What is an actionable leader? To us at 3Back, an actionable leader is someone who:
- Redefines the definition of leadership with management as a group responsibility.
- Works together to find the most efficient way for a business to achieve its goals.
- Maintains the happiness of the Team as a priority.
We believe actionable leadership requires acquiring high-priority skills to increase employee engagement, improve team collaboration and embrace change.
How do you acquire those high-priority skills?
Find out about our newest class,
Management 3.0.
So, just what are those skills?
1. Agile Management
Agile management is a proven approach to leadership and governance of creative teams and people. Understanding different methods, popular practices, challenges in Agile adoption around the world, and the contribution of the manager and team leader in Agile organizations is key to becoming an actionable leader.
2. Complexity Thinking
As the cornerstone of an Agile mindset, mastering how to think in terms of systems, about the difference between complex and complicated, about fallacies of traditional linear thinking, and suggestions for complexity thinking drive actionable leadership.
3. Intrinsic Motivation
Since people are the most important part of an organization, managers must do all they can to keep people active, creative, and motivated. Recognizing the difference between extrinsic motivation vs. intrinsic motivation, the ten intrinsic desires, and common techniques for understanding what is important to the people in your teams, set you apart as an actionable leader.
4. Self-organization
Self-organization requires employee empowerment, authorization, and trust from management. Assessing how to make self-organization work, how to distribute authorization in an organization, the challenges of empowerment, how to grow relationships of trust, and how to distribute control define successful self-organization.
5. Goal Setting
It’s necessary to protect people and shared resources and to give people a clear purpose and defined goals. Knowing when to manage and when to lead, how to use different criteria to create useful goals, the challenges around management by objectives, and how to protect people and shared resources from any bad effects of self-organization are critical.
6. Competence Development
Teams are only able to achieve their goals if Team Members are capable enough, and managers must, therefore, contribute to the development of competence. Comprehending when to apply competence development, how to measure progress in a complex system, and the effect of sub-optimization set the stage for results.
7. Organizational Structures
Many Teams operate within the context of a complex organization, and thus it is important to consider structures that enhance communication. Growing an organizational structure as a fractal, how to balance specialization and generalization, how to choose between functional and cross-functional teams, informal leadership and widening job titles, and treating teams as value units in a value network, provide a strong foundation.
8. Change Management
People, teams, and organizations need to improve continuously, to defer failure for as long as possible. In practice, this means that managers and leaders must act as change agents, trying to change the complex social systems around them. Successful change management addresses the system, the individuals, the interactions, and the boundary of the system.
That’s quite a list. If only there were an interactive, experiential class that used proactive leadership games and exercises to teach these skills.
There is. It’s called Management 3.0, and we’re excited to offer it to you. Our 3-day course delivers a hands-on learning experience with in-class experiments developed to challenge the way you think, better understand why people do what they do, and prepare you to make an immediate, positive change in your organization.
Find a Management 3.0 course near you.
As Always, Stay Agile.