IT is part of the business

Companies and businesses have evolved, and with them the style of leadership and management. We can find many ways to classify the ways to manage, one of them is through the denomination of Management 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0.

• Management 1.0: Is a management style inherited from the time of the industrial revolution, where people were hired to perform very repetitive tasks within a production line, for example to fit parts of a machine or manually pack products. These people did not need to be motivated to get great results in the tasks or have a high intellectual level or education, they were easy to hire and replace. These organizations usually have a pyramidal hierarchical structure, where a few people make decisions and the rest follow and execute them.

• Management 2.0: In this case, managers realize that they are working with people and not with machines, and workers are taken as an asset of the companies; they are cared for and retained as a strategic value for the company. In this management style, some strong hierarchies are maintained.

• Management 3.0: The organization is thought of as a community, things are done so that the community can benefit from them and everyone is, in some way, responsible for contributing to their success and a few are responsible for the whole. Management 3.0 is based on the idea of Systems Thinking (we will talk about it in a few days) where the result of actions does not occur at the individual level but are an accumulation of interactions between different situations and actors.

Let’s look at some aspects of Management 3.0 and tools that will help us get to know our colleagues better and bring out the best in all of us, not working in isolation, but as a system, as a community.

Personal Map

Through this technique we can get to know people both on a personal and professional level, get to know them in their day-to-day life. Imagine that Christmas Day is approaching, and we have an emergency job that two people can do, one married with children and the other single without children. Neither of them will feel like working that night, but one of them will be much more resentful than the other. Knowing personal aspects of people helps to understand the reality of each of them.

The Personal Map is a kind of mental map that allows us to present ourselves in a summarized way. To do this we will place ourselves in the center of the map and we will develop topics such as:

• Family
• Friends
• Work
• Goals
• Hobbies
• etc

The process can be done in a public way on a whiteboard or flipchart or individually and then exposing it to colleagues. It is very important not to force people to tell things they do not want to tell, so the topics to be discussed should be open and each person can expose the ones he/she wants, which can be from the list shown or others.

Once the map is done, we will make a round of presentation of each person, where he/she will briefly explain his/her map.

This exercise can be done using tools such as Miro, Mural or other tools available online for free.

Moving motivators

When we talk about keeping our team motivated, we must not forget that teams are made up of people and as people, they are all different, so what can motivate one person can demotivate another. What do I mean by this? That it is very important to know the people around us to offer them what they are really looking for and to know why they do the things they don’t like to do.

We have two types of motivators:

• Extrinsic or hygienic motivators: are those that come from outside, such as relationships with superiors, financial rewards or social benefits.
• Intrinsic motivators: are those that emerge from within people due to psychological needs and that motivate behavior in the absence of extrinsic motivators, such as recognition, professional progress, achievement, or responsibility.

It is very important to know the motivators that most drive ourselves and our colleagues to perform the tasks, as this way we will be able to reinforce them and obtain a mutual benefit that provides value to the community.

To achieve this knowledge, we can rely on a practice called “Moving motivators”. To perform it we have several cards with different intrinsic motivators and the exercise would consist of three phases:

1. Individually, we will order from left to right the motivators that most move each of us, so that on the left is the most important motivator for each of us and on the right the one we consider less important.
2. In a next step, we will move up those motivators that we currently have covered in our work and down those that we do not have covered and want to reinforce.
3. In the third phase, the motivators are shared, and relationships and synergies are sought to strengthen the most important motivators for each person

This exercise helps us to get to know the people and the team as a whole. Suppose we have an innovation team, and one person has curiosity as one of the least important motivators, nothing happens, he may have other very interesting motivators for the task such as expertise, but we will really have a problem if the whole team classifies curiosity as not very motivating.

This work can be done physically by printing or buying the cards, or virtually by using one of the many tools available such as Mural or Miro, with templates such as  https://miro.com/miroverse/moving-motivators/

Kudos

This practice is based on the recognition of other people, usually done spontaneously at unexpected moments, by means of a small written and public form, although there are many variations. It is a simple and effective way to enhance intrinsic motivation.

There are many ways to deliver Kudos to our colleagues, for example, with Kudo Walls, boxes as a shared or personal mailbox, or even using Microsoft Teams through the Praise utility.

Kudos also have their dangerous side, for example, that someone in a team does not receive any Kudos, or that the message is misunderstood, or that someone is congratulated for something someone else has done, but in general the effect is very positive.

OKRs

OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) are objectives and their corresponding key results that we place on people to foster their growth in any type of life domain and to be able to measure this progress.

OKRs are represented through:

Objective: What do we want to achieve or where do we want to get to? We define a working direction, where to go.

Key result: It is the way to know how close we are to the objective and when we have reached it.

Initiative: These are the tasks or jobs we will perform to achieve the key results.

“There is no favorable wind for the sailor who doesn’t know where to go” - Seneca

Through OKRs, employees are more committed to achieving objectives (they are defined, they know what they have to do) and we can measure progress and focus individual and group efforts.

OKRs are not substitutes for KPIs, but complementary. While a KPI gives me a measure of the current situation of my business, OKRs help me to know where I want to get to.

For example, at the OKR level, we can have as a target to increase sales of product X, as a key result of selling 100 units per month and as an initiative to give a 10% discount, and on the other hand have a monthly sales KPI of 53 units at that time.

We have talked about some of the tools and techniques, but there are many more. If you are interested, I encourage you to go deeper into the topic of Management 3.0 through the web https://management30.com/ where you can find plenty of resources such as detailed explanations of the techniques, support documents or workshops and certifications.

Happy new era of Management.