Dr. Steve Mayner

Yes, I am Steve Mayner. I do work with Scaled Agile, the folks that brought you SAFe. For those who may not be familiar with it, it is the market-leading framework for lean, agile, DevOps adoption at scale, and we've had some great success. We've got 135 partners around the world, lots of people trained, great business results.

Really not here to talk about the framework. We'll be happy to share more about that at the booth if you want to stop by. I'm really here to talk about something that I've learned in working with the largest organizations in the world the last year and a half at Scaled Agile, and then for years prior to that, working with government agencies in the U.S. in their transformation process to adopting lean and agile for their product development.

And one of my observations that I made some years ago is, as I went from organization to organization to organization, I found there was a dramatic difference between the success or failure of these transformative initiatives. And I became curious: what makes the difference between whether one organization succeeds where another one fails?

And it became such a curiosity that I decided to devote my doctoral research on that question: understanding organizational change, what the factors are that contribute to success and failure, and what can we give to business leaders as something practical and actionable that can help increase the likelihood that success initiatives will actually succeed?

And that's really what I'm here to share with you today, is some learnings that I took away from that process.

So I think everybody would agree, hopefully, in the room. Raise your hand if you agree with this statement: that DevOps adoption is often going to result in organizational change.

Not too much disagreement in the room with that. So if we all agree with that, would you also agree with that?

Yes. In fact, early on in my research, it was like, "Thank you, Captain Obvious," right?

So John Kotter was one of the first folks, if you go to his seminal work, Leading Change, many years ago, he made this observation from his experience that 70% of organizational change initiatives fail. And of course, that set off this firestorm of supporting and counter-research around: is 70% the right number or not?

And you've got lots of other peer-reviewed research that came out, whether it's talking about, in this case, they just made a general observation that companies engaging in strategic change are more likely to fail than to succeed. And over here, you'll notice that there are some pretty famous companies that were faced with organizational change challenges that didn't quite make it.

I don't know how well this is known in Europe, but we used to love going to Blockbuster with our kids and letting them pick out a movie on a Friday night. Well, you can't do that anymore because that company's no longer around.

Other kinds of change initiatives around products, other research came up with a 50% failure number. Anybody remember New Coke? Yeah, that didn't work so well either.

Burke in 2011 supported Kotter's number and said, "Yes, in fact, we found that at least 70% of the change initiatives that we studied had in fact failed." Again, the implications are if we do not have the ability to understand the changing market around us and adapt to that, we can end up like another great American icon of industry, Kodak, who no longer exists. They failed to adapt to the changing market successfully.

But quality improvement initiatives: 40% to 93% failure rate. Anybody own a Galaxy Note 7? You know they're coming out with the 8, right? That'll be interesting. Let's hope they learn some things from the 7.

Here's an interesting one I found. Smith did a survey of all of the change management research and tried to understand, are certain types of change initiatives more likely to fail than succeed? And he studied all different types of change, whether it was technology change, process change, and so forth.

And the thing that really struck me was initiatives involving culture change had a measly 19% success rate.

Is a shift from a legacy waterfall process to a lean, agile, DevOps type of environment going to change the culture in many of our organizations? So what does that research then tell us?

Not too good, right? And this is what I was seeing in my practical experience, working with the senior executives of many different organizations. And they were encountering this kind of phenomenon, and that's what led me into this research study.

And here's what I found from looking across all different kinds of research that had been done into why does organizational change fail. And there's a lot of things. Can you guys relate to the stuff on the screen?

Yeah. Is this resonating with anyone? You guys have seen this happen, right?

So this is not just academic. This is really what's going on out there in our change initiatives. And the interesting thing was the number one reason that I found in study after study after study, that the main reason why a change initiative failed was employee resistance to change.

So that's an interesting thing, but then I wanted to dig into that and understand more about why is it that employees are not excited about our change initiatives. Do they not see the value in why it is we're wanting to do these things?

So we have this observation that change is very difficult, and it's more likely to fail than to succeed. And yet we also know this, right? We live in a world where change, in fact, I think it was a Forbes article I read not too long ago that says, "In the 21st century, organizational agility and the ability to adapt rapidly is a core competency for the 21st century."

Right?

In New York Business Journal, since 2000, 52% of the names on the Fortune 500 list are gone. That's staggering. And that curve, if you look over history, is exponential. The rate of change and of the ability or inability of organizations to adapt to change is pretty significant.

McKinsey & Company did a report, and they had this quote: "Speed is critical to disruption, yet legacy structures can block a company's ability to execute rapidly." Which means we have to have the ability to make those changes.

So we have this amazing, it's almost like the immovable object and the irresistible force, right? Change is very, very hard and most likely to fail, and yet we must be able to change. We must be able to adapt because of the pace of technology change, disruption coming into our marketplaces from new entrants, and globalization. So many things that are driving forces that say our organization must be able to adapt and do it rapidly.

So I became curious: if we have this amazing dichotomy, what kind of answers can we offer to leaders to break the deadlock and to be successful in their change initiatives?

And the more that I researched and the more that I read, I started uncovering a very common theme, and it had to do with the behaviors of leaders during change initiatives. And so that really led me down this path of doing a quantitative study examining the correlations between leader behaviors and successive change, specifically in agile and DevOps transformations.

And in that study, I went through the whole history of leadership. In research, you have to do the survey of the existing body of knowledge. And I went through all of the past leadership theories, whether it's transactional leadership or charismatic leadership or servant leadership, and I came across something called transformational leadership. And that's what I want to focus the next section of the talk about.

Why is this important? If you go all the way back to Deming, Deming talked about when we have great people, we've hired these people in our organizations, and they're working really hard, and yet we're still having these challenges, what's the problem?

The problem's not the people. The problem's the system. And who can change the system?

Right? It's the leaders in our organizations.

And so what I found, it was really curious because when you look at the body of research, there has actually been more research done around transformational leadership, which is a leadership theory that was first introduced by James MacGregor Burns, who was a biographer for John F. Kennedy. And in his book Leadership, he introduced this concept of transformational leadership, synthesizing some of the previous theories, but then adding some new things.

Let's do a quick look at what Burns recommended. I'm going to give you my interpretation because some of his terminology, like inspirational motivation, sounds a little academic. So I'm going to give you maybe the easier-to-interpret version.

So really four different quadrants, the first one being transformational leaders are very adept at establishing a clear vision. Where are we going? Why are we going there? How are we going to get there? Clear vision intent. It inspires and motivates people. They understand the why behind the change. And if you follow folks like Simon Sinek, right, start with why. Knowledge workers need to know the why for something, and then that will help them drive their motivation. It creates organization alignment and so forth.

So transformational leaders communicate very clear vision.

Transformational leaders are also very authentic. They set the example. They are the role model. They are themselves lifelong learners. They create the environment of trust and transparency through their own conduct, their own ability to admit their own mistakes, to be very open and transparent for themselves personally, and acting with integrity. Burns called that idealized influence: leading the change and knowing the way, as Deming said.

The third characteristic is the ability of a leader to develop others and see people as individuals, not just numbers. Offering that individualized support, the coaching, the encouragement, keeping that open door, line of communication, being very accessible, recognizing both individual and team contributions, and being authentic and showing genuine care and concern.

Folks, if you haven't noticed, our people understand the difference between doing things to make it look like we care and if we really care. You guys know that?

So transformational leaders truly see people as people, and they want to demonstrate that genuine care and concern. So I call that the growth aspect of the leader.

And the fourth, and if you look in the body of knowledge, this is very similar to what charismatic leadership taught. These things you saw in servant leadership. Burns saw a gap, and that is these things are all great, but we still have to perform. We still have to excel. We still have to compete in our marketplaces.

So this is the aspect he called intellectual stimulation, which I call creativity. Or it's this aspect of understanding that as a leader, your job is not to command and control, but your job is to grow other people and to equip them, encourage them, and then unleash them and empower them. Unleash the intrinsic motivation, the decentralization to be innovative and to be creative and to strive for that truly market-differentiating innovation that's going to set us apart.

That's the perfect alignment to the lean and agile and DevOps mindset of really having self-organizing, empowered teams that are going to really excel.

So if you look at it, my interpretation of this is the bottom two sets of behaviors, vision and authenticity, is the leader leading himself or herself, right? Thinking about, can I communicate with vision and clarity and direction? Can I be authentic? Am I an authentic leader creating an environment of trust and transparency and integrity?

And then if you look at the top two, really, it's our interactions with others. How do I interact with individuals? Do I see them? And do I show genuine care and concern? And am I really seeing myself in my leadership role as raising other leaders and empowering them to really make a difference in our organization?

And then the leader must also understand that this is a never-ending process. That same plan-do-check-adjust cycle that we teach to our teams, the leader must also embrace for himself or herself, that it is a lifelong journey to learn and grow and constantly develop oneself, to be willing to admit where my strengths and weaknesses are, and to always be striving to grow in all those areas.

So that's the model for transformational leadership and my summary of it in a nutshell.

Here's kind of what we found from the research. If you look at different studies on transformational leadership, the outcomes are pretty impressive. It increases employee engagement.

It's interesting. When leaders lead in this way, their followers respond in very predictable ways. It starts to remove those barriers of resistance to change. They start leaning forward into the change and thinking beyond their job description and into actually, "How can I be a part of this change and make this change successful?"

So it directly goes to the number one biggest reason why organizational change initiatives fail, by changing that employee response to the change initiative, which I think is really, really powerful. And that's kind of why you see better organizational change outcomes and employee performance and attitudes and all these kinds of things.

Now, here's the good news. When I found this, this really excited me because one might think, "Well, if I don't have those behaviors in my own leadership style, is there any hope for me?"

The research shows that transformational leadership absolutely is a learned behavior, and that has been proven by study after study after study. So if someone has the willingness and the open mind to say that if I don't lead in that way, but I see the benefits of those leader behaviors, and I'm willing to change how I lead, that is definitely an achievable goal.

And why it's important. So here's sort of the "so what?" answer.

Research shows that transformational leadership actually has a greater influence on a follower's commitment to supporting organizational change than any specific change model. It's not about a five-step process or any framework. It's how leaders lead that has the greatest impact on how followers respond to the change, and I think that's very powerful.

So what are the implications for leaders in agile and DevOps implementations?

I love this.

Wait a minute.

Did anybody feel something when you saw this picture?

Yeah. Of course, I didn't wear a skirt, but that was me when I was that age, right? We always had that feeling of, "I'm on the outside looking in." And so many of our middle managers, I have these conversations every single week in the companies that I talk to, like, "What happens when we do all of this and we empower our teams, and they're self-managing and self-organizing? You're saying leadership is so important, but now I don't know what it is I'm supposed to do. I'm a middle manager. If I'm not doing this, what value do I add to the organization anymore? I kind of feel like that."

Well, guess what? Your value is immense. We still, in our large, complex organizations, need leaders. We need managers. They add tremendous value to the process.

The very first thing that we teach in our classes is leaders, as Deming said, "It's not sufficient to know that we need better quality and better productivity. It is critical that you know the way."

So we want you to lead the change. How are your people going to know that we're going in a different direction? It's because you're going to show them. You're going to show them by demonstrating and modeling these behaviors.

You're going to participate in what Kotter called the guiding coalition: the people who have the ability and the charter to guide us through the change. Leaders have tremendous, they understand the organization. They understand the politics. They have the network of connections. They know where all the bodies are buried. And having all of that knowledge and bringing that knowledge to the table to lead the change is incredibly valuable.

Creating the safe space. Managers and leaders are great permission-giving forces inside of the organization to say, "Look, we know that you're going to go individually, and as an organization, we're going to go through that J-curve." And that's okay. It's expected. We know it's going to happen. And as the folks who sit in the positions of authority who you may be concerned about, how are they going to respond when we're struggling through that change, we're telling you now it's okay.

We still need managers to do all those great manager things. Understanding what kind of talent do we need in lean, agile, DevOps organizations. Where do we go find them? How do we recruit them? How do we hire them? How do we incent them? How do we integrate them into our existing teams? How do we create reward structures that are team-centric and not individual-centric, which goes to our HR systems?

There's tons of work in our organizations out there to do that we still need leaders and managers focused on providing ongoing... Think about all the stuff that you've heard over yesterday and today, all the new technologies, all the new practices, all the new disciplines. Who's out there making sure that all of our knowledge workers have that ongoing development, whether it's training or pairing or having that opportunity in innovation and planning spaces to learn other things? Who's paying attention to that?

We still need leaders and managers looking at people as individuals and saying, "What are your growth concerns?" And making sure that those concerns are met.

Keeping teams in the know, making sure that that vision is always present, always in front of them. We still need leaders and managers doing all of these things while our self-empowered teams are building great, cool stuff.

So very quickly, in summary, here's what we've learned. Organizational change is hard and is prone to failure, especially when it leads to altering the culture. Lean, agile, and DevOps frequently involves organizational and cultural change. Knowledge workers involved in agile and DevOps initiatives are working hard. They're great people. They're very talented. They're very skilled, and they want to do well.

The challenge we have is with our system. Who can change the system? It's our leaders. Leaders are the only ones who can change the system, and research shows how they choose to lead, their leadership behaviors, have a direct influence on successful organizational change outcomes.

The transformational leadership behaviors that were originally authored by Burns and advanced by other thought leaders can have a positive influence on the factors like employee resistance to change that lead to successful organizational change efforts.

Anyone can be a transformational leader, and leaders and managers are still needed at all levels of a post-DevOps organization, where transformational leadership, their focus to other things that we still need leaders and managers to do.

One other quick footnote. So it was mentioned that I did this talk at DevOps Enterprise Summit in San Francisco last fall. So Gene and Nicole and I did an interesting experiment where we actually sent out the same survey. There's an actual survey instrument to measure transformational leadership behaviors that I used in my research. We used the same survey to survey the current and past speakers at all of the DevOps conferences, and we asked them to participate in the survey because these were people who had already demonstrated success in leading transformation. That's why Gene asked them to speak.

Anybody want to guess what the results, what was the transformational leadership quotient among these speakers over the conferences the last three years?

Consistently across the board, it came back that these were, in fact, people who were leading with those same transformational leadership behaviors. So it's not surprising that they had success and they had been invited to speak at the conference. So I think that's fascinating.

And by the way, before the conference is over, I think in the closing session today you're going to hear about the current State of DevOps survey, and there's going to be some cool info that Gene's going to share with you there.

So with that, here's the help that I'm looking for. This journey is not over just because I finished my doctoral research. I've learned just enough to tell me what I don't know, which is that while there is some correlation, I really want to dive deeper.

So I'd like to get into organizations that are willing to do additional research to see how these behaviors are playing out, or other behaviors that maybe they find not productive. Can we find a stronger cause and effect in success and failure rates? So if your organization might be interested in that, come see me.

And then other colleagues too. What I think is missing out there in the world, I built one for my previous company, but in terms of something that's readily available out there, if you want to learn to be a transformational leader, how do you do that? Just read all of Burns' articles, or is there something more substantive that we can offer to the market, to leaders, to organizations who want their leaders to lead in this fashion?

And so I'm also looking for colleagues who are similarly curious who might collaborate together and build such a thing that we could offer to our leaders and our organizations.

And with that... Oh, yeah, one last thought. One final shameless plug. If you want to learn more about this and a whole lot more, come to our summit. We can tell you more about that down in our booth.

And zero-zero on the clock. How's that?

Are we done, or do we have any time for questions, or we need to switch? I look to our facilitator somewhere.

Verity, what say you?

Two minutes for questions. Yes, sir.

Q&A

Q: You used the terms lean, agile, and DevOps almost interchangeably through that entire presentation.

A: Yes.

Q: Do you think the differences are important, or that we should be viewing this as a value-based transformation and the methodology we're using is almost irrelevant?

A: So for this topic of leadership, the type of change really does not matter. It's whether or not the change, the closer it gets to something that really challenges existing culture, that's where the need for different leadership behaviors really become most important because those types of changes are the types of changes that are going to get the strongest resistance from employees.

So how leaders lead becomes really, really critical. And whether you see those as a continuum or separate, it really doesn't matter for this topic.

Another question?

By the way, I have business cards up here on the stage. If anybody wants to have further questions or participate in further discussion, you're welcome to come get a business card.

Thank you very much for coming. Hope you enjoyed it.