Management 3.0: definition and purposes-EN

Agility has gone mainstream. People everywhere (even outside the IT bubble) are talking about agility – business agility, enterprise agility, digital agility… I could go on. However, no matter what adjective precedes the term agility, we believe that it can’t be achieved without an agile mindset.

Individual agile mindsets can be powerful but if organizational leadership doesn’t embrace and promote a similar way of thinking and conducting business, the path to agility will likely not be attainable.

One tool that we find invaluable for agile leadership is Management 3.0.

What is Management 3.0?

Management 3.0 is “a mindset, combined with an ever-changing collection of games, tools, and practices to help any worker manage the organization.”

It is a way of seeing and understanding organizations from a systemic perspective based on change management and aspects such as delegation, commitment, motivation, communication, and new forms of working in an organization proposed by the philosophy of Agile.

Why Management 3.0?

Management 3.0 training promotes participation and constant reflection on the ways in which teams and change are managed in organizations. During the 2-day class (or optional 3-day class that includes an application workshop), we address the following aspects:

Energize Your People

People are the most important part of an organization. Leadership and management must make keeping their people active, creative, and motivated a priority.

We often expect that change will just happen. We assume that people come to work motivated to do their jobs; that the challenges they face and objectives they need to achieve are enough for people to be committed an organization. But is this enough? Consider:

• How can we manage teams of people to be more motivated and committed to the objectives and purpose of the organization?
• What kind of tools can we use to understand what motivates or drives the people who are part of our teams?

Empower Your Teams

Agile methodologies put the focus on concepts such as “self-organizing teams”. It is not a particularly novel approach, but it involves a series of challenges that are not always well resolved.

According to Management 3.0, having self-organized teams (teams that are capable of taking on new responsibilities, are more proactive, and assume leadership in achieving shared goals) requires the important tasks of empowerment and trust. Consider:

• Do we know how to empower our teams?
• How do we manage delegation in our teams?
• Do we have strategies to coach people in their maturity towards a progressive assumption of greater responsibilities?

Align Team Values and Culture

As a commercial years ago said: “power without control is useless.” Self-organization without well-defined objectives and a common purpose that is incorporated and accepted by people can lead to less than desirable results.

As part of your transformation strategy, consider:

• Do we understand how to form and mature a team?
• What tools can we use to help define a shared vision?

You know the values ​​of your organization, but consider:

• How are they lived and embraced by the people in our organization?
• What kind of organizational culture are we cultivating with the way our teams perform?

Develop Skills and Competencies

Following the Management 3.0 mindset, teams cannot achieve their goals if team members do not have the appropriate competencies. Consider:

• How can we design a system that favors the development of individual and team competencies?
• What tools can we use to help our people visualize their level of competency?
• What learning paths exist for our people’s growth?
• How do the competencies we need relate to the current and future needs of the company?

Scale Your Organization

Almost all of our teams operate in highly complex contexts. Complex environments require us to behave as an ambidextrous organization. That is, the ability to continue perfecting and promoting what we know how to do, but also to explore new limits, new markets, and new options to deliver value. Consider: 

• Do we know how to deal with complexity? 
• Does our organizational architecture favor communication and power distribution that facilitates intelligent decision making? 
• Do we have an environment or do we know how to configure an environment in which experimentation is promoted without punishing for mistakes?
• Are we applying ourselves to maximize learning capacity through agile experimentation with our organization’s products or services?

Instill a Continuous Improvement Mindset

People, teams, and organizations must incorporate the principle of continuous improvement proposed by Management 3.0 in their mindset. This is not a new concept, but the current environment and the new ways of working require us to embrace a great competitive advantage: to have an organization oriented towards continuous improvement. Consider:

• How are we configuring our work environments to facilitate continuous improvement?
• Do we have events, rituals, and tools that allow us to carry out continuous improvement, celebrate the improvements, share the knowledge resulting from these improvements, etc.?

How to get Management 3.0

After considering these questions, does your organization have a mindset that promotes the path to agility? As Management 3.0 facilitators, we can help you answer “Yes” to all these questions by developing sustainable solutions to meet your agility goals.

Take a look at the full Management 3.0 course outline and please let us know how we can help!

– Juan Luis