Host Intro (Gene Kim)

So we have two amazing talks on leadership and culture. As much as we love talking about it, we have studied it in the State of DevOps research. We know that culture is one of the top predictors of performance. What is often missing are concrete tools and techniques that leaders can use with their teams, and also teams that they are a part of.

I cannot think of a better person to share these kinds of tactics than Christine Hudson, who I met in 2013 back when she was at Rally Software. It was shortly after they went public, and she was one of the many amazing leaders that I got to learn from back then. She gave a fantastic presentation last year, and I asked her to come back and share these amazing tools and tactics that anyone can use to set great norms and increase engagement, which you can put into practice right away. If we are lucky, she might be able to tell you about some of the experiences she had pairing with Steve Yegge and me last week. Christine, take it away.

Christine Hudson

Thanks, Gene. It was definitely fun pairing with you and Steve last week. I will definitely talk a little bit about that.

It has really been a crazy day of information here. As usual, you all have presented an astonishing amount of information on generative AI and the impacts. Like Gene said, I met him back in 2013 when I was working at Rally Software, and I have really appreciated how Gene and this community are so curious, practical, and results-focused, but also welcoming, with care for the humans involved.

In this last decade especially, I have focused most of my time helping senior leaders and their extended teams improve their use of modern value-flow methods, methods this community is familiar with, to create better business results and happier humans. Before that, I held other technical and non-technical roles. This is the first time I have put developer on the screen for a while. It has been over a decade since I have really written code, but last week I worked with Gene and Steve to learn more about returning to development with the help of an AI coding assistant. It was incredible what one person could accomplish in such a short time, what I could accomplish in such a short time, with a bit of thoughtful coaching and encouragement.

This talk around leadership and culture change is certainly about coaching and encouraging our leaders, helping humans through big rapid change, like right now. I have deployed the tactics we will explore today in various departments, with technology, product, business operations, and legal leaders, often with the whole business collaborating across departments, and sometimes in critical corporate change efforts that span multiple lines of business. Whatever part of the business I have been working in or across, and whatever leaders I have been partnering with, there has been a common need to make it safer to share hard information earlier, to have hard conversations more easily, and to address the elephants in the room. What is often missing is not the desire to create psychological safety, but the iterative, incremental tactics to help create it.

There are lots of models, measures, and definitions of culture. Today I am mostly going to discuss behaviors, language, and expectations, and I will share a few of my favorite tactics for changing your culture.

Before the tactics themselves, let us talk about where to implement them. In all cases, where you do the work of culture change matters a lot. To create rapid improvement and stay up to speed once you are there, it helps to combine learning about and practicing new ways of working, new skills, and new behaviors while doing the most critical work of the business. This can be in everyday meetings. You can start small by observing and making small changes, and then build on these over time. Starting small is perfect.

We will talk first about small tactics, the benefits of incremental cultural improvements, single-meeting behaviors, and specific adjustments you can make as early as today. Then we will talk about slightly bigger tactics that you can leverage with your senior leadership team or extended leadership team. If you are willing to slow down a little to speed up, it is powerful to have 100 or so amazing leaders work together to create their own new norms. I will also share helpful things to think about in creating your own tactics if you are ready for next steps.

One note: in this presentation, I am assuming you are the leader running the organization. These are tactics to use in your meetings and in encouraging and supporting the leaders who report to you. At the end, I will briefly include a few ideas to help create culture change in other people's meetings.

When thinking about the benefits of small behavior changes and small culture changes, I have found it helps to describe the small behaviors first in terms of the headaches they can cause. We can imagine getting rid of them as ibuprofen for our system, not just vitamins to get healthier.

First, if difficult information is not shared or is not shared early enough, quality can suffer and firefighting is likely. Some behaviors that can indicate difficult information might not be shared early enough, or consumed early enough, can seem innocuous. If leaders are not listening and are doing their own work until it is time for them to present, important information can simply get missed. When one leader drones on and on, other leaders check out. When leaders regularly talk over each other, even if they are excited and co-creating, that can also be a sign. With no space in the conversation, there is no room for quiet thinkers to share, and no space for difficult information to enter.

When a leader blames other humans or other departments for issues or lack of progress, especially focusing on the who versus the behaviors, it decreases the perceived social safety to share. There are other costs too. These leaders are less likely to investigate and address root-cause issues, and less likely to take action within areas they can control.

Sometimes leaders do not have the skills needed, and that is not something we typically advertise as leaders. A common issue I have witnessed mostly with mid-level managers, but also sometimes with senior leaders, is a lack of comfort and use of measures and outcomes, identifying change in the business levers they intend to affect, doing cost and benefit analysis, and ROI calculations. Psychological safety leads to high-performing teams when it is paired with clear high expectations. The cost of these missing skills and the lack of clarity created can cost your organization rather a lot.

If you are doing some of these things, or allowing some of these things, the good news is you can stop today. You can change what you are modeling in your next email or your next meeting. Let us look at a few quick initial hits to head off some of these costs.

For each observed behavior, I will suggest one adjustment. There are often many adjustments that will help, but I will give one simple one that is easy to get started with.

When leaders are not listening, or do not understand each other's work well, one simple option is to add an active-listening exercise. By active listening, I mean listening intently for meaning, paraphrasing back what you think you heard, and then checking for understanding and anything missed. Pitch practice is a similar exercise. It does the same thing, except the focus is on leaders thinking about sharing clarity in the information they provide.

Either exercise adds a little time to a meeting, because after each leader presents, another leader, potentially chosen at random, paraphrases and checks for understanding. We frequently learn that we are not listening intently to each other, or are not listening at all, and sometimes we do not fully grasp or misinterpret each other's desired outcomes. Active listening is a much bigger effort than we anticipate. Be prepared for tired, annoyed leaders who are paying more attention, better grasping the current state of your system, and better understanding each other's work.

I am spending time on this tactic because I have found it helpful. In the past six months alone, I have used it with two executive teams, a senior leadership team, and business operations leadership teams at a couple of levels. You can use it in many kinds of meetings. The ones I like best are weekly or quarterly reviews and readouts, or as part of an offsite where you learn about each other's strengths, backgrounds, and hidden skills.

When leaders are droning on, it can help to share a simple study like the Google study on high-performing teams. This study included psychological safety in the top three, but it also included conversational turn-taking, or approximately equal talk time. Based on this, you can say, let us try it. Try facilitating round-robin with equal talk times. Use a timer. Expect some leaders to continue to go over, and they will probably be annoyed or embarrassed when you as facilitator try to get them off. Introverts will likely be annoyed and maybe anxious. The whole team, though, will likely be more engaged, even if it is a bit stilted at first. Most will be grateful you are no longer tolerating one or two people dominating the time. The same exercise is useful when leaders are talking over each other.

When leaders are blaming other humans or departments, try watching a video on personal responsibility or focusing on what you as a leader can control. I have found it is great to watch the video in a meeting together, even if you provide it ahead of time. I love the Responsibility Process video by Christopher Avery; I think it does a great job of getting people out of blame quickly. After watching, ask leaders to work on awareness, especially self-awareness. Even one session can give leaders awkward visibility into how they might be delaying or not taking action within their control, and how they might be spending time, energy, and angst blaming others instead of improving what they can.

If you do not hear your leaders talking in terms of measures and changes to business levers, you may have the hidden problem that your leaders do not have this skill or that it needs honing. If that is the case, make it safe to get this skill. Most leaders feel like they should have it, and you probably expect them to have it. Minimize shame or fear of looking dumb and solve the problem with practice. Ask leaders to pair up, take a pass together at determining and refining the measures for each other's investments, and include them in the next meeting. Provide supportive, constructive feedback, because the outcome you want is that your leaders hone this skill. Expect additional systems learning and more considerate investments.

That was a slew of small tactics. Let us talk about some slightly bigger ones if you are ready to slow down to speed up. These are my favorite four tactics to help leaders create their own new improved norms and start putting them into action together: training combined with working agreements, combined with work visibility, and with demos. Sometimes it is just practicing what we already know, with more emphasis on the behaviors and skills, that helps us create the culture that better supports improved results.

Each one of these tactics likely needs its own time. It cannot be wedged into an existing meeting like the earlier tactics. Each has several associated behavior and expectation changes. I often group the first three into one larger session and follow it in a few weeks with a demo.

To give an example, I will share a quick recap of an experience report I shared at ETLS last fall, where I was lucky to present with Ronica Roth and Bria Schecker. The story was about delivering with confidence. I was working with a senior executive I love working with. He joined a rapidly growing Fortune 500 company and took over a company-wide initiative where improvements had leveled off. The goal had been to increase customer satisfaction and retention. With complex delivery across several technology and business groups, even this seasoned executive struggled to clearly tell when and what would be delivered to customers. There were quality issues, firefighting, occasional rollback, and some deliveries surprised front-end workers who had not been trained on the updates. That happens a lot, actually; it is not so great for customers.

The leadership team decided we wanted to answer better together: how and what do we plan to deliver in the next quarter? To do that, we created a session that included a little business-agility training time, co-created working agreements, and had everyone involved in the program make 30-, 60-, and 90-day plans that we would share with each other. We used an existing quarterly business review, not an entirely new meeting, and changed the format. We still reviewed the quarter's results, then immediately added forward-looking work visibility to make it safe to be messy and get it wrong. We talked about how difficult it would be to see places where we had high-risk duplicate work, or even unnecessary work. We created working agreements on how we would kindly call out risks, opportunities, and elephants. We made a first attempt to make our work visible week by week. The work varied in type and complexity across customer experience, service, business operations, training, HR, communications, and tech teams. We practiced week-by-week readouts of each type of work and encouraged everyone to put their improvement hat on and think together: how might we improve each plan to deliver better together to our strategy?

It was sometimes awful as we handled difficult issues together in the moment, but so much better than firefighting them later. The first time we held this combined session, we learned so much. We made incredible improvements to the structure of our work and our system, agreed to demo in two weeks, met again, and then met a month later for another round of training and work visibility.

I want to talk about working agreements because I find this one is not quite as common. Once the team has hashed through some modern ways-of-working concepts, it is easier to talk about making their own updated ways-of-working agreements with each other: creating clarity in what processes, logistics, skills, and behaviors they would like to work on or hold each other to, how they want to practice together, and how they hold each other accountable.

I often suggest starting with a few working agreements, seeding them and asking the team to create the rest together. Ones I often start with include art of the possible: if you catch yourself thinking, that will never work here, take a deep breath and think, how might that work this time? What might be different now? What might make that possible? Another is welcome the elephants: how might we make it okay, or welcome even, to share difficult information with each other? What do we know about each other's cadences of learning or conflict styles that we can incorporate? Do we need anonymous elephants at first? Fine. Are we ready to deal with the elephants weekly in our leadership meeting? Even better. A third is about setting expectations: kindly holding each other accountable to new ways of working, making room for learning, and making it okay to be messy and sometimes get it wrong. Try giving getting it wrong a funny name that people can call out in meetings, like banana bread. After the team creates working agreements, I like to immediately practice them and pull them into play in a working session.

The very act of creating a mid-range plan of forward-looking work is, for many leaders, shifting culture. Most leaders do quarterly reviews; not many do forward-looking plans. In the work visibility session, senior leaders do their own midterm planning, make work visible for what they personally will accomplish and pay attention to in the upcoming two to three months, week by week, at about half-day granularity, including critical meetings, milestones, and vacations. This can hone prioritization, focus, and capacity. It is even better when you ask your extended leadership team to create work visibility together, especially focused on your most critical change efforts.

It can be incredibly powerful. These leaders, even doing a rough pass, find and hash out dependencies, risks, potential fires, bottlenecks, duplication, and opportunities for parallel work earlier. It does not have to be pretty the first time. I often use stickies, physical or virtual collaboration boards, so you can move things around and make it okay to learn as you go. Please be messy the first time. You learn so much about your system and how your leadership team thinks about the problems in it, their work, and their priorities.

The last tactic is demo. What I mean is a say-do-show meeting, typically a couple of weeks or a month after mid-range planning, to show what you have accomplished. With my tech background, I call this a demo even with critical corporate initiatives or in other departments. The point is to show whatever work you have completed. It is fine if it is a document. If your leaders are not accustomed to sharing their work or showing it often, this can make them very uncomfortable. Starting with training, working agreements, and midterm planning helps clear the path. If they did not do what they said they would, make sure we learn why, learn about a problem space in our business system or capacity, adjust our plans, and make sure we are more likely to achieve the outcomes we really want.

Time Check

Christine asks how she is doing on time. Gene replies that she has maybe 90 seconds.

Christine Hudson

The last thing I would like to talk about is actually, I am going to skip over creating your own tactics today. I will leave the slide up briefly because the design of your own tactics and behaviors can be supported with Claude. The steps are based on typical organizational change, habit change, and culture change steps.

What I would like to talk about briefly is if it is not your meeting. If it is not your meeting and you do not feel comfortable approaching the person running the meeting, you can do some simple things in it. You can model it. For active listening, just do it. Pick a leader to listen to and take notes. It does not have to sound stilted. Say, hey, I am not sure I heard everything right. You might have gotten cut off. Are these the key points you had? Did I get that right?

Another huge piece is appreciation. There is a lot of research being done right now on appreciation in organizations, and it is promising. Small, genuine appreciation for when people make room for the quiet people, make room for the thinkers, goes a long way. You can also pair up with other amazing humans and co-create working agreements, especially if there is a meeting where you feel comfortable making suggestions with like-minded participants.

I would like to close with a couple of community requests. First, please run a small single-meeting tactic and share with me how it goes. I am especially interested in what did not work. Second, if you used to be a developer, maybe a leader who has been out of coding for a while, there is some really cool stuff going on with Gene and Steve using coding assistants. I participated last week and it was stunning. It was amazing. Come join us. Thanks again, Gene and everyone, for inviting me to share some tactics. I hope you put them to good use.

Close (Gene Kim)

In fact, Christine, you built a calendar export tool from Google Apps so you can migrate from one account to another. It was awesome, and you did it in less than 45 minutes. If you are interested in doing a similar pairing session, ping Christine if you want to be part of a cohort of getting back to coding. Thank you so much, Christine.

Christine Hudson

Thank you, guys. Thank you.