Management 3.0 Practices Finder

As a means of reinforcing and remixing what I learned about at a Management 3.0 Fundamentals course, I put together this Management 3.0 Practices Finder. It is my hope that this page will be helpful to anyone who would like to explore, and potentially try, one or more of the Management 3.0 Practices.

For anyone who is either completely unfamiliar with or would like a brief refresher on Management 3.0, see the remainder of this blog post.

Note: The Management 3.0 Practices Finder builds upon another recent experiment, the Liberating Structures Finder, which is based on a similar information sharing model.

Management 3.0 Overview

One way to describe Management 3.0 is to articulate how it differs in terms of mindset, in comparison with more traditional views of management that preceded it:

• Management 1.0. Management as practiced through most of the twentieth century (and which is still common in many workplaces), often manifested via a command-and-control mindset. Much of Management 1.0 is related based on concepts dating back to the Industrial Revolution (sometimes referred to as “Taylorism” — named after the creator of Scientific Management, Frederick Winslow Taylor). Among the many challenges associated with Management 1.0 is that it signals that managers do not trust their subordinates, it is often manifested as micro-management, and if focuses on metrics such as “utilization.”
• Management 3.0. The need for an approach to management that is better suited to “knowledge work” (such as software development) has led to explorations that have taken management in a different direction. Rather than relying on abstract theories that have long been popular in business schools, Management 3.0 favors articulation of a basic set of principles and practices that can readily be acted upon to address particular business contexts. Most importantly, Management 3.0 makes the happiness of workers the priority.

Behavioral Differences

Here are a couple of examples of how Management 1.0 behaviors differ from Management 3.0 behaviors:

Information Hoarding vs Information Sharing

• Management 1.0: Maintain ownership of information
• Management 3.0: Openly share information

Managing Teams vs Mentoring Teams

• Management 1.0: Tell teams how to solve a particular problem
• Management 3.0: Encourage team members to work together to solve a problem

Let’s Start by Changing Ourselves

What it really boils down is this: Traditional management principles have tended to focus on trying to change others. With Management 3.0, we start first with changing ourselves, and closely examine how we work with those around us.

To quote from the Management 3.0 website:

You don’t want theories and soft management science, you want hands-on approaches that can become solutions for increasing employee engagement and improving results. You want to build a future. You want the right skills and you want them now.

Management 3.0 seeks to achieve a set of outcomes that are desirable in any organizational context, for example:

• How can we effectively understand how we’re doing, at an organizational level, a team level, and an individual level?
• What are some alternatives to traditional performance appraisals, and how do we correlate that set of principles/practices with how we reward our employees?
• What are the most effective ways to motivate our teams?
• What aspects of our organizational culture tend to impede the delivery of desirable outcomes?

Management 3.0 Principles

Principle #1 Engaging people and their interactions

• Get people involved in the work
• Get people involved in interacting with each other

Principle #2 Improve the system

• A Management 3.0 practice should improve the system
• The system is not just one team, everyone interacting with the team is part of the system
• We should try to improve the whole system and not just one part of the system.

Principle #3 Help to delight all clients

• Clients are not just our external customers, we consider everyone involved in the system a client.
• We should try to delight all clients, not just stakeholders or just our co-workers.

Principle #4 Manage the system, not the people

• While recognizing that it is hard to change behaviors, when we change the environment, people adapt their behavior to fit into the new environment
• By changing the environment, people are enabled to make their own choices that fit within that environment; management is about nurturing the garden

Principle #5 Co-create work

• Co-workers create things together
• Co-creating is also about giving feedback to each other; that is, co-create behaviors