century, heroin was put into use as a cure for morphine addiction. It was successful at ending morphine addiction so long as heroin was available because heroin was more powerful. Of course, the morphine addiction then became a heroin addiction, which wasn’t much progress. This replacement dynamic is being repeated in the [...]

To understand my style and intent when I am not being congruent, others must be skilled technologists of human behaviour. If I want to make others’ jobs easier, I too have to master the same technology and apply it to the job of becoming more congruent.
The technology of human behaviour is many times more complex [...]

A major task of the software engineering manager is to help people in the organization develop their social skills, not just because the workplace is better when people are polite, but because social skills influence more and more the effectiveness of technical skills. Teaching social skills is an investment in problem resolution, but even more [...]

In contrast to the Management by Selection Model (which says programmers, analysts, testers, writers, or whoever are born, not made, and that technical people can be ranked on a one-dimensional scale), the Management by Systematic Improvement Model is based on multi-dimensional thinking:

People differ in many dimensions that can affect performance
Programmers, analysts, testers, writers, or [...]

In software development, things can happen at a slow rate and often need unsticking, as when one blocking fault stops progress on an entire project for a month. In software maintenance, things happen at a fast rate and often need something to get them moving again, as when a customer is screaming on the phone [...]

The four dimensions of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator are significant in the workplace because they describe four elements that determine much of a person’s working style.
For each dimension of the MBTI model, there is a pair of letters to choose from:

Internal or External, according to how I prefer to get energy
Sensing or iNtuitive, according to [...]

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