Challenge

Zan’s Challenge 10/6/15: Identify Your Strengths and Weaknesses

Zan Challenge

It’s time for another Zan’s Challenge! These challenges are still to help spur your thoughts, strengthen your skills, or open your mind to new possibilities in Agile.

Today’s Challenge: Identify your strengths and weaknesses

It’s important, when striving for personal and professional growth, to know your strengths and at least some weaknesses which you can work to address.  We’d all like to think we have no weaknesses, but that is never the case. We all have something we can work to be better at.

Here are some tips to identifying strengths and weaknesses:

  • A quick way to know how strong you are at something is to try to teach it to someone else. Your understanding will be tested in new and unique ways, and teachers often find they learn just as much as their students.
  • Another really simple way is to just do it, whatever ‘it’ may be. While you’re doing something, examine how you feel. If you’re happy with the activity, you’re more likely to be strong. If it is frustrating or disconcerting, that is a sign you may be weak in that area. This applies to lots of different activities.
  • Ask trusted colleagues for their honest opinions. Give your honest opinion in return. Sometimes people know you better than you know yourself, especially when it comes to weaknesses.

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 Challenges!

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Zan’s Challenge 9/21/15 – Push Your Boundaries

Zan Challenge

It’s time for another Zan’s Challenge! I’m doing away with the weekly format, and instead making new challenges every two weeks to fit closer to the most popular timebox for iterations, and to allow time to actually focus on one challenge before it changes. These challenges are still to help spur your thoughts, strengthen your skills, or open your mind to new possibilities in Agile.

The challenge: Push your boundaries.

It’s easy to live every day, doing the minimum of what needs to be done and never striving to improve. With Agile, however, we believe that constant tuning and adjusting are vital to remaining competitive, and that individuals should be motivated to create great projects. Some might say, “If you’re not getting better, you’re falling behind”. In that spirit, it’s important to push your boundaries and to be unsatisfied with maintaining the status quo.

So challenge yourself and your team to find new ways to become more efficient. It is not about working harder (unless you feel like you’re slacking off!). Find things that are slowing you down, and make efforts to rectify that. Eliminate wasteful processes and find ways to simplify your work. Set a personal growth goal, and strive to achieve that goal.

Most importantly: Don’t be satisfied with “Good Enough”. “Good Enough” does not exist when it comes to how we work. There is always something to be improved, somewhere.

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 Challenges!

pushboundaries