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Tools

63

Use Blind Auditions to Reduce Hiring Bias

While these steps may seem new to you and unlike how you’ve hired in the past, that’s exactly the point. Hiring is perhaps the most critical activity of any business because who you choose will in turn make critical choices for the business itself–don’t let this important of a decision be derailed by your unconscious biases.

Use Quadrants for Better Time Management

While you will likely always have to spend at least part of your day doing things you less-than-love, getting clear on how you’re spending your time will help you work with more intention, and have a bigger pay off at the end of each week.

How to Hack an Existing Business Model

The instant a new business model is implemented, it begins to become obsolete. Organizations should take a systematic approach to identifying, developing, and testing new business models long before their existing streams of revenue are threatened by upstarts.

Decide as a Team Using Square’s SPADE Model

Your team should use a decision making framework that feels right for you, but the most important thing is that you codify how decisions get made and what roles people play in important decisions.

How to Use Storytelling in Your Presentations to Sell Better

Use our template of Freytag’s Pyramid to start to map your presentation to the framework. Remember, the more you can involve your audience in the story you’re telling, the more likely they’ll want to support your efforts.

Turn Your Status Meetings into More Effective Action Meetings

By making simple changes to your status meetings, you can exchange information faster and move on to doing real work, rather than getting stuck in a conference room for half a morning.

How to Define Your Vision, Values, Purpose and Mission Statement

Clearly defining your Purpose, Vision, Mission, Values, and Measures will help your team understand what you’re trying to achieve. Aside from motivation, this will enable them to make decisions independently, rather than referring to the chain of command. It will also help your organization track whether or not it’s achieving its goals.

The Definitive Guide to Agile Retrospectives and Post Mortem Meetings

The process of a Retrospective itself is less important than simply developing a habit across the enterprise to look back, reflect, and make needed changes to work better, together. Just start with one Retrospective and note how it affects future work.

How to Decide What Work to Outsource

Not only will team members feel happier about focusing on work they’re good at, but this process will also free up time to tackle more ambitious challenges.

Share Your Story to Quickly Foster Empathy

How your team approaches this exercise will tell you a great deal about their willingness to work as a team. Each team is different, and there is no “right” way to respond, but your team’s response will demonstrate the amount of work ahead before the group of individuals is truly ready to operate as one team.

Solicit Candid Peer Feedback with an Anxiety Party

More and more companies are ditching annual performance reviews for mechanisms that provide faster, friendlier feedback focused on personal growth. If you’re interested in exploring alternatives, be sure to design the process in such a way that 1) feels right for your culture, and 2) is aimed at the direct problem you’re trying to solve for.

How to Run a Decision-Making Meeting

Making decisions puts a quick stop to endless conversation at meetings and gets people back to being productive.

How to Prioritize Features with a Conga Line

It’s not easy to decide to remove features, especially as team members may feel compelled to defend features that they developed. Get passed endless debates or fear of candor by getting everyone up and moving.

Use Google’s Structured Interviews to Improve Hiring

Whether you’re the interviewer or interviewee, too often, it feels like the interviewing process comes down to “would I want to have a beer with this person?” But research shows that structured interviews—using the same interview questions and techniques to evaluate job candidates—drastically reduces our biases when hiring.

Track Startups to Identify Emerging Customer Needs

Startups are the leading (and yes, sometimes “bleeding”) edge of innovation: they’re small bets on the future, or predictions about what customers will demand. Tracking these bets is an important part of consumer research and can help your team anticipate changing market conditions.

The Simplest Way to Break Down the Work Ahead

Setting goals as a team can be daunting, but using a simple template to break down the work will help the team achieve what they set out to do. Any goal or initiative can feel more attainable when the team can draft next steps in two day, two weeks, and two months.

Ask the “Five Whys” to Resolve Your Team’s Issues

In addition to better collaboration, this meeting sets the tone for honest and candid feedback, encouraging team members to voice what they need from one another.

Why Consensus Based Decision Making is Slowing Down Your Team

One of the reasons teams feel they’re “not moving fast enough” is because they’re not making decisions fast enough—instead, ideas and…

Use Culture Cards as a Team Building Exercise

Having honest conversations about how a team works together is never easy, but creating a space for these conversations will foster a culture of communication, helping team members feel heard from the start.

How to Define Roles and Responsibilities Using Trello

Roles are fluid: it’s entirely likely that over time each member will switch roles or add completely new ones. However, creating a roles and responsibilities board is a good starting point to identify what each person is working on, and can serve as a red flag if one member is overburdened on a weekly basis.