Hi Chak,

These are great questions. George has pointed you to some great resources from Esther Derby on self organizing teams, Esther is an authority in this space so I recommend you start there.

Let's talk about the manager value proposition for a moment.

Jack Welch, CEO of GE would regularly assign Vice Presidents to various plants and facilities to make improvements. He was very clear about one thing with all of them - make yourself redundant. If you are still doing the same job in two years I will fire you. He saw management's role as system's thinkers who could go in, analyze the system, find the urgent things that needed fixing and work within the organization to fix them. This philosophy fed the growth of Six Sigma in GE, because it gave a toolset that could be used across plants/products/markets by managers to analyze a manufacturing system, find issues and make improvements.

I view a manager's most effective role as someone who is continually looking for opportunities to improve the system in which people work so that it is more effective for the manager, their co-workers, and the customer. Just as the teams should continually learn about the tools and business domain to deliver a quality product, an effective manager will also be reaching for ideas/tools that make them more effective in improving the system. In this again we see GE's leadership. GE setup GE University with tough courses that challenged managers with new ideas (like Six Sigma). They were expected to apply these ideas in their organizations. Most of us aren't lucky enough to have a corporate learning agenda, so it is up to us to find our own ways to learn and apply that knowledge.

In the past 17 years, GE has increased its market value from $12 billion to some $280 billion. For all that time of stupendous enrichment, the management training centre at Croton-on-Hudson (known as Crotonville) has been central to the company's vaunted management system. The three-week development course for high-fliers is so important in GE's scheme of things that CEO Jack Welch (who is even more vaunted than the system) goes to Crotonville every month to teach its 700-odd students.

http://www.thinkingmanagers.com/management/management-training.php

When we watch the Olympics or a master artist perform on stage it is amazing to see what they have accomplished. Athletes often put their lives and careers on hold to perfect that one skill, usually with little reward other than the satisfaction of the process of training and improving. Even if they set a world record, how long will it stand before someone else breaks it?

What is the perfect company? Can we make one? Think of all the moving parts required to deliver a non-trivial software product to market. What would the perfect company look like to its customers, its employees, shareholders? If we take the customer as the first stakeholder, then I am sure they would have opinions on what the perfect company would be. Applying Lean thinking to the process from a customer request to request fulfilled gives us a long list of work we need to do to become better at what we do. Asking the same question of the people who work there will also provide a long list of things we can improve. These are not trivial things on the surface, but core issues that impact the activity of work. Consider the athlete. If you thought of yourself as a coach, and everyone who reported to you as athletes looking to experience the satisfaction of the process of training and improving, how would that change your perspective? How would it change theirs? How do we measure our improvement?

The specific steps you take to become a great manager are the same things one would do to be good at anything, learn, practice, reflect on the improvements, what is working, what isn't, repeat. Lean, Scrum, XP, are all inspirational sources of learning about what works. None of these methods are comprehensive, so the learning never really stops. :) I just took Luke Hohmann's course on Innovation Games. Luke has built some very useful tools for collaboration on product vision and process. These are complementary to Agile ideas, teamwork collaboration. However they are not specific to Agile, for example they are regularly used by a company that manufactures airconditioning (HVAC) systems.

cheers,
Robin.

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Robin Dymond, CST
Managing Partner, Innovel, LLC.
www.innovel.net
www.scrumtraining.com
(804) 239-4329