Leadership and Agility with Brandi Olson

The Experimental Leader

It was great talking to Brandi Olson. I enjoyed our conversation.

And as I was thinking about it, I was thinking about a couple of things that are part of my leadership toolkit with people.

One is I often recommend that leaders end meetings when they're done. Set aside one meeting every couple of weeks with your team. Where you check in and do all the warmth and things that need to be done, but don't be afraid to schedule short meetings and get off after five minutes or 15 minutes if that's time to get the work done. So that you don't end up being in a cycle where because you scheduled an hour, you have to stay on for an hour. Be efficient in your meetings and see what needs to be done. And then don't be afraid to say, "I feel like we're done. Can we move on now?" That's not rude. You don't have to sit through a long meeting. It's okay to finish and recoup your time back.

The other thing is, how many things you can work on at once. It made me think of the Kanban process, and Kanban sort of limits you. A Kanban board can make work visible.

I talked about it in my book. But there's a Japanese efficiency tool to make work visible. And they often constrain you to have a column for work in progress. They limit you to having only three things in progress. So I think you need more than one. And I think you may need more than two because, for example, if you're reaching out to someone to get the information, you're waiting on them. So you might be in the waiting mode for a project. So it would help if you so had that you're working on the project, but you're not actively working on it. But you certainly don't need 20 because if you're working on 20 things, you're not working on anything to move it forward and get throughput or completion with the project.

So Trello Atlassian, this project product is a Kanban board. There are some free other free Kanban boards out there. There's we used Kanban flow for a long time. So there's just a variety of Kanban boards that you can use if you want to. And it can be a handy tool.

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