Chapter 11: Leaders and Managers
Why Leadership Has Been Overlooked
The DevOps community has sometimes maligned leadership (middle managers preventing necessary changes). Yet one of the most common questions is: “How do we get leaders on board so we can make necessary changes?”
Leaders have the authority and budget to:
- Make large-scale changes
- Provide air cover during transformation
- Change incentives for entire groups of technical professionals
- Set the tone and reinforce desired cultural norms
By 2020 (Gartner projection): Half of CIOs who haven’t transformed their teams’ capabilities will be displaced from digital leadership teams.
Transformational Leadership Model
Research used the Rafferty and Griffin (2004) model — five dimensions:
| Dimension | What it means |
|---|---|
| Vision | Clear understanding of where the organization is going and where it should be in 5 years |
| Inspirational communication | Communicates in a way that inspires and motivates, even in uncertain or changing environments |
| Intellectual stimulation | Challenges followers to think about problems in new ways |
| Supportive leadership | Demonstrates care and consideration of followers’ personal needs and feelings |
| Personal recognition | Praises and acknowledges achievement; personally compliments outstanding work |
Survey Questions Used
My leader or manager:
- (Vision) Has a clear understanding of where we are going / Has a clear sense of where he/she wants our team in five years / Has a clear idea of where the organization is going
- (Inspirational) Says things that make employees proud to be part of this org / Says positive things about the work unit / Encourages people to see changing environments as situations full of opportunities
- (Intellectual) Challenges me to think about old problems in new ways / Has ideas that forced me to rethink things I’ve never questioned / Has challenged me to rethink some of my basic assumptions about my work
- (Supportive) Considers my personal feelings before acting / Behaves thoughtfully of my personal needs / Sees that employee interests are given due consideration
- (Recognition) Commends me when I do better than average / Acknowledges improvement in quality / Personally compliments me when I do outstanding work
Research Findings
- Transformational leadership characteristics are highly correlated with software delivery performance
- High-performing teams reported leaders with the strongest behaviors across all five dimensions
- Low-performing teams reported the lowest levels of these leadership characteristics
- Teams with leadership in the bottom one-third of strength are only half as likely to be high performers
The Key Limitation: Leaders Cannot Achieve Goals Alone
Teams with the top 10% of transformational leadership characteristics were equally or even less likely to be high performers compared to the general population.
“Leaders cannot achieve goals on their own. They need their teams executing the work on a suitable architecture, with good technical practices, use of Lean principles, and all the other factors we’ve studied.”
Leadership is necessary but not sufficient. The influence flows through:
Transformational Leadership
↓
Technical Practices + Lean Practices + Product Management Capabilities
↓
Software Delivery Performance + Organizational Performance
Leadership also enables eNPS — transformational leaders found in places where employees are happy, loyal, and engaged.
Servant vs. Transformational Leadership
| Servant Leadership | Transformational Leadership | |
|---|---|---|
| Focus | Followers’ development and performance | Getting followers to identify with the organization and engage in support of organizational objectives |
| Orientation | Bottom-up (serve the team) | Mission-oriented (inspire toward a shared goal) |
Research used transformational leadership because it is more predictive of performance outcomes.
The Role of Managers
Managers have responsibility for people, budgets, and resources. At best, managers are also leaders with transformational characteristics.
Unique role of managers: Connect strategic objectives of the business to the work their teams do.
Managers improve team performance by:
- Creating work environments where employees feel safe
- Investing in developing their people’s capabilities
- Removing obstacles to work
- Enabling specific DevOps practices visibly
- Making deployments less painful
- Making performance metrics visible and aligned with org goals
- Delegating more authority to employees — “Knowledge is power, and you should give power to those who have the knowledge”
Investing in Teams: Concrete Actions
Ways technology leaders can invest:
- Make existing learning resources accessible to everyone; create space for learning
- Establish a dedicated training budget; give staff latitude to choose interesting training
- Encourage attendance at technical conferences at least once a year; share learnings
- Set up internal hack days — cross-functional teams work on projects
- Organize “yak days” — teams work on technical debt
- Hold regular internal DevOps mini-conferences (DevOpsDays format)
- Give staff dedicated time for experimentation (20% time, or days after a release)
Tips to Improve Culture
Three things highly correlated with performance and strong team culture:
- Cross-functional collaboration
- Climate for learning
- Tools
Cross-Functional Collaboration
- Build trust with counterparts on other teams (kept promises, open communication, predictable behavior even under stress)
- Encourage practitioners to move between departments (they bring valuable context, create natural contact points)
- Actively seek, encourage, and reward work that facilitates collaboration
Game Days / DiRT Exercises (Disaster Recovery Testing): Simulate outages; teams must work together to maintain/restore service. Google uses this to build relationships between engineers who don’t normally work together. When real disasters strike, they have strong working relationships.
Climate for Learning
- Create training budget and advocate for it publicly
- Ensure teams have resources for informal learning and space to explore ideas
- Make it safe to fail — treat failures as learning opportunities; blameless postmortems
- Create regular opportunities to share knowledge (lightning talks, lunch-and-learns)
- Encourage demo days and forums — celebrate work and learn from each other
Tools
- Let teams choose their tools (unless there’s a good reason not to)
- Make monitoring a priority — refine infrastructure and application monitoring; proactive monitoring was strongly related to performance and job satisfaction
Key Conclusion
Technology transformations benefit from truly engaged and transformational leaders who can support and amplify the work of their teams. Organizations should view leadership development as an investment in their teams, technology, and products.
Grassroots DevOps success stories exist, but success is far more likely with leadership support.