The 7 Two-Minute Habits That Make People Actually Want to Follow You

1) Active Listen Burst

Here’s the move: give someone 60 seconds of your full attention, then paraphrase what they said and ask one clarifying question. The moment someone starts speaking, resist the urge to formulate your response. Instead, just listen. Then say: “So what I’m hearing is ____. Did I miss anything?” This works because people trust leaders who make them feel truly seen — and it clears up confusion before solutions start flying around the room. Just watch out for one thing: don’t hijack the moment with your own story. Paraphrase first, then ask your question.

2) Values Compass

Before or after making a key decision, take a moment to name the value guiding your choice. It’s simple: “I’m choosing X because it best serves [fairness / ownership / customer care].” This habit works because when values are explicit, your team immediately understands the trade-offs you’re making. They might not always agree with the decision, but they’ll understand the why behind it. Pro tip: keep your organization’s core values in your notes and use the same vocabulary consistently so your team recognizes the pattern.

3) Openness Nudge

In the final two minutes of every meeting, create space for dissent and missing perspectives. Simply ask: “What haven’t I heard yet — especially if you disagree with me?” This is how you build psychological safety — it doesn’t happen by accident. You have to actively pull the truth out of the room. If everyone stays quiet, try a 30-second silent vote: “Type your concerns in the chat now.” This removes the social pressure and gives people a safer way to speak up. The uncomfortable truths you uncover here will save you from bigger problems later.

4) No-Blame Language

During reviews or post-mortems, shift the conversation from “who’s at fault” to “what system failed.” Ask: “What part of the system or process produced this outcome?” This reframing is powerful because shame kills learning, while systems thinking scales it. When people aren’t afraid of being blamed, they’ll be honest about what actually happened — and that’s where real improvement begins. Make sure to close the loop by assigning one owner and setting a deadline for fixing the system issue you’ve identified.

5) Compass Check (Fair? Clear? Kind?)

Before you hit send on any tough message, run it through three quick filters: Is it fair? Is it clear? Is it kind? If you can’t say yes to all three, go back and fix one line. This is emotional quality control that takes less than a minute but saves hours of cleanup later. It reduces drama, increases alignment, and helps you communicate difficult things in ways that maintain trust. The discipline of pausing before sending is what separates reactive leaders from respected ones.

6) One-Line Intent

At the start of every meeting, state your goal in one clear sentence: “Goal: decide/align on ____.” That’s it. This simple habit works because people relax when they know what “done” looks like. It eliminates the wandering discussions where everyone leaves confused about what actually happened. Put this goal at the top of your agenda and read it out loud in the first 30 seconds. It sets the tone and gives everyone permission to redirect the conversation if things go off track.

7) Decision Note (What/Who/When)

Right after any decision, log it in one sentence: “Decision: ____. Owner: ____. By: ____.” This creates transparency and accountability while saving everyone from those frustrating moments three weeks later when no one remembers what was actually decided. Future-you won’t have to dig through five different chat threads trying to reconstruct the conversation. \

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Why Most Agile Teams Build Features Instead of Value and How To Flip the Script

For a long time, I believed that the number of features we shipped was a sign of a healthy product team. New capabilities meant progress. More releases meant momentum. A packed roadmap meant ambition. And during sprint reviews, when we showcased everything we had delivered, I felt proud as if quantity itself was proof of impact.

But something always nagged me. After each launch, I would look at the data or talk to users and feel this uncomfortable tension between what we had built and what had actually changed. The features were there, polished, documented, deployed but the world around them stayed strangely still. The metric didn’t move. The user behavior didn’t shift. We were launching features into the void, and the void was yawning back.

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Start The Year With a Clean Backlog - Mike Cohn

Think outside the box.
Do you hate that phrase as much as I do?
It’s become another overused business cliché, and it bothers me for another reason: Creativity often comes from thinking inside the box.
This is especially true in agile story-writing workshops.

The difference between a successful story-writing workshop and one that fails to deliver often comes down to a single factor:
Whether or not the product owner defines a clear, significant objective: a “box” within which the team can think.
Workshops without boundaries often roam across the entire product. Teams may generate a long list of user stories but those stories lack cohesion or purpose. They’re hard to prioritize, and even harder to act on.

The most productive workshops start with a simple framing statement from the product owner, like:

“We’re here to think about this specific subset of the product.”
That’s it. One well-chosen boundary and suddenly the team is aligned, focused, and generating better, more valuable ideas.
Early in the product’s life, that boundary might be about identifying what’s needed to deliver an MVP.
Later on, it might center around a Minimum Marketable Feature (MMF), something small enough to ship but valuable enough to matter.

When workshops are focused around a meaningful objective, you don’t need to hold them every sprint. I typically run them about once a quarter because one well-run session generates a steady flow of high-value stories.
As this year closes and a new one begins, it’s a great time to schedule a story-writing session. You might even want to bring our trainers in for a Story-Writing Workshop, where we’ll work with you to:

• Set powerful, objective-based boundaries
• Write stories that are right-sized and ready to build
• Build a focused backlog that everyone can align around

Discover how to kick off the new year with a backlog that’s ready to go.
Whether you hold your own story-writing workshop or bring us in to help, remember that thinking inside the box is a powerful way to take teams from good to great,

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