How do you react to bad news? Assess your management skills

Have a few minutes? Want to quickly assess your ability to react to bad news? Try this short exercise.

Context

Working for a large multi-national organization, you are the head of a 40 people software development team. Your team’s ability to deliver on their commitment continues to decrease despite implementing new measures to help boost productivity.

During a recent lunch meeting, you were informed that things on the floor are really bad by one of your external partner. In an attempt to help you, the partner offers to present some key findings about your team – their processes, their tools, their skills, their environment, etc.

In order to share the suggestions of your external partner with your team, you invite your direct reports (managers) to the presentation. It’s a sunny day outside and despite some technical glitches, the consultants begin the presentation by stating the objective of the meeting and inform you they intend to be very candid. After a few introductory slides, the real content of the presentation begins…

Slide 6

Lack of Team work No ownership of the project by the team members No shared commitment by the team members Team members not working with a common goal in mind Seperation of responsabilities leads to a silo work environment Consequences Lack of efficiency No sharing of knowledge Team members have no common focus

Slide 7

Lack of Technical Skills Testing (Unit, Functional, Acceptance) non existant No knowledge of Object Oriented Programming No knowledge of Web Development Skills Sound engineering practices absent No time for learning Consequences High and increasing number of bugs Quality is constantly low Maintenance costs are increasing Will have a negative impact on future projects

Slide 8

Difficult Work Environment Micro management and interference by management Lack of communications and transparency Maintain a culture of fear and blame Dictates the ways of working No time for learning Consequences Overall unpleasant work environment Team members want to quit the project Overall quality is suffering

How would you react?

Enter your answer below. I will publish the results shortly.

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