Redefining Leadership: Experiments to Make a Business More Human
In alignment with our vision of making business more human, we love sharing our Be Human Project community with leaders like Jurgen Appelo.
The self-proclaimed creative networker and author, encourages leaders and managers to run experiments within their organization to stimulate discoveries about best practices for working with unique individuals. His experiments also make for great bonding exercises, such as inviting employees over for a dinner party and upon arrival springing the news that they will be the ones working together to prepare the meal.
Those kinds of experiments are just a sampling of the sorts of insights that Appelo surfaces in Management 3.0 and its companion book, Managing for Happiness. His book offers serious games, innovative tools and simple practices to motivate any team, change the culture of your workplace, boost productivity and nurture innovation among everyone. Appelo professes that everyone deserves to work in a happier organization.
In the above video clip, Appelo summarizes his management expertise into “seven silver bullets,” or seven steps to follow for better management practice.
1. Build for meaning.
Managers should make sure their teams understand why their work is meaningful beyond a surface level. They should know the reason behind their work.
2. Innovate management.
Managers need to be innovative both in the ways they manage people and the ways they perform work.
3. Accelerate learning.
To innovate, managers are required to learn faster. The world is accelerating faster and faster so managers must accelerate learning.
4. Run experiments.
Learning is optimal when teams run more experiments.
5. Embrace playfulness.
Experimenting is part of playing. We learned this as children, and it shouldn’t stop in our professional lives.
6. Nurture happiness.
We only play when we’re having fun. We must nurture the happiness of those we work with to ensure everyone is content and performing optimally.
7. Manage the system.
Managers cannot make people happy by snapping their fingers, but they can manage the system by creating an environment that is conducive to growth and happiness.
If you want the full effect of Jurgen’s management wisdom you can watch the full salon here.
Jurgen’s newest book, Startup, Scaleup, Screwup: 42 Tools to Accelerate Lean & Agile Business growth is available April 2019.
You can purchase Jurgen’s book “Managing for happiness here.
Here is a link to Jurgen’s TEDx Talk about Managing for Happiness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvJ4KlVlqV8
Some other helpful links:
https://hbr.org/2008/02/how-great-managers-manage-peop-1
