Better management with less managers

We are all familiar with managing teams, which did not live up to their potential. We believed, that they are not motivated and they did not really engage in what we wanted to achieve. They do not contributing in service and product delivery. We need better management.

Usually such a conflict between team and product managers occur, when the managers thought, that the requirements were very clear, but the team did fail to deliver event the easiest of those features. Since we start to understand that Agile & Scrum has to do more with a mindset than with a process, our natural reaction to this is: “They do not have the right mindset”.

“Most organizational change question have the same form: ‘How can we change other people’?

We get better, happier organization by changing ourselves instead of others. When people don’t focus on improving themselves, is it any wonder they’re always complaining about each other?

Management 3.0

One of the members at one of my customers did mention exactly that. They were looking for ways on changing another mindset. But we can’t change another mindset. We can only change our own.

The natural reaction, if we are facing this challenge, is to create more rules and spend more time by defining in more detail, what we would expect from the delivery. We believe, that the more we define, the more we can help the team to understand. In a world of uncertainty, though, this is not true. The weird truth in such a case? The exact opposite.

The World of Uncertainty

In a world of uncertainty, we do no have all the answers and sometimes understand the cause and the effect of specific situations only in retrospect. If we do not know, what we would need, how can we define it specifically in all clarity?

The consequence is, that in the end the deliveries are actually getting worse. So, we add more manage ment, add more managers and wonder, why the deliveries are failing.

A better option is to create safe-to-fail environments, which give the team the opportunity to learn. We learn the most, when we create experiments and when the success-failure rate is at 50-50. If we are not sure, what the outcome is, then learning is the most.

Self-organised teams as a system

Management 3.0 promotes the idea of system thinking. If we understand, what the frame of such a system looks like, we can establish guidelines for team members to follow these guidelines. This will lead to a system, in which the team has the opportunity to grow by themselves. Only if we create the frame or the system, in which this is possible the team feels engaged and motivated.

Meet us at one of our Management 3.0 trainings and learn and see, how such as system might look like for your organisation.