The Taps Model: A tool to explore cognitive overload

I’ve come up with a tool that my team and I have used to explore the pressure exerted on leaders by their many responsibilities, important tasks and interests. We call it The Taps Model and in this post I explain what it is and how to use it.

Was our self-organising interview team experiment a success?

When faced with dysfunction in our interviewing process we decided to improve things by creating a self-organising team. But did it work?

Redgate’s Fantastic Beasts (and how we improve them)

At Redgate we’ve found that development teams with clear purpose, self-direction and freedom to act were the most engaged and delivered amazing results. To shape all our teams to have these qualities we identified six key principles and unleashed our Fantastic Beasts!

Tackling issues with the magic of Theory Y

How we tackled issues in our interview scheduling process with Theory Y and a self-organising team.

Leaders, take care of yourselves

Leadership roles can be tough. Whether you are principle engineer on a piece of work, leading a development team, taking responsibility for a functional area or heading-up an organisation, you are more often than not going to find yourself in challenging circumstances.

How do you scale leadership?

How do you increase leadership throughout an organisation? Imitating the behaviours of those thought to be high-achieving leaders may not be the right approach at all.

Team leadership lessons from football coaching

Some of my colleagues and I were lucky enough to spend some time with Ian Bateman, one of the Football Association’s youth coach educators and Head Coach of England’s partially-sighted Futsal squad. as an opportunity for us to learn about coaching and leadership from outside of the software development “bubble”.