Free Range Management E-Book

Andreas Creten

• Herausgeber: WS
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 137

Beschreibung

The new way of work and management

Leading a team has never been more difficult — or easy. With Free Range Management, you can create an environment where people are truly happy and free to do their best work. Whether you are a first time manager or want to improve the culture of an existing team, look no further.

In this concise manual, Steve Tauber and Andreas Creten have detailed the processes, structure, and approach needed to lead and manage knowledge workers. Inside, you’ll find concrete advice needed to revolutionize your organization from the inside.

Each chapter is laid out smartly with detailed advice, key takeaways, and the recommended first, pragmatic steps in your journey. Welcome to the new way of work and management.

Leseprobe

Contents

Title Page

About the Authors

Dedication

Copyright

Introduction

Assess Outcomes

Outcomes Versus Output

Autonomy

DO

Embrace Feedback

Structured Feedback

Planned Feedback

Unplanned Feedback

Changing Behavior

DO

Encourage Psychological Safety

High Performance and More

Measuring Psychological Safety

Influencing the Atmosphere

Imposter Syndrome

Readme

DO

Define Clear Tasks

Big Picture

Double Diamond

Betting

Roadmap and Passports

Data-Informed Prioritization

Chunk and Split

DO

Create Focus

Focus Time

Focus Strategies

Defending the Team

Remote Focus

DO

Support Collaboration

Async Versus Synchronous Work

Meeting Management

Liberating Structures

Communicating Asynchronously

Distributed Collaboration

Cultures

Mentoring

Delegation

Schedule Flexibility

DO

Monitor Healthy Habits

Recharging

Burnout

Motivation

DO

Become Knowledge-First

Definition

Transparency

Reflex to Document

Organizing Information

Creative Time

DO

Build the Team

Hire Fast

Metrics to Hire

The Hiring Process

Free Range Worker

Diversity, Inclusion, & Equity

The Hiring Process Continued

Onboarding

Fire Slow

DO

Afterword

Bibliography

About the authors

Steve Tauber and Andreas Creten have been leading teams remotely for over 25 years.

As a firefighting CTO and lead due diligence auditor, Steve Tauber knows what makes startups succeed or fail. He joins companies to help them through troubling times as they reshape and prepare for the future. In his free time, Steve enjoys reading and writing sci-fi, playing and designing tabletop board games, and spending time with his amazing wife and family. Originally from the US, he now lives in Croatia.

Andreas Creten is CEO and founder of madewithlove, a remote-first company from Belgium building digital products since 2008 with love, a lot of it. He focuses on helping product companies set up for success by pivoting the organization: to be user-centered, to help employees flourish, and to leverage technology in the best way to optimize for usability, quality, and speed. In his free time, you can find Andreas woodworking or spending time with his wife and three children.

For anyone who worked at madewithlove.

You have shown us the way to Free Range Management.

Copyright © 2022 madewithlove

All rights reserved.

Illustrations: Tinne Cornellisen

Print ISBN 9789464664737

eBook ISBN 9789464775952

Introduction

Free Range Management can be summed up in two words: create space. The trick is doing that in a way where employees and managers are happy. What follows is a practical guide to managing knowledge workers, structuring teams, and shaping the work so that an organization can find success.

Although the vast majority of our experience is in software, computing, and IT, knowledge work exists across many disciplines and roles. If you are paid to think, you are a knowledge worker. This includes not only doctors, politicians, and engineers but also jobs traditionally viewed as low skilled, roles where one must experiment and apply deeper knowledge to get a good result.

Throughout the years, we developed a management style that is rooted in freedom, mainly because we wanted each team member to be able to manage themselves.

We strive for an environment where each individual can be the best version of themselves while slowly steering them in the right direction. By giving them the space, we allow their creativity and sense of responsibility to flourish.

This book documents what we’ve learned along the way. It’s composed of several chapters, each focused on frameworks and tools needed to create space. You don’t have to read the chapters in order but it will help. Our goal is to provide you with enough information to get started, to show you how the working environment can improve.

Each chapter starts with pragmatic information, includes some references, and ends with a list of small steps to get started. We’ve also included a bibliography at the end so that you can continue learning about any topics that you’d like.

Not everything in this book will work for every individual or team. We only ask that you make small experiments. In the end, it is about choosing your own flavor of Free Range Management.

How can employees be trusted if they are not watched closely? Especially in today’s remote work or hybrid environments, assessing and measuring performance causes great stress for managers. This is why the first chapter is all about how we Assess outcomes.

We don’t believe in management by sight or surveillance. Instead evaluating and measuring outcomes is the path forward. With clearly defined expectations, workers can be afforded the autonomy to do their job in the best ways possible.

We also explore how organizational structure can impact decision making. What traits do the best structures have and are there models that can be adopted? And how does tooling impact this?

To meet these challenges, a manager must Embrace feedback. We define the traits of good feedback and go on to provide several frameworks to help deliver it. We also answer how a manager can plan feedback sessions for the team and individuals so that they can learn and grow.

When an opportunity to improve is discovered, new processes need to be implemented. How can a manager introduce change into the team or organization? Not everyone on the team will be accepting of the improvements suggested during moments of reflection so managing change carefully can be a challenge.

Because it is the number one trait of high performance teams, an effort must be made to Encourage psychological safety, the shared vulnerability and trust within a team.

What is psychological safety and does it have any real world impact? We explore some examples and discuss how to measure it within the team.

Creating awareness is only the first step. A manager must also influence the atmosphere. We look at real life examples where people have impacted psychological safety through transparency, empathy, and several communication structures.

What is imposter syndrome and can I have an impact on it? We answer this question and also explore ways to set the stage with clear expectations, for both managers and employees.

Next, we turn to the work. We share several structures that allow a manager to Define clear tasks. A big part of managing knowledge teams is shaping the strategy and problem to be solved. What is the best way to do this? We take a look at several frameworks that help resolve this question.

When working with limited resources or time, many managers struggle with building too much. How do you structure an experiment and learn from it?

A very important question is: “What’s next?” so task prioritization and roadmapping is explored, too. Oftentimes, people set their priorities based on their gut instinct. Is there a way to include data into the decision making process?

And when handing over work to teams, how much work should you give them at a time? Learning how to properly chunk and split work is a key skill for a manager.

Once workers know what to work on, they must Create focus. But what is the best way to do that? Creating focus time requires the careful application of focus strategies. Is it reasonable to ignore your colleagues in search of time to think deeply?

Part of a manager’s role is to defend the team from distractions, so we explain how to do that. From managing unplanned work to ethical issues to getting into the zone while working remotely, we cover pragmatic solutions to create the needed focus.

Remote work also comes with its own challenges. Are you an expert in working remotely? Have you had to help a team member manage work-life balance, loneliness, or distractions? We also identify possible solutions to these problems.

People cannot work in isolation so special approaches are needed to Support collaboration. When can asynchronous communication supplant synchronous forms? Are status update meetings really necessary?

To balance focus time, we examine meeting management and ways to influence creativity when teams come together. Are there effective ways to generate ideas or resolve agreements while including all members of the team? Asynchronous communication comes with its own rules so we discuss those.

Cultural clashes can sidetrack teams quickly. What frameworks can help ease our understanding of other team members? There are two, fortunately.

Many managers, even experienced ones, struggle with mentoring and delegation so we introduce mental models to help organize these aspects of the job. Which are the best tasks to delegate?

With such high focus and effort, workers can burnout or lose motivation, this is why every manager must Monitor healthy habits. How can a manager influence the sleep, diet, and exercise habits of their team?

And when it comes to burnout, are there any early warning signs? Motivation is related to this so we investigate the core drive of individuals. How would you describe your purpose? How would your team?

In the penultimate chapter, our focus is on the information flow within an organization. Companies must Become knowledge-first if they are to successfully employ knowledge workers.

First, we define this term before diving into the component parts. From communicating transparently to creating a reflex to document to organizing information, we provide the tools to ensure that knowledge flows seamlessly throughout the organization.

Creative time allows employees to explore topics and share new understandings. How much time should be dedicated to this work and is the benefit worth it?

Finally, we examine how to Build the team. We look at a default hiring pipeline and how to measure the process. Does your current interview experience live up to expectations? Do you have too many steps or take too long to hire?

We list the traits of a Free Range worker, the person that you want to hire. Other than pragmatic experience, what should you look for in candidates?

A major aspect of building a team is ensuring that diversity, inclusion, and equity are accounted for. We explore the difference between culture fit and culture add.

Why is onboarding knowledge workers quickly so important? How long should it take before a new hire can make an impact? Can the onboarding process really take fewer than 2 weeks?

And when things go wrong, there needs to be a fair, planned, and measured response. This gives people the opportunity to improve their work.

We hope you enjoy this journey.

Illustrations: Tinne Cornelissen

Assess outcomes

Outcomes versus output

Through collaboration and creating output, team members can create desirable outcomes. For instance, a software team doesn’t care about the number of lines of code (output) but instead the number of customers using a particular feature to solve their problem (outcome).

Many first time managers make the mistake of measuring output. Instead of focusing on hours worked (butts in seats), look at the outcomes produced by employees. But how can that be measured?

It is valuable to differentiate between evaluating work in a qualitative way (assessment) and a quantitative way (metrics). It is much easier to perform assessments rather than rely on metrics. However, this opens up individuals and teams to subjective measurement.

Assessments are useful for measuring the ways in which outcomes are created (the process and interactions along the way). While metrics should measure the outcomes directly (often at a team level).

For instance, the head chef of a restaurant is reviewing the work of a newly hired cook. The head chef can use assessments to understand how the individual interacts with the team and if they can follow the existing rules of the kitchen. Metrics can be used to determine if the new hire can prep ingredients at the right pace and how the team’s mean time to dish delivery is impacted by the hire.

By creating metrics (and a dashboard to view them), the management team can have an overview of the work. In this way, managers can build trust with their teams and give them the autonomy to do what they are hired to do: think about and solve problems.

It is useful to compare individuals within the context of a team, not to coach individuals, but instead to understand how the team as a whole is functioning. This can be done with various frameworks such as 9 box grid (sometimes called the people-performance-potential-model).

As the name implies, two axes are used: performance versus potential. On one edge, performance is tracked based on job results, focusing on output as low, moderate, or high. Potential is on the other edge and deals with personal growth and future capabilities.

Although this model can help visualize individuals compared to their colleagues, it does have its drawbacks. It can be hard to remain objective because both axes are difficult to gauge in a quantitative way.

Meaningful performance metrics are generally assigned at a team level rather than an individual level for knowledge workers. And when it comes to potential, collecting data in the first place is near impossible making this ranking very subjective and prone to bias without a structured rubric.

One company, YSC Consulting, has taken steps to quantify potential. Their system is composed of judgment, drive, and influence (JDI).1During each review period, a manager can document the way an employee demonstrates each quality and where they need to improve.

Judgment is composed of recognizing problems, framing them properly, and the analytical rigor in solution ideation. Drive is focused on aspirations, taking initiative, and self-assurance in making change. Influence is defined as self-awareness, maintaining an environmental radar, and identifying the range of the individual’s influence.

Because individuals are compared against one another, 9 box grid becomes all about subjectivity. It allows a manager to see the bigger picture of a team. Mentors and mentees become apparent and changes over time are easy to identify.

There are certain metrics that can be measured at the team level. Again, the metrics should be focused on desired outcomes. What is the core role the team is fulfilling?

Depending on the team it could be shipping software features or proofreading chapters of a novel or holding training workshops. Once the core role is discovered, metrics can be created.

A north star metric is the number one metric within a business, one which drives a company towards delivering customer value. For a passenger transportation service company, it might be weekly rides or perhaps total minutes ridden per week.

Initially, the team will be able to identify and track trailing indicators. These are metrics which are measured after something occurs. Given enough time and research, correlations will be discovered which allow tracking of leading indicators. These types of metrics predict success and help companies make decisions about the future.

For instance, a sales team might track Revenue or Churn rate. These metrics occur after an event. The same sales team might also track Qualified leadsand Customer happiness which would help them understand what might happen next and therefore become predictive.

1.https://www.ysc.com/leadership-strategy-services/identifying-and-developing-potential/

Autonomy

Traditional organizations have a structure filled with supervisors who manage communication up and down the reporting chain. This prevents individuals from making decisions. The people furthest from the problems are then making decisions, with limited information and expertise to do so. The decisions of many companies are guided by those with the highest salary rather than the best knowledge.

One approach to ensuring decisions are made by the right people is by assigning a directly responsible individual (DRI). Coined at Apple, the DRI describes someone who drives an issue towards resolution. They are an orchestrator who ensures the right people are working on a particular problem and they help push decision making as low in the organization as possible.

L. David Marquet documents his approach to management in Turn the Ship Around!. As the new captain of a nuclear submarine, he quickly discovered flaws in a top-down organization.

The crew was trained to follow orders, even though the one he gave was impossible on this particular boat. This made him rethink his entire approach.

Soon he developed some guidelines where the crew would have the power to make their own decisions. By announcing their intent, ample time was given to officers to prevent error. For example, a crewman might say “I intend to reduce speed to zero six knots.”

Controls are still needed. On the sub, weapons control was still firmly reserved for upper ranks. In the office, perhaps everything below a certain monetary cost is permitted.

When given the proper context and with decision makers closest to the problem, better decisions will be made because those people will have the fullest understanding of the niche factors involved. But how can those people come together?