To me, the core issue here isn't specifically about management, but about allowing their developers to follow their intuition. I think a great way to do that is to set aside a time for developers to work on whatever they want to (within the scope of the project). Feel like your test coverage is lacking? You get X% to work on that. Some technical debt always been bugging you? Use your X% on that.
The beauty of this approach is that it can start as an experiment, say 10% (or a day every two weeks), but then migrating to an environment where employees set most of their work queue is just a matter of adjusting X.
The beauty of this approach is that it can start as an experiment, say 10% (or a day every two weeks), but then migrating to an environment where employees set most of their work queue is just a matter of adjusting X.