Last year, my colleague Esther Derby interviewed me about leading requirements workshops for an Amplifying Your Effectiveness (AYE) Conference Podcast.

Esther probed me about my favorite questions to ask workshop participants.

Robert, a project manager, told me he uses the weekly project status meeting as a bully pulpit to shame any member of the team who didn't satisfy their task deadlines. I've seen him in action -- his face becomes grotesque as he verbally assaults his teammates.

I believe it's wrong for Rob or anyone else to attempt to shame another person. But it's also wrong for a teammate NOT to satisfy a task deadline.

Is it shameful not to meet a deadline?

Project Managers from ABC and XYZ, which are located on the opposite side of the same street, differ in how they report project status: The PMs from ABC are forthright with their sponsors, and the PMs from XYZ are evasive.

Why do the PMs at ABC and XYZ have opposite approaches to reporting status?

When faced with a problem, I suggest considering three strategies:

• Coping
• Managing
• Solving

You and Jeff are members of a project team. You've know Jeff for years. You like and respect him. He is new to the team. In what looks to you like an effort to prove his value to the other members of the team he has taken on too many tasks. He isn't completing his high-priority tasks on schedule. And he keeps taking on new tasks.

What do you do?

I am fortunate to have worked on a team led by Anne Cawley early in my career. Experience working with her enabled me to know, rather than speculate, about the power of an effective manager.

What elements of her management style made her effective?

"Communication is to personal health, satisfactory interpersonal relationships, and productivity as breathing is to life. Effective communication can be both taught and learned. We were not born with the way we communicate. We learned it, mostly through modeling, in ways no one even knew or intended."

--Virginia Satir (family therapy pioneer)

There are different types of meetings. Each type requires a different structures and supports a different number of participants. For instance, a status (feedforward) meeting has no limit to the number of participants while a decision-making meeting produces results faster with a small number of participants.

If you want to help your teams have more effective meetings, set the participants expectations about the meeting by stating in the agenda --

• the purpose of the meeting.
• the type of meeting

If you want to be a more effective communicator, keep your conversations focused on these three elements --

HERE

NOW

US

Several of my friends who work for the same large organization tell me they are bored with their job. I hear about them waiting for management to complete the process of setting a new direction for the organization.

What opportunities are available to employees when management is in the process of setting a new direction?

One week before the application you have been working on is to be delivered, your client asks you to make a small change to a drop down menu. He knows there isn't time to process the change through change management so asks you to bypass it. You try to reason with him that a last minute change is a bad idea. But he insists the change is important to the business and it would mean a lot to him personally. You want to please him so you say yes.

Do you have a pattern of saying yes to requests when you would like to say no? What's the secret to saying no and making it stick?

What element of a project retrospective, in your experience, separates the average retrospective from the outstanding? For today, I would answer, "A visual history of the project created by the participants during the retrospective."

What does a visual project history look like? Why is it a key element to an outstanding retrospective?

All of us have experience with projects.

In my experience, complex project never work exactly as planned.

What is the first thing about a project that must be adapted when things aren't working as planned?

You have heard of the fog of war. But have you heard of a BOGSAT -- Big Official Group Sitting Around Talking? It's a disease that infects organizations.

Let me share with you a story about a BOGSAT intervention.

Ban whining. It's destructive communication inside organizations.

Why is whining destructive? How can a whiny complaint be transformed into a constructive, actionable proposal?

All work requires energy. Middle-managers who divert all energy to new actions fall into a common trap: They fail to reenergize existing actions, which may kill the success of new actions.

Middle management success depends on fueling both new and existing actions. How can appreciative feedback help you discover existing, effective actions and preserve them?

My first post on rewarding employees explored the importance of providing a reward that is meaningful to the recipient. My second post explored the purpose of rewards, the timing of rewards, and my thoughts about rewarding all the members of a team rather than a few individual members of the team.

In this final post on rewards, I explore answers to the following questions: Do rewards work? Are they manipulative?

In my first entry on employee rewards, I emphasized the importance of knowing the recipient well enough to reward them with something that is meaningful to them.

But there is more to effective reward programs than providing a meaningful award. Let's take a step back and explore answers to the questions: What is the purpose of a reward program? How can we innovate to make reward programs more effective?

I surveyed ten of my colleagues from different high-tech companies about the state of employee rewards programs at their company. One colleague told me about the outstanding reward programs where he works. The other nine colleagues told me something much different. Their feedback is easily summarized as follows: "Our reward programs are pathetic!"

What's the difference in the thinking by managers at the company with the effective reward program and the managers at the companies with the pathetic reward programs?

What vital element of business communication is the most forgotten?