It’s time for the next “Zan’s Weekly Challenge”! Weekly, I will pose a challenge to help spur your thoughts, strengthen your skills or open your mind to new possibilities on your Agile journey.  While I have no way of following up with most of you regarding these challenges, I welcome you to post your feedback as a comment, send me a tweet @zandterman, or any other way you see fit.

This week’s challenge: Be honest with others and with yourself.

Being honest is a fundamental part of Agile. If you are not being honest, there is absolutely no way to improve yourself, or to help others improve, whether they be teammates, co-workers, managers or friends. While it may be easier to try to spare someone’s feelings (or your own!) by being dishonest, it doesn’t address the problem and can harm you in the long run when the truth comes out. Some tips:

• Use simple, direct language. Don’t try to skirt the issue, or assume someone knows what you’re talking about unless you say it.
• While it is important to be honest about your feelings and opinions, remember the difference between feelings, opinions and facts.
• Being honest is not a license to be a jerk. It is possible to hold compassion while still telling someone a truth they may not want to hear. Unless you’re already a jerk. Then you should honestly try being less of a jerk (we can all probably try that).

Good luck with this challenge. Please let me know your results, what you think of this challenge, and if you have any ideas for future Zan’s Weekly Challenges!

A little note: For those interested in when my “Back to Basics” series will continue, I had honestly planned that I would have continued them last week and would have still kept going and been near completion by this point, but we all know what can happen to plans. That being said, I do plan to continue the series this week, but I’m not going to put an upper limit on completion for the whole series. I may also interject other posts in the middle prior to finishing if the value is there (or the mood strikes). If you have any questions, feedback or words of encouragement, please feel free to contact me!