Why transformational leadership is the cornerstone of a successful DevOps strategy

Key to this is supporting willingness to experiment and innovate within a team, as well as establishing and supporting improved business cultural norms, and implementing technologies and processes to enable developer productivity.

Engaged leaders are essential for a successful DevOps culture, which is something that many businesses recognise overall. However, the DevOps community has been guilty of vilifying its leadership – setting themselves up for challenges by having middle managers who prevent or delay the necessary changes for the business to improve its IT and organisational performance. In DevOps, as much as anywhere else (and possibly more so), it is important to have the right leaders, with the right attitudes, directing the business. Leaders typically have the authority and budget to make the large-scale changes needed to make DevOps transformation a business reality – set the tone of the organisation, reinforce desired cultural norms and provide visible support when the transformation is under way.

What makes a good DevOps leader?

DevOps success is far easier to achieve when there are effective leaders supporting the team – despite infrequent reports of successful grassroots DevOps initiatives. This is where the role of transformational leadership naturally emerges.

Leaders who follow a transformational leadership style inspire and motivate their teams to achieve higher performance by appealing to their values and sense of purpose. This seems to resonate particularly well with a millennial audience – a growing proportion of the workforce, who are driven by purpose as much as financial gain. Exemplifying this: 86% of this demographic would consider leaving an employer whose values no longer met their expectations according to the PwC Millennials at Work report. In doing so, it facilitates wide-scale organisational change. The model is essential for:

·        Establishing and supporting generative and high-trust cultural norms.

·        Implementing technologies and processes that enable developer productivity, reducing code deployment lead times and supporting more reliable infrastructures.

·        Supporting team experimentation and innovation, to create and implement better products faster.

·        Working across organisational silos to achieve strategic alignment.

Teams that work towards a common goal are best led by a leader through their vision, values, communication, example-setting and evident caring about the team’s personal needs. Transformational leaders use these attributes to help the team create a personal interest in the needs and objectives of the organisation as a whole.

These characteristics are also highly correlated with IT performance. High-performing teams usually have leaders with the strongest behaviours across all dimensions: vision, inspirational communication, intellectual stimulation, supportive leadership, and personal recognition. The positive (or negative) influence of leadership flows all the way through to IT performance and organisational performance.

Building a bed-rock for success

An important philosophy of forward-looking executives is DevOps. These executives  acknowledge the link between DevOps and high organisational performance. As more of a culture and processes than a technology, management on all levels (even outside of the core IT team) needs to understand what it means to adopt DevOps practices as business practices.

Companies cannot practice or buy DevOps. It is a culture where continuous questioning, experimenting and learning is a part of everyone’s day-to-day activities. Transformational leadership builds the core foundation for this culture to thrive – a culture where it is everyone’s job to challenge the status quo, continually bettering the organisation, its developments and practices.

A team who constantly reinvents and improves the organisation is a great asset to any business. It prevents complacency and stasis internally which can be the death of a business in the modern fast-moving world. However, creating this kind of team requires a leader who specialises in inspiring team cohesion, supporting effective communication, and delivering high performance to achieve key business outcomes. A transformational leader may not be a turnkey quick-fix solution, but is invaluable in providing the stable foundations for a successful DevOps team and, in time, prove a business’s digital leadership.