Travelers Management Series Prework

We’re excited to work with you over the next few weeks. This prework will help familiarize you with some of the key concepts we’ll work through in the live course. Taking the time to watch the videos and read the articles ahead of time will help you show up ready to talk through how they apply in your work.

The training is divided into four sections, two of which we’ll cover on the first day of training, and the 3rd and 4th on the second day. Here’s an overview of the four sections:

1. Why Agile Works When It Works: Complexity & Scrum Understanding complexity is the key to making sense of why Agile approaches like Scrum work when they work and how to apply them successfully. In this session, we introduce the Cynefin sensemaking framework and use it to explore how to make the most of an Agile approach in your unique context. Then, we dive into the core aspects of Scrum, with a focus on how to make each part of Scrum do the job it’s designed to do.
2. How to Manage in an Agile Organization: 3 Jobs & the Leadership Circle Leadership is essential for peak organizational performance, but leaders often struggle to figure out exactly what to focus on for the biggest impact. In this session, we dig into the 3 unique jobs of a manager in an Agile organization—the basis of an effective leader’s “backlog”—and we look at how to develop your own personal leadership capability to do every part of your job better.
3. How to Get Results Without Being Overly Directive: Coaching for Leaders As leaders try to be less directive, to avoid the micromanagement everyone hates, they can end up adopting a hands-off approach that provides neither clear direction nor growth for employees. Turns out coaching is a skill most leaders haven’t had a chance to develop. And just asking more questions doesn’t do the job. In this session, you’ll learn and practice a coaching approach leaders use to catalyze individual and team growth, broader and deeper thinking, and greater collaborative capability. This session is consistently rated among the most immediately applicable and transformative concepts we teach leaders—coaching skills really are a multiplier!
4. How to Set Teams Up to Succeed Establishing the optimal team and organizational structure directly impacts a company’s ability to succeed, but it’s a complex puzzle. Without the right structure, teams work on the wrong things, get stuck waiting on others in order to deliver anything of value, and never get into the flow that is the hallmark of all great work. This workshop reveals how leaders create the six conditions for effective teams and introduces strategies for effective organizational structures that emphasize the importance of collaboration within teams for complex tasks and coordination across teams for ordered tasks, thereby enhancing overall team performance and organizational agility.

In the prework, we’ll share a video or article for each main topic. We hope this helps you prepare to have a great discussion with us during the training, and look forward to getting to know you.