It’s January, and people are setting goals and New Year’s resolutions. But how do you pick the right ones? It can be overwhelming, and you can end up picking no goal at all or just picking ones that are easy to define. In this episode, Richard and Peter share a simple process using the Theory of Constraints to find just the right personal and work goals for 2024.

Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/set-the-right-goals/

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In this episode, Richard and Peter give actionable advice for how to get unstuck when your team’s retrospectives produce lots of good ideas for change but never seem to lead to actual changes getting implemented. They share an agenda for a special retrospective you can do to address that exact challenge.

Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/inspecting-without-adapting/

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Richard and Peter introduced the concept of culture signals in episode 71. But because of the examples in that episode, many people got the misconception that culture signals were only for CEOs. Not at all!

In this episode they share 7 inspirational examples of mid-level managers, team leads, and individual contributors creating effective culture signals, and they review how you can do the same in your environment.

Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/culture-signals-for-everyone/

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Most leadership teams adopt their style by accident and end up with wasteful meetings and unnecessarily noise and conflict. In this episode, Peter and Richard share an approach for figuring out the right kind of leadership team style for you based on your context. They describe the tools that fit each style and when your team might shift from one to another, drawing lessons from great music groups and sports teams.

Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/finding-the-right-style-for-your-leadership-team/

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Are you looking at your task list today and dreading it a bit? In this replay from the October 2023 Humanizing Work Meetup session, Richard and Peter share three recent situations when they were feeling a little burned out, and what they did to fix it. They walk through a process to think and communicate about Purpose and Vision at the micro level. That process took them less than five minutes in their examples, and energized them to make their work meaningful that day. Learn how you can do the same thing to tackle the day with energy, even when the tasks aren't something you're looking forward to.

Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/overcoming-burnout-daily-purpose-and-vision/

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Coaches usually focus on skills like facilitation, team formation, and conflict resolution. In this episode, Peter and Richard argue that none of those things matter if a team doesn’t get product ownership right, so coaches need to be fluent in product skills and able to coach their clients to get better in that area. Included in our conversation:

Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/how-coaches-benefit-from-po-skills/

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In this episode, Richard and Peter talk about the business case for getting better at product backlog refinement. What’s the financial and human cost of bad backlogs? Way more than most people realize. Here’s why it matters and what to do about it.

Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/biz-case-for-better-backlogs/

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In this episode, Richard and Peter answer a listener question about whether an Agile approach can work with a customer-funded project model or whether you have to change your funding approach to work in an Agile way. They address the implications of Agile for things like funding, why project funding works for some orgs, and how to change things like funding in an Agile way.

Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/agile-and-project-funding/

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In this special episode, Peter and Richard have a conversation with a long-time listener, client, and community member about how their thinking on Scrum has (and hasn’t) changed over the years.

Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/thinking-on-scrum-changed/

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These days, every leader seems to want empowered individuals and teams. But how do you actually get real empowerment? Just saying, “You’re empowered!” doesn’t seem to work reliably. In this Humanizing Work Community Meetup session, we explored a step-by-step path to increasing an individual or team’s empowerment in a particular area of responsibility. We walk through how to use this approach on two real examples, a COO that wants to empower their team to make M&A decisions, and a Product Leader that wants to empower developers to own decisions around a big change to the pricing model.

Episode page: https://www.humanizingwork.com/meetup-replay-a-path-to-real-empowerment/

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