Leading for Self-organization: Dos and Don’ts of Agile Management Agile is something for teams, right? True, but teams don’t function in a vacuum. As a manager, you can set the stage and support teams who want to increase their agility. This presentation explores three topics that managers can work on to make teams succeed and increase the company’s agility: Leadership, Collaboration, and Culture. With agile, teams are supposed to make their own decisions on what to do and how to do. Managers should be delegating decisions to the team and trusting them to do the right thing. But letting go of control can be a scary thing. In this talk, I will explore leadership approaches suitable for teams and managers that want to become agile. I’ll show how teams can use the approaches to become empowered, and how managers use them to guide teams towards producing valuable results. To make agile work, people should feel psychologically safe to make decisions and try out things. It can be challenging to establish a culture that enables agile. Let’s explore what managers can do to create and nurture a culture that fosters experimentation, and what they can do to enable learning from failures and from things that go well. To sum it up, I’ll provide a list of these things that managers should consider doing if they want their teams to be successful, and things that may be harmful to teams that they could stop doing. Agile Business Day The Agile Business Day is the only Italian conference of international scope that covers the themes of agility at a business level, organizational, technical and humanistic. With speakers and thought leaders of international level, over 30 sessions in a day, video streaming, pre-conference workshops and extensive networking opportunities, Agile Business Day represents a unique opportunity for growth for companies and organizations both public and private for managers, professionals and anyone who wants to invest in individual and company growth.

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Leading for Self-organization:
Do’s and Don’ts of Agile Management
Agile Business Day 2020 - Online
Ben Linders

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Ben Linders Consulting
Trainer / Coach / Adviser / Author / Speaker
Agile, Lean, Quality & Continuous improvement
Freelance Editor for InfoQ.com
BenLinders.com
Books: Valuable Agile Retrospectives Problem? What Problem?
What Drives Quality Self-assessments Continuous Improvement
Games: Agile Self-assessment Game Retrospectives Bingo Impediments
Quality Coaching Cards Agile Testing Cards

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Ben Linders Consulting
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/management

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Ben Linders Consulting

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Agile Team
people working together to deliver value to the
users of products or services and stakeholders
• Self-organized
• Deliver value
• Collaborative
• Learn and adjust

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Teamworking
Purpose
Safety Autonomy

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Leadership Approaches & Styles
 Intent-based leadership
 Holacracy
 Sociocracy & Sociocracy 3.0
 Host leadership
 Servant leadership
 Management 3.0
 Humble Leadership
 Invitation Leadership
 Sense-and-respond Leadership
 Elastic Leadership Agile Leadership

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Agile Leadership
 Experiment
 Reflect
 Ask for feedback
 Coach people
 Be Coached
 Give trust

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Ben Linders Consulting
Why people hate working in teams
• unfair workload
• find it hard to work together
• depend too much on colleagues
• too much unclearness
• not getting credits you deserve
• work with people you dislike
• unclear roles or expectations
• unsure how what you contributes
• slowed down by colleagues

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Ben Linders Consulting
Why people hate working together
• unfair workload
• find it hard to work together
• depend too much on colleagues
• too much unclearness
• not getting credits you deserve
• work with people you dislike
• unclear roles or expectations
• unsure how what you contributes
• slowed down by colleagues

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Ben Linders Consulting
Why work in a team – WIFM?
 Get more done together
 Getting credit
 Give and get help
 Learn from each other
 Camaraderie, belonging
 Increased work satisfaction
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

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Benefits of Agile Teams
 No micromanagement
 Sustainable pace
 Limit outside interference
 Less unclearness
 Improved communication
 Better results
Making Agile Work for You

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Creating a Teamwork Culture
 Guide Self-organization
 Stimulate Collaboration
 Foster Modern Leadership
 Be an Example Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash

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Organizing for Teamwork
 Establish Stable Teams
 Embrace Diversity
 Short-cycled Improvement
Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash

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What if it doesn’t work?
• Reflect & discuss
• Speak up
• Team working skills
• Get team coaching
Agile Retrospectives

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Advice to managers
Dont call people resources!

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How to not manage agile teams
• Don't call people resources
• Don’t micromanage
• Don’t put pressure on teams
• Don’t be a jerk
When in doubt: don’t do it and see what happens

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How to do manage agile teams
• Listen
• Value collaboration
• Trust people
• Give them what they need
• Reward team results
• Drive out fear

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One last thing
Managers are people too!
Stop using the term “management”, “business”, or “them”.
Call them by their name, respect them in the same way as
you want to be respected.
Managers come to work to do their job the best they can,
just like you.

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Ben Linders Consulting
Thank you!Thank you!
Ben Linders
Trainer / Coach / Adviser / Author / Speaker
Agile, Lean, Quality & Continuous Improvement
info@BenLinders.cominfo@BenLinders.com
@BenLinders
www.linkedin.com/in/benlinderswww.linkedin.com/in/benlinders
www.facebook.com/BenLindersAdvieswww.facebook.com/BenLindersAdvies
www.benlinders.comwww.benlinders.com

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Background Information

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Assessing your Agility
Over 70 tools:
• Self-Assessment checklists
• Readyness checks
• Maturity assessments
• Agile health checks
• Measurements
• And much more!
Agile Self-Assessments

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Services for Agile Self-assessments
Services for assessing your agility and increase delivered value:
• In-house workshop for playing the Agile Self-assessment Game
• Public workshops to experience the Agile Self-assessment Game
• Agile assessment for your team, department, or organization
• Facilitation for playing the game at your event (conference, meetup,
hackathon, game lab, etc)
• Tailoring the Agile Self-assessment Game to your specific needs
• Licenses for playing the game
• …
Contact: benlinders@gmail.com +31 6 2901 3863

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Continuous Improvement
 Become aware of importance of continuous
improvement,
 Explore how it’s engrained in agile software
development
 Suggestions that you can use in your daily
work to improve continuously
Increase your organization's agility!
Leanpub.com/continuousimprovement
“Continuous Improvement is the act of continuously doing
whatever helps to become better and thus more valuable”