To lead and manage teams effectively the My Org App has leveraged the top principles and action items that came from the most trusted resources. The list below has the details on this book and all the key principles and actions that came from this book to make the app.
Resource Details:
Title: Management 3.0: Leading Agile Developers, Developing Agile Leaders.
From Amazon: In many organizations, management is the biggest obstacle to successful Agile development. Unfortunately, reliable guidance on Agile management has been scarce indeed. Now, leading Agile manager Jurgen Appelo fills that gap, introducing a realistic approach to leading, managing, and growing your Agile team or organization.
Principles summarized
You must treat delegation of authority as an investment [Rothman, Derby 2005:97]. It takes a while to get a return on your investment, and until that time delegation will just cost you time, energy, money, and possibly some frustration. Taking work back to do it yourself before workers are able to do that work without your supervision is like taking your money out of the bank before being paid interest.
89% of the new hire failures are due to lousy attitude, not skills (only remaining 11% are due to bad skills). 87% people consider quitting and in 93% of the case overall productivity drops when co-workers have lousy attitude. Tolerating bad attitude destroys your leadership effectiveness and credibility
Money is great, but few organizations can continually (and legally) offer the kind of money that really makes a difference. What they can offer is all the other stuff that gets and keeps people engaged - feeling excited and motivated.
Between you and team members four types of trust and mutual respect need to be in place. Or else self-organization might not work as intended. (1) trust or respect your team, (2) earn trust and respect of / from the team, (3) team members trust in / respect each other, (4) trust / respect yourself)
There are three kinds of purpose in living systems (and yes, organizations belong to the group of living systems [De Geus 1997]): Every living system (including genes, organisms, people, and organizations) has an intrinsic purpose.Every living system can have an extrinsic purpose assigned to it by an 'owner' or 'guardian.'Every living system can have an autonomous purpose assumed by itself.
An organization is an emergent phenomenon. It is the result of the interaction between shareholders, managers, employees, customers, and suppliers. All these stakeholders have their own individual goals, but none of them can claim that their goals are also those of the entire emergent system... And though shareholders can assign extrinsic purpose to anything they own, they can assign that purpose only to the assets of their organization. They cannot assign that same purpose to employees because they do not own the employees. Shareholders are not herding sheep.
Why is the manager allowed to assign an extrinsic purpose to an entire software project team? Because he is the only one who is responsible for the whole system. None of the other stakeholders are.
We should use a term “goal” only in the case of an extrinsic or autonomous purpose, and the term “meaning” only when talking about an intrinsic purpose. My goal as a living being can change regularly, depending on whatever happens in my environment; but the meaning of my life is rather static. (So far, the answer has always been 42.)
Delegation of control is a manager’s way of controlling complex systems. According to the Conant Ashby Theorem, every good regulator of a system must have a model of that system. But with complex systems the available information for a controller is either too complex to comprehend or not enough to construct a proper model of it.
Between you and team members four types of trust and mutual respect need to be in place. Or else self-organization might not work as intended. (1) trust or respect your team, (2) earn trust and respect of / from the team, (3) team members trust in / respect each other, (4) trust / respect yourself)
Team is a group of people so strongly linked that the whole is more than the sum of the parts. The productivity of such a group is greater than what the same people can do in unjelled form
You cannot predict the behavior of a team by analyzing individual team members separately. Since team"s personality is an emerging quality
An organization is an emergent phenomenon. It is the result of the interaction between shareholders, managers, employees, customers, and suppliers. All these stakeholders have their own individual goals, but none of them can claim that their goals are also those of the entire emergent system. The manager is the only one who is responsible for the whole system. None of the other stakeholders are.
If managers or leaders care about organizational survival, they need to care about innovation. When they care about innovation, they need to care about creativity. When they care about creativity, they need to care about intrinsic motivation. It’s almost like a Natural Law.
Prefering people with different educations, experiences, technical skills, people skills, viewpoints, skin colors, ages, genders, personalities helps to enforce stability, flexibility, resilience, and innovation in projects... Creative solutions that people come up with are largely dependent on their backgrounds. This means that diversity in a team can significantly enhance a team’s creative powers.
Guides leveraged
When something bad happens after you delegate a task to a worker, do not take (back) responsibility for the task. Instead, take responsibility for the way you’ve delegated it.
Your manager should not expect you to know every detail of what’s going on with the people you’re managing, and he should not expect you to make every decision yourself. Again, tell your manager why you’ve delegated the work and decision making, and show him the checklist.
When your manager tells you to take control over a situation, it is almost never intended as an instruction to do all the work yourself. You are simply expected to prove that you can lead a group of people in delivering quality results. Your manager doesn’t care how things get done. He cares about results.
Software developers and other IT professionals want to see in managers people who understand their job and what it is they are trying to accomplish.
disrespectful, condescending, and rude behavior for people is the single most expensive damage that you, as a manager, can inflict upon your organization. The goal of respecting people is not to make them happy. The goal is to increase productivity, creativity, and innovation. Happiness is a by-product and a welcome side-effect.
As a good manager, you must know how people think about you. You have no choice. You have to find out what parts of your behavior you need to change. And you probably won’t know unless you ask people. It’s really simple. All you have to do is ask the following questions: (1) What is it that I should stop doing? (2) What is it that I should start doing? (3) What is it that I should continue doing?
You create motivational debt by being bossy, because people don’t want to be told what to do. They want to be asked. Here is why: When people have not agreed to do something, you don’t have their commitment. And when you don’t have their commitment, you have a motivational problem on your hands.
When an empowered team walks into your office and asks you to decide on an issue, find a way to have them solve the problem themselves. Never betray your trust in employee by making decisions for him, and cirtainly not behind his back
Trust must be earned. And you can earn it by always delivering on your promises... When I tell someone that I will get back to her about some problem, I will get back to her to talk about the problem. When I promise to email a document, I will send that document. And when I tell someone that he has full responsibility for a job, I will refrain from interfering and mind my own business, until my input is explicitly requested.
But trust also suffers when people are either predictably unpleasant (someone always doing precisely the things you don’t want him to do) or unpredictably pleasant (someone doing the things you want only when you least expect it). Make sure that your behavior as a manager is predictably pleasant, and I’m sure you will have no trouble earning trust from your people
Focus on communication and commitment between team members. First, you make sure that communication among team members is improved by increasing the bandwidth and quality of their communication. Example, Daily (stand-up) meetings, colocation, pair programming, team dinners, and brainstorm sessions. Second, you see to it that commitment for activities in the team is being negotiated and respected. People new to Agile software development may need a little help in this area. Assist individual team members in doing what they promised to do so that their fellow team members can trust them. When it turns out they cannot keep their commitment, help them in communicating this early and honestly.
You must beleive in yourself and stay true to your own reason and common sense, even when others disagree. You should only change your mind when new insights have convinced you, not when other people have pressured you to reconsider. Doing something you don't believe in is an act against the trust in yourself
The leader is best when people are hardly aware of his existence [...]. When his work is done, his aim fulfilled, the people say, ‘We did it ourselves.’ (Laozi)
Push decisions and responsibilities down to a level where someone has information that is smaller in size and more accurate. For better overall control of a complex system, most of the decisions should be made in the subsystems (Conan Ashbey Theorem)
There are 3 types of purposes in living systems (and yes, organizations belong to the group of living systems [De Geus 1997]): (1) Every living system (including genes, organisms, people, and organizations) has an intrinsic purpose. (2) Every living system can have an extrinsic purpose assigned to it by an “owner” or “guardian.” (3) Every living system can have an autonomous purpose assumed by itself.
Define an extrinsic goal for your team that transcends the goals of all individuals, including your own. Make sure everyone understands the goal. Check regularly with team members to see if they use the goal in their everyday decision making.
Ask your team what its autonomous goal is. If the team doesn’t have one, don’t tell it to define one. Just let the team wonder about your question.
Compare your extrinsic goal with the autonomous goal of the team. Can the two goals lead to conflicts? Discuss with the team how any conflicts will be resolved.
If managers or leaders care about organizational survival, they need to care about innovation. When they care about innovation, they need to care about creativity. When they care about creativity, they need to care about intrinsic motivation. It’s almost like a Natural Law.
A position that is widely accepted in recent writing is that creativity is based on intrinsic motivation—the wish to carry out an activity for the sake of the activity itself, and not in the hope of obtaining external rewards. Extrinsic motivation can inhibit creativity or even be fatal to it [Runco, Pritzker 1999:521].