Host Intro (Gene Kim)

Gene Kim introduces Dr. Andre Martin as someone he has known for years, first meeting him when Martin was Chief Learning Officer at Nike and later following his move to Chief Learning Officer at Target. Kim says Martin has spent his career exploring why organizations create senior learning roles, how executives view employee engagement, and how the technology community can leverage those values. He notes that Martin has a PhD in organizational psychology, and adds that the employee Net Promoter Score in the State of DevOps research came from a suggestion by Martin that Dr. Nicole Forsgren integrated into the survey. Kim says Martin is now VP of People Development at Google, leading a global team committed to helping Google unleash the full potential of Googlers worldwide, and invites him to share what he has learned and give advice to the community.

Dr. Andre Martin

Martin opens by joking that he has spoken in many conference slots, but never before stood between an audience and a unicorn party. He says his job is to make the time go by as quickly as possible while speaking about a topic central to his 20-year career. His career across Disney, Mars, Nike, Target, and Google has revolved around a single question: how to make sure a company is as powerful as its brand, and how to ensure culture is a lever of growth rather than the reason a company no longer exists.

He asks why an HR person is at a DevOps conference and answers that every company is now a digital company. Whether a company makes dog food or tennis shoes, mainstream business, finance, strategy, marketing, and sales are now looking to IT and asking for help understanding what is going on. At the same time, IT leaders are asking to get in the room and be part of the conversation. Culture is not separate from that transformation because anyone working in a company, especially anyone leading a team, creates culture through daily interactions.

Martin says culture is often treated as mysterious, but he wants to unpack it. He starts with once-powerful companies he admired 20 years earlier, including Jones University, which he describes as the first online university in 1984, operating over cable airwaves in the western United States. These companies had talent, market share, devoted consumers, and enough technology to drive the next wave of business, yet many are now nearly gone. Martin argues that they lost their way because they lost their culture: they lost sight of their founding principles and began treating themselves as invincible, as if no real competitor could compete with them. He warns that if leaders are not creators of culture every day, their firms can follow the same path.

He turns to the question of how leaders affect culture. Citing McKinsey research, he says many CEOs believe culture is a competitive advantage, many believe organizations without high-performance cultures are doomed, many believe culture can be changed, and many believe their own culture must change. Yet only about 10% of firms succeed in sustaining or building a high-performance culture over time. That leads to the question of why some teams stay at the top while others are one and done.

Martin tells the audience that each leader is the CEO of their team. They create culture in every touchpoint with employees. Leaders talk about values, and employees watch whether those values appear in the decisions made on their behalf. When they do not, engagement is lost. He uses a PowerPoint reading trick to show that past experience can become the biggest inhibitor to future growth. Human beings shortcut information, use past experience to make future decisions, and use experience to define the current moment. In doing so, they can miss weak signals, make faulty assumptions, and make decisions about teams, companies, and areas of focus that are no longer correct.

To illustrate sensemaking, Martin asks an audience member, Chris, to read a scrambled-letter passage about the phenomenal power of the human mind. Chris reads it with help. Martin explains that great leaders make sense out of nonsense: they notice weak signals around them and use those signals to find better arguments and better decisions. He connects this to the DevOps audience, saying they must do that every day while leading IT transformation, navigating digital disruption, and building highly engaged, high-performing teams their companies depend on.

Martin says if culture is the only real job a leader has, leaders need something practical. He points to powerful brands that are also revered for workplaces and cultures, and says that growth puts pressure on culture. Each has faced issues in recent years, some public and some private. It is hard to hold onto the core of who you are at the pace companies are leading.

He gives the example of REI's CEO going on Reddit in 2015 before Thanksgiving to discuss closing stores because the company believed people should be with family and outdoors rather than shopping. The CEO expected positive questions, and received some, but soon employees began upvoting comments saying the company used to care about employees and consumer experience, and now felt focused on selling memberships. Martin asks what happened in all the earlier moments that left the CEO with so little awareness of where employees were, what they needed, and how they felt.

Martin defines culture and climate. Culture is aspiration: the things the organization says it values, the expectations it sets, and the environment it hopes for every day. It appears on walls, in culture pamphlets, and in onboarding. Climate is the felt experience team members have every day. When culture and climate align, organizations get high engagement: committed employees who put discretionary effort and energy toward the business, consumers, productivity, and innovation. When a company claims collaboration, care, and innovation but a team experiences a manager barking orders in a neglected corner of the organization, dissonance erodes engagement. Great talent can become burned out, actively disengaged, and spend discretionary effort elsewhere.

He stresses that culture does not come from on high or from CEO values alone. It comes from the choices leaders make in how they run teams each day and whether those choices line up with stated values. There is no single right culture. Some elite law firms honestly brand themselves as places where people should bring a sleeping bag because they will work constantly, and they still attract top litigators because the felt experience matches the promise: work with the best, on the best cases, in a flat organization, and leave as one of the best litigators in the world.

Martin then discusses engagement as a relationship. He cites John Gottman and his wife, who studied couples in the Love Lab to identify the smallest unit of currency in relationships: the bid. People bid with each other constantly. There are bids toward, such as nodding, complimenting, summarizing, or responding to a joke; bids against, such as the argumentative but engaged back-and-forth some relationships use; and bids away, where someone is ignored. Gottman's research could predict with about 90% accuracy whether couples would still be married seven years later. Healthy couples bid toward each other 83% of the time; couples headed for divorce did so about 33% of the time. Martin says teams are bidding for leaders' attention every day, and leaders should pay attention to what kind of bids they return. The most damaging is the bid away because it communicates that the other person does not exist or is not relevant.

Martin says he is fascinated by growth companies because growth puts pressure on culture. He describes eight warning signals that can indicate a team's or company's culture is in trouble if leaders fail to take them seriously. He highlights common answers when people are asked how they are doing. Busy, he says, is the answer of the un-strategic, meaning people have too much to do, cannot make choices, and are not being helped to choose. Fine is the answer of the actively disengaged, because people are rarely actually fine; they are often angry, upset, sad, or excited. When someone says fine, leaders should ask the next question.

He unpacks several warning signals through stories. The first is invoking history. New companies often tell expensive new talent to sit still and listen because the company is different. Martin says this keeps companies in place. If the organization hired new people because it dislikes where it is today, it should let them loose. Onboarding should be about the company getting to know the new person, not only the new person getting to know the company. Leaders should listen with full attention because new talent brings useful information. Saying "we've tried that idea; it doesn't work here" is another way to invoke history. Ideas have their time; just because something did not work once does not mean it will not work tomorrow.

He tells the story of Alex Velez, whom he met when Velez was a junior at Berkeley. Velez attended an optional geology lecture about growing high-quality organic vegetables from waste. Velez and his friend Nick returned to their fraternity house, collected coffee grounds from local coffee shops, and began growing porcini mushrooms in the basement. When Berkeley's president found out, he came down, heard the story, and helped fund what became Back to the Roots Ventures, known for mushroom kits in Whole Foods. Martin says Velez still calls him for advice on topics such as mergers and acquisitions, despite Martin being an HR person, because Velez trusts his brain and calls many people. Martin uses this as a model for shortcutting one's own schemas and experience with new talent.

The second signal is keeping people busy. Leaders fill free time, but free time is where creativity and innovation rest. Martin asks leaders to consider how much of what they give people is simply exporting stress. Leaders should import stress and export civility. If leaders are not strategic and do not make choices, they make it impossible for people to participate in strategy. Lives are full, and even people in the audience may be catching up on work during the talk. Leaders need to say that fewer things done better are of higher value, even when that feels counterintuitive.

He uses Ricardo Semler as an example. Semler took over his father's business at 26 and fired 97% of the management team because people were busy, making their own choices, and not moving in one direction. He wanted to build a company around accountability, making it permeate every area of the business. From onboarding to performance review, development, and compensation, Semler tried to build ownership so everyone participated in strategy and made the best choice for the business. Martin describes Semler allowing people to choose their own salary after seeing internal comp ratios, external benchmarks, and job descriptions. The point is that values are communicated through touchpoints, not wall posters: leaders should ask whether each touchpoint reinforces the values they claim to live by.

The final signal Martin discusses is leading with critique. He tells the DevOps audience that engineers, Agile practitioners, and operations people can fall into believing that every idea brought to them must be picked apart. It is easy for leaders to think their job is to improve ideas by finding what is wrong with them, but Martin says that is not the job. The leader's job is to instill the sense that the organization needs more and better ideas every day, and to teach people how to find and work through to the best possible solution or better practice.

He points to Tom Kelley from IDEO as a model of valuing creativity. At IDEO, creativity is rampant. Martin tells the story of a young man named Beau interviewing there. Beau appeared disheveled, sat down with a projector, and projected a stop-motion film about his life, values, beliefs, and work experiences onto his own chest. After three and a half minutes, they hired him without saying a word. IDEO knew technical skill could be taught and that when you find creativity, innovation, and talent, you do not let it go. Martin summarizes the pattern: if you value creativity, hire for it; if you value accountability and ownership, let people set their salaries; if you care about curiosity, call people who are ill-informed about the subject and ask them anyway because someone will have a better idea than you.

In closing, Martin says a leader's job is to set the rules for recess. He tells a story about Scott Stucke, a friend at West Point, whose leadership course has cadets create rules for recess. The cadets, believing everything can be designed, plan to line children up by height, number them into groups, assign activities, rotate them every two minutes, blow a final whistle, and debrief. When the bell rings, the children rush out chaotically, ignore the cadets, climb fences, kick, scream, and run around. Fifteen minutes feels like six days. The cadets then watch the teachers. The teachers stand at the doorway, the children pass by, and the playground self-organizes. The teachers explain that they set only three rules each day: no one runs in the parking lot, nobody climbs the fence, and do not hit, kick, pinch, slap, or bite anybody. Other than that, the children are on their own.

Martin uses the metaphor to warn that leaders often over-organize employees' lives and act as parents instead of leaders. The practical question is: what is the fewest number of rules a leader can set to get the highest level of engagement and empowerment from the team?

His final asks are threefold. As leaders, be mindful of the climate you are creating and whether it aligns to the culture you want; leaders control more than they know. As talent, use your voice when organizations ask how they are doing; do not let weak signals stand, and do not only complain or be a thorn in leaders' sides, but offer better solutions. As a community, have more conversations like this. The DevOps community is on the cusp of being central to the future of business, and to produce the innovation needed to run companies, the community must discuss the how: culture, high-performing teams, engagement, and how to keep great talent from finding another place to work. He encourages the audience to give themselves grace, try to be 10% better, and remember that everyone is imperfect. There is no best leader, but if people align the way they lead to the values they subscribe to in life, they and their teams will be okay.

Gene Kim closes with, "Trains and rainbows for everyone."