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Make People Awesome

As a manager your job is to make people in our ecosystem awesome. This includes the people who use, make, contribute or fund our products or services. As a manager I enable myself and my team to learn their context and pain points, what holds them back and what they aspire to achieve.

Work Objectives

• Works one-on-one with team members, partners, clients and other stakeholders

• Optimizes diversity among team members to build strong teams with complementary strengths

• Supports and defends the interests of staff, clients, and partners, as necessary and appropriate

• Deals with ineffective performance in an empathetic manner

• Provides regular feedback, acknowledges success and the need for improvement

• Coaches, challenges, and provides opportunities for growth

• Balances the needs of employees, clients, partners and the organization

• Monitors and addresses workplace well-being

• Develops and supports career plans and learning opportunities

• Assists in developing people strategy for succession planning

Indicators

• Team (including clients, partners, and other stakeholders) learning and development is strengthened through learning events/course or team development/building activities.

• Work planning ensures that employees are able to take leave when and as required.

• Promote health, safety and well-being for staff and provide guidance as required

• Holds bilateral meetings with direct staff, clients and other stakeholders as necessary

• Consistently solicit feedback on the health of our relationships in your ecosystem (could be in the form of stats, surveys, emoji's or any other form imaginable that represents how we are doing

Make safety a prerequisite

Safety is both a basic human need and a key to unlocking high performance. I will actively make safety a prerequisite by establishing safety before engaging in any hazardous work. I will protect people’s time, information, reputation, money, health and relationships. I will endeavor to make our collaborations, products and services resilient and safe.

Work Objectives

• Enable an environment where employees are free to express their opinions and ideas in a safe space

• Enable respectful dialogue and debate

• Enable an environment with diversity of opinion and a space for open respectful debate, and healthy dialogue

• Support employee mental health and flexible work arrangements to ensure work life balance

• Employees can work and converse in the language of their choice

• Work unit is managed in a manner that is fiscally responsible and that creates an environment that is safe from financial pressures

• Surplus and deficits and managed appropriately to allow other work units to adjust as necessary

Indicators

• Employees are free to work from home and have the equipment to do so

• Meetings are bilingual and employees feel free to express themselves in the language of choice

• Financial reporting is provided on time using sound judgement to our FMA on a monthly basis

• Forecasts accurately reflect the needs of the teams

• Capital investments are managed appropriately and gating timelines are respected to avoid any unnecessary risk

• Risks and issues are raised with senior management in a timely manner in order to take necessary corrective action

• Conflicts are managed in an appropriate and respectful manner

• Zero tolerance for harassment, discrimination, or any other form of unhealthy work or discriminatory behavior

• Briefing up is done regularly so that risks and issues can be dealt with in a timely manner

Experiment and learn rapidly

I will foster an environment to learn rapidly by experimenting frequently. I will make our experiments “safe to fail” so we are not afraid to conduct more experiments. When we get stuck or aren’t learning enough, I will take it as a sign that we need to learn more by running more experiments

Work objectives

• Employees are free to experiment and question the status quo

• Employees are encouraged to find better ways of working

• Employees are working in the open and sharing what they are working on

• Collaboration across work units and departments is mandatory

• Employees are given the time to learn and upskill

• Provide feedback, advice and guidance on others work

Indicators

• Where appropriate (non-protected) work is published in the open (medium, google docs, twitter, etc...)

• Success and failures and openly discussed and shared with others so that they can learn as well

• Employees actively participate in communities of practice and working groups

• Employees contribute to work outside of their respective work units

Deliver Value Continuously

Anything that isn’t delivered isn’t helping anyone become more awesome or safe. In modern agile we ask ourselves, “How could valuable work be delivered faster?” Delivering value continuously requires us to divide larger amounts of value into smaller pieces that may be delivered safely now rather than later.

 Work Objectives

• User research is conducted for all product / service initiatives

• Product vision boards are produced where appropriate

• Our intake is optimized to deliver maximum value to our partner and clients

• Help others in their journey to continuous value delivery

• Coach, mentor and train our partners and clients in agile and UX principles to effectively deliver products and services

• Model the agile principles and values

Indicators

• Participation in agile training sessions by all team members

• Reviews are used to solicit feedback and make necessary adjustments in direction and priority

• Teams have the autonomy to determine how they work while respecting the objectives of the departmental priority

• Planning is done on a regular basis to ensure teams deliver the highest value possible

• Evidence of user research is prevalent in all products being developed

• Product roadmaps are produced to show the value delivery chain

• Products are built based on outcomes and documented as such

• Products are constantly released to solicit feedback early and often

• Product reviews are inclusive and open to all

• Teams are self-organizing based on vision and direction provided by clients and management