Develop Agile Managers, or Agile Dies
We need good agile managers, if we hope to sustain rapid adaptation and innovation. Agile managers deliver coherent chunks of value, rapidly adapt to changing circumstances, and experiment with new approaches. Because they depend on their teams to support their own agile needs, they demand agility from their teams.
Management talent is rare, and agile management talent even rarer. Gallup has surveyed thousands of managers, finding that low-talent managers, unfortunately a majority, create dysfunctional teams, build unsupported products and produce little sustained value. So developing high-talent agile managers matters.
Agile managers adopt five agile base patterns for themselves: they measure economic progress, proactively experiment to improve, limit work-in-process by time and cost, radiate collective responsibility, and collaboratively solve systemic problems. It turns out these patterns have analogues in high-talent (non-agile) manager talents. That’s a relief, because we can focus agile manager development on extending the talents good managers already have.
In this workshop, we'll explore agile manager characteristics, and management dysfunctions. We'll create approaches to move good general managers to good agile managers. We'll explore strategies for dealing with mediocre managers, whether they are peers or superiors. And we'll learning how to improve our own management agility.
This talk comes from well-documented experience. I have held management roles from Team Lead through VP Engineering and CEO. At Citrix, Skype, Amway and other large companies, I used agile to help manage a 24-member user-experience department, three different agile coach teams and a 50-member data science department. Much of this work has been described in conference papers and detailed blog posts.
Outline/Structure of the Workshop
- High-Talent Managers
- What are the five characteristics of high-talent managers?
- Should we promote, develop or bench existing managers?
- Exercise:
- Assess managers we know (anonymously, of course).
- Categorize and brainstorm ideas for improvement
- Five Agile Base Patterns
- Are you, your team, your manager, and your organization "are sustainably agile"?
- Exercise(at a table):
- Self-assess for individual agility
- Brainstorm ways to improve individual agility
- Strategy Scrum Teams
- Can we apply Scrum to common management projects?
- Why should managers be doing anything other than impediment removal and fighting fires?
- How can we help them?
- Change the Organization
- Kotter Organizational Change Model
- Exercise (at a table):
- Pick a particular situation, and construct a plan to improve manager agility
Learning Outcome
Attendees will learn to
- identify high-talent, teachable and low-talent managers, using Gallup High-Talent Manager research, and understand how to develop and achieve success for them and the organization
- assess the agility of individuals, teams, managers and organizations, using Agile Base Patterns
- assess our own agility and construct a game-plan to improve ourselves
- introduce Strategy Scrum into management projects, to improve success and sustainability
- change organizations using the Kotter Organizational Change model, specifically in this area of agile manager development
Target Audience
Individual contributors, managers and servant leaders who want to promote sustainable agility
Video
Links
Article: Develop Agile Managers, or Agile Dies (with many links from that article)
schedule Submitted 7 years ago
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