Name: Enlightened Managers: The Key to Empowering & Encouraging Self-Organizing Teams
Start: 2025-11-13T17:30:00-08:00
End: 2025-11-13T19:30:00-08:00

**Enlightened Managers: The Key to Empowering & Encouraging Self-Organizing Teams**

**Summary**

Almost all of us have teams we want to work better: better productivity, effectiveness, clarity, quality, and frankly joy. There's no silver bullet, but Ron Lichty wrote the book on the role of managers in empowering and encouraging and evangelizing self-organizing teams.

Self-organization shows up in the Agile Manifesto: “The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.” But what is self-organization?

Ron will share metaphors he’s found resonate with teams he’s led and coached and trained - metaphors you can use to help managers and team members alike understand their role in making for joyful self-organizing teamwork - what Christopher Avery refers to when he says that Teamwork Is an Individual Skill (the title of Avery's book).

Ron will explain what managers can do to enable and encourage self-organization, discuss the internal work they need to do on themselves to let go of the urge for control, and outline the work they can do to evangelize and support their teams in the larger organization. He'll also share how individual contributors can diplomatically encourage their managers to foster cultures of joyful self-organizing teamwork.

**Speaker**:

Ron Lichty has been managing software development for over 35 years, in one company after another untangling its software development knots and transforming chaos to clarity, the last 25 of those in the era of Agile. Originally a programmer, he earned several patents and wrote two popular programming books before being hired into his first management role by Apple Computer, which nurtured his managerial growth in both development and product management roles. At companies like Fujitsu, Schwab, Razorfish, Stanford, and dozens of startups of all sizes, he grew to VP Engineering, VP Product and CTO roles.

For the last 13 years principal and owner of Ron Lichty Consulting ([www.ronlichty.com](http://www.ronlichty.com/)), he trains teams and executives in agile, coaches business and product and engineering leaders, and on occasion takes on interim VP engineering roles, all in pursuit of making software development “hum." In his continued search for effective best practices, Ron co-authors the periodic *Study of Product Team Performance* ([http://www.ronlichty.com/study.html](http://www.ronlichty.com/study.html)).

Addison Wesley recently released the 2nd edition of his fifth book, *Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams* ([http://www.managingtheunmanageable.net](http://www.managingtheunmanageable.net/)), coauthored with CTO Mickey Mantle, and compared by many readers to programming classics *The Mythical Man-Month* and *Peopleware*. He lives in both San Francisco and Seattle, and co-chairs the Silicon Valley Engineering Leadership Community, the Enterprise Agile Global Community, and the Managing Software Teams in Seattle meetup.

Rob Oliver

Poorni Shanmugam

Gopal Renganathan

Mary Stovall

Ron Lichty

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Enlightened Managers: The Key to Empowering & Encouraging Self-Organizing Teams

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Enlightened Managers: The Key to Empowering & Encouraging Self-Organizing Teams

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