Middle Management — Endgame
On my way to destroy it, I have finally become what I hate the most. Welcome to middle management punks! The new blog for…. oh f*** this! No. This is the new challenge I’m facing, this is the chance to do it right. This is the chance to have somebody tell me in a year or two what a stupid middle manager I am and how to actually transform an organization to agile.
This is my first step into organization development and I love it. For sure, even in a small team like mine (about 20–25 people), it’s a complicated journey to transition everybody to this greatly advertised agile mindset or attitude or whatever. You already know our plans to become a teal-oriented organization, you already know what it’s like to work with many remote colleagues. But let me share some insights I could collect being part of this organization’s management team.
Framework the Reality!
It’s been two months since we formed as the new management team. We decided for the term management to not raise too much of a stink. Leadership team would have been my preferred choice but we’re still far from that. Thus, the m-word works for now. After we formed, we talked about how we’d work together as a team and how we’d report to our boss, i.e. what the price to pay would be to have as much autonomy as possible. I can tell you, we put a lot of post-its on our workshop whiteboard.
What was the outcome of this session? We came up with a lightweight process that would support us in taking care of our daily business as well as strategic decisions.
The basics
- Making decisions: always consent. If there’s no “no” the decision is made.
- Commitment: we commit on our decisions together. Always.
- Concerns: No need to proof concerns as long as they’d lever out a “safe enough to try” for one of us.
The process itself
Daily: we sync through our Slack channel for daily business asynchronously.
Weekly: we have a weekly tactical to define and review projects and to find next steps for them.
Weekly: there’s a weekly news update on Fridays, keeping our organization up-to-date asynchronously.
Monthly: we have a monthly assembly meeting to spread news & love & project status & achievements & to collect feedback. It happens remote but it happens regularly and with everybody.
Monthly: we have a monthly review with our boss to portray what has happened on product & organizational level in our team and to validate our product backlog prioritization. This is also the place to discuss longterm projects and have him consult us with difficult issues.
Monthly: after our review we do a retrospective to reflect on our month as a team. Lightweight structure with simple questions is the key to talk openly here. We answer questions such as “what did we solve as managers, what did we solve as leaders?” or “do we have any elephants between us?”
Quarterly: there are long term projects being a huge part of our backlog and carrying the most value. Therefore, we try to check if we’re still on track for the big picture at least quarterly.
Yearly: we’ll sense and respond for this. We visit all locations at least once a year and will probably also have a retreat for strategic topics. Speaking of these…
…ad hoc: oriented by Death by Meeting, strategic issues will always be addressed in ad hoc sessions, best case consulting experts from our team to solve the challenge.
Reality outweighs Framework!
Our first review and retro is done. We received great feedback on most of the things we did but also some bad feedback on which we need to focus more over the coming weeks. We already visited all locations and got feedback from all our team members as well. Independent of the framework we came up with to support our daily business, we found that there is one thing that’s a key to building a great organization. Presence.
Your organization won’t develop or change or whatever you want it to do, if you try to lead it behind closed doors. Be present in everybody’s daily business, talk to them about what they really care. Make sure you understand their needs to help them develop into great team members. Also, make sure that they understand the purpose of your organization and what they’ll have to do to contribute to this purpose.
Although there are plenty of things we have to work on in our management team and a lot more we need to work on within the complete organization, we haven’t lost focus yet. This said, it seems like our version one of our management team framework seems to work. It’s not the most innovative thing, it just uses some practices other people came up with. But it supports our reality and helps us cope with stuff we’re facing everyday. It’s not yet about leadership but about managing reality. I’ll keep you updated how it works out. Maybe it’s agile enough. At least for today.
