How To Be A Better Leader – Management 3.0

Agile Mckenna Consultants

In August, myself and my brother and fellow McKenna Consultants director Nick McKenna, travelled to Stockholm to attend a two day Management 3.0 training course.

We had both read books around this and wanted to find out more, with the aim of becoming Management 3.0 Licensed Facilitators (which I am pleased to say that we did!). We work with a number of clients who we have successfully helped to implement many agile methodologies from the team level (Scrum, Kanban, Lean etc) to running and scaling the entire software development process (SAFe is a popular framework for many of our scaling clients), yet may of the leaders, managers and executives are left wanting more, asking us how they can “be more agile” in their day to day and ultimately become a more effective, better manager of people.

This is where Management 3.0 comes in. After reading some of the work by Jurgen Appelo, including Management 3.0 and How To Change the World), we had an appetite for more and felt that this could be something that our clients could truly benefit from.

So what is Management 3.0?

Management 3.0 is a modern approach to managing people, blending together ideas from complexity thinking, change management and agile methodologies to give leaders, managers and executives a practical toolkit of knowledge and techniques to enable them to become more effective leaders and managers.

The focus of the course is around the following main topics:

  • Energize People
  • Empower Teams
  • Align Constraints
  • Develop Competence
  • Grow Structure
  • Improve Everything

And within each of these topics is not only the why, but gives you some practical tools, techniques and activities to allow you to explore these concepts with your teams, colleagues and organisations. Some of my favourite tools from the course were:

  • Moving Motivators – A great tool to encourage discussions around what are the intrinsic motivators of individuals. Believe me – this tells you a great deal about yourself and your team!
  • Kudo Box – Everyone loves to get praise, whether it is a well done, high 5 or a slice of cake. This is a cool way to make it easy for people to say thanks to each other.
  • Delegation Poker – Not all decisions have to be made by the managers and leaders. This game is a great way to collaboratively agree on how the responsibility of decision making can be shared, and also, which decisions cannot be shared.
movingmotivators

We have already used these at McKenna Consultants, and we are using them with our agile clients right now!


Since the course, we have started to experiment with some of these tools and way of thinking to great effect. So much so that we have decided to run the two day Management 3.0 training course in Leeds, UK (the only one in England outside of London) on Thursday 24th and Friday 25th November 2016. For a quick summary of Management 3.0, here is Jurgen himself presenting these topics at a recent TED Talk.

In summary, the trip to Sweden was well worth the effort and we are excited to contribute to Management 3.0 community and help our agile clients become better leaders!

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