Steve Mayner

My name is Steve Mayner. I work for Scaled Agile, Inc., the folks who bring you SAFe, the Scaled Agile Framework.

Thanks to the folks from Capital One for the great shout-out in the previous session.

I'm here today to chat about something that I've observed in my journey over about 30 years in the IT industry. The first half of that was in the commercial space, the last 15 years or so working in federal IT systems, working with government programs. Then in February of this year, I made the leap over to work for Scaled Agile, where I still have the wonderful opportunity to work with some of the largest organizations in the world.

Part of what I'm going to share with you today is some things that I've observed in that journey, working in all of those different environments with all those different customers.

Let's go ahead and dive in.

Over the course of today and yesterday, and if you've been involved in the DevOps conversation, the conferences the last couple of years, sometimes it's good to just sit back and appreciate all of the things that we've heard and we've learned about what this means to be on this DevOps journey.

Some of these things are very nicely captured in The DevOps Handbook and other sources. Things like rethinking our organizations aligned around value streams, and that leads to different organizational patterns and principles. The idea of leaning out our development process, of reducing batch size, reducing queue lengths, so that we achieve flow of value through the system.

Streamlining the whole deployment process, that's obviously been a huge part of the DevOps conversations, both in terms of practices as well as technologies, tools. Things like automated testing, CI/CD, automating the deployment process. Feedback through telemetry and A/B testing. You've heard some of the presenters in the general sessions talking about some of those practices, and having the dark deploys and all that kind of stuff. Great ideas and ways to advance our industry.

Building a learning organization. Getting value out quickly so we can go through that plan-do-check-adjust cycle that Deming taught us about. Automated change management and environment builds. Being able to really empower our teams to create the environments that they need on the fly.

I could go on and list lots more things, right? You guys have been taking furious notes the last couple of days, and so you kind of know that these are the kinds of themes that you'll hear across all the speakers.

Scaled Agile has also... Just so for those that may not be familiar with the framework, it really is a collection of success patterns, best practices that we've observed working with some of the largest organizations in the world. We have an article; we talk about what we have seen in terms of DevOps patterns amongst our customers.

Again, a lot of these are going to be repeated themes. Themes like building and maintaining a production-equivalent staging environment, so you have that to deploy to as part of your deployment pipeline. Maintaining dev, test, and production environments so that they are consistent all across the board. That's where the automated configuration management tools have really helped us.

Deploying to staging every iteration. Deploying to production frequently. Having everything under version control, including our infrastructure. Starting to create the ability to automatically build our environments and then deploying the actual deployment process.

These are the things we have seen. Awesome stuff, right?

But here's something that I think everybody has picked up on. You've certainly heard it from the speakers so far in the first day and a half, and that is this: as an organization, if you're not already doing these things and you're considering doing those things or you're in the process of doing those things, one thing is inexorably true, and that is, as you go down this path, as you engage in your journey, that is going to lead to that.

I see lots of head nods, so I think everybody is either in agreement with it or has experienced it directly.

We also know this, right? Yeah, this stuff isn't easy. They're all great ideas, and there's wonderful tools, and we get excited about coming to a conference like this. We want to run back home and try some of these things out, and we find out change is not the easiest thing in the world to do.

In my journey as a consultant, as a coach, in the last company I ran our Agile and DevOps practice, and we worked with federal customers trying to learn this Agile thing and this DevOps thing and implement it. I kept seeing the same pattern over and over again: that while the will and the ideas and the desire was there, oftentimes it just seemed like making the change was really, really hard.

That observation actually made me so curious, because change is so important. We have to have that ability, and yet we run into so many roadblocks. It prompted me to do some research, and that research led me down a journey that I needed to really dig into it in a disciplined way.

So I decided to actually pursue a doctorate focused on this phenomenon of organizational change and how difficult it can be.

In that research journey that I began several years ago, as I dug into the literature, I immediately ran into Kotter. Everybody's familiar with Kotter, right? 1996, Leading Change. He makes this declaratory statement that 70% of organizational change initiatives fail.

Then what followed was this flurry of additional research in the academic community, people trying to either substantiate or refute the 70%, and this ongoing debate that's been happening around, "Do 70% of organizational change initiatives really fail?"

Well, Kotter was just the beginning. He started a conversation. As I've dug into the literature, which you have to do as part of a doctoral program, while I certainly found there's room to argue over whether 70% is the right number or not, or how universally true that is, what I did find from the literature is that whether it's 70%, or 60%, or 80%, there's a lot of substantiation that organizational change initiatives are actually more likely to fail than to succeed.

Not only do we have the literature, we can just look at the headlines, right? Think about the strategic change that Blockbuster had to make when their market was disrupted by Netflix and on-demand technologies. They tried to adapt. They tried to change. Right? But they weren't able to overcome that, and now my grandkids will never know the joy of going into a Blockbuster on a Friday evening and getting to pick their movie out. They're just not going to know what that means, right?

Fifty percent failure, all types of change initiatives like, I don't know, let's mess with a formula for a product that has lasted for decades. Yeah, let's do that.

Another one. Seventy percent in this study, all changes in the study weren't successful. Kodak, again, faced with needing to change, tried to adapt, but they adapted too late.

And the quality initiatives, I just had to throw this out there. I grew up in the era of the Pinto, right? I could have just as easily thrown up, oh, I don't know, maybe a Galaxy Note 7.

Anybody knows this story? Right? Ron Johnson comes in, gets hired by JCPenney over from Apple, and he tries to bring that Apple culture to a long-standing American stalwart retail company. How'd that turn out?

Well, one of the things that our research in change initiatives has told us is the more the change involves changing the culture, the more likely it is that that change is going to fail. Certainly, we saw that in the case of JCPenney.

So we've got all this stuff that tells us that change is hard and it's likely to fail.

Isn't this true? Especially in 2016, in this day and age, organizations must continuously adapt. You have heard that from speaker after speaker over the last day and a half, whether it's the Affordable Care Act in one industry or the advent of driverless vehicles in the case of Allstate. What does that do to insurance?

How many of you have read this book, Bold? Anybody? Okay. Homework assignment.

Awesome book from some of the folks that have been really on the forefront of creating the environment that led to things like SpaceX and lots of innovative things. What they do, and not so much the conclusions they draw, but they really articulate the changes that are happening in our world around us that are disrupting the environment, whether it's everything as a service, or Internet of Things, or driverless vehicles, or 3D printing. The list goes on and on.

Never in any time in our lifetimes have we been in a place where it was so easy for entrepreneurs to come in and disrupt almost any market out there.

How many watched this this last week? You know this guy? Yeah. Musk comes out, "Oh, by the way, we forgot to tell you guys, but we were working on this whole thing where we can turn your whole roof into a solar panel, and it looks like shingles."

Where did that come from? Right? This is more and more becoming the norm.

What we know is that organizations that fail to have this ability to change as a core competency are likely not to be around for a long time.

Last year, in New York Business Journal, a study was done. Since 2000, 52%, over half of the companies that were in the Fortune 500 in 2000, no longer exist. They either went out of business, got bought out, merger, et cetera.

This is our reality.

So we need to understand why change is so hard. Because we, as organizational leaders, have to have our organizations be able to change.

Anybody recognize any of these things on this list? How many have been in a change initiative that experienced any one of these things? Raise your hand.

Yeah.

What I found in looking through the literature is that the number one most cited reason for organizational change failure was employee resistance to change. How curious.

If we're going to have a competency of being able to change as an organization, we need to understand why these things are happening. And more importantly, what was driving my research and my inner desire to find some answers was, how do we overcome this?

That really led me to the conversation around transformational leadership.

The more I dug into the research and using my own experience, I kind of began to sense that somewhere in this equation, leadership played an important role.

In fact, we go to Uncle Deming here. We love to quote Deming. We sense that leaders play a key role because, if we believe Deming, what we know is that wherever we are in our transformation journey, our people really are trying hard. Yes, there may be a few bad eggs, but by and large, people come in wanting to do a good job.

If the system is not where it needs to be, then we have to change the system. And who can change the system?

Grassroots change initiatives don't work so well, especially in the large companies that we tend to work with, right? You have a leadership structure, and if it's ever going to change, the folks that have those positions have to cast that vision. They have to drive that change.

So I wanted to dig into this a little bit more and see, is any kind of leadership okay?

Like many of you who have been in any kind of a business program, you had to study the history of different leadership theories. In my literature review, I went through all of them, learning about them, studying about them, and I came across this one I had never encountered before. It's called transformational leadership.

I thought, "Hmm, that's curious." I knew servant leadership. I knew charismatic leadership. I knew all these other ones, but I didn't know about that one. The more I pulled on that thread, the more intrigued I became.

What I found out is, and there was a study of the literature that was done in 2011 that found that there had been more peer-reviewed research conducted on transformational leadership than all the previous forms of leadership combined.

Now, that got my attention.

So I dug into it, and let me just kind of give you a sense of what this thing is that we're talking about called transformational leadership.

Transformational leadership really stemmed from an author by the name of James MacGregor Burns. He wrote a book called, interestingly enough, Leadership, in the mid-1980s. Fascinating individual, by the way. If you really want to learn more about where this came from, this genesis of thought that is captured in transformational leadership, look at his biography. He was a biographer for JFK. He was a combat reporter in World War II. Really fascinating individual.

So let's look at the elements of transformational leadership. He used some terms that are maybe kind of hard to digest. They're academic-like terms, so I've translated it into something that may be easier for us to grasp.

The first element of a transformational leader is this idea of someone who has the ability to create inspirational motivation, or this vision. The ability to inspire followers, create passion and motivation, create organizational alignment and encouragement. A lot of Burns' work here definitely drew from charismatic leadership, for sure.

But you think of some of the leaders he was around, folks like JFK, right? "We're going to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade." That was the kind of influence that he was really looking to as he articulated this aspect of the leader.

The second area was what he called idealized influence, or I call it authenticity, right? This idea of setting the example, leading by example, being true to yourself and being authentic, having integrity, and through your own behaviors, creating this environment of trust.

These two bottom areas really are focusing on the leader and how they present themselves.

The next two areas focus on how the leader interacts with followers.

The next area is what Burns called individualized consideration. This idea of seeing the people in the organization as individuals and having true care and concern for the individual. Not seeing them as a number, not seeing them as resources. As Daniel Pink talked about, not seeing them as smaller, better-smelling horses, right?

So this is where the leader is really focused on, "I want the folks in my organization to grow. I want them to have personal satisfaction in their own careers through the work that they're doing. So I'm going to invest in their training. I'm going to give them recognition. I'm going to give them access to me as a leader."

The fourth area he called intellectual stimulation.

So the bottom area on the far lower left side came from charismatic leadership, largely. You see a lot of servant leadership in these two arenas, but the last area really was kind of unique to transformational leadership. It's this idea that it's great to have all these warm and fuzzy things, but we're still in organizations, and we have to achieve, we have to perform. We have to deliver value to our customers. We have to be innovative if we're going to succeed in our marketplace.

In this arena, the transformational leader is, I call it creativity. It's this focus on innovation and challenging the status quo and encouraging followers to exercise their creativity, and really empowering them to be innovative and to relentlessly improve.

Speaking of which, that's another element of transformational leaders. They're lifelong learners. They're curious. They're constantly trying to improve themselves as well as their organizations.

I found this one piece of research that really struck home why this is so important. This study was conducted, and what they were looking at is leadership compared to different change models, right? In all respect to Kotter and his eight steps, we use that in our own teaching, but this study found that transformational leadership actually had a greater influence on followers' commitment to supporting organizational change than on implementing any specific change management practice.

Now isn't that interesting?

Other things that transformational leadership... As you just dig through the body of knowledge and literature, there's just all kinds of things that kept appearing, these patterns, and there's tons of research. I cited a few. There's a bibliography in back. You can dig into the studies if you want.

But there was just very compelling evidence that said, this is a set of leadership behaviors that's worth understanding better and learning more about.

Now, here's the thing that I got most excited about as I was digging through the literature, and that's this: transformational leadership can be learned. It can be taught.

If you look at that list and say, "Well, that's not me. That's not how I lead. It's not natural for me to work in that way," that's fine. But if you understand that you're going to achieve better outcomes, change is going to be more successful in your organization if you lead with that set of behaviors, the good news is you can actually learn to lead in that way.

You're not stuck in your current way of leadership, which I think is really cool. Again, there's tons of studies that have been conducted that prove this out, that it actually can be learned.

Gene and I have talked about this area of research kind of since I began. We've been having conversations about it for the last three years or so. As we started getting ready for this particular conference and he asked me to do this session on this topic, we were just chatting about it, and I can't even remember who originally came up with the idea, but we kind of formed a hypothesis. We decided to do an experiment.

Here's the hypothesis.

Our hypothesis was that, if you think about all the leaders that have been on the stage over the last three years at this conference, that among those leaders that Gene had selected to speak at DevOps Enterprise Summit, if we conducted a study, we would find that there were a very strong tilt, a very strong presence of these transformational leadership behaviors among that specific population, as measured by the gold standard on measuring transformational leadership behaviors, which is the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire.

Which, the questions, if you've ever taken it, they need to be updated. Maybe I'll do that after I graduate, but right now it is the standard.

So we did that. We sent it out to 112 current and past presenters. There were 44 responses when I sent this slide deck in. As of today, we actually had some more people come in, so 50 responses. It did not change the results any. The results were the same.

With that, for statistical significance, that gave us 90% confidence and 10% margin of error with that size of population.

Drum roll, please.

Here are the results.

The green area shows, according to their benchmark of thousands and thousands of people who have taken this survey, this is the area that, if it lands in the green zone, then that indicates a strong tendency to use transformational leadership behaviors in leading your organization.

Clearly, you can see that this group landed nice and squarely in that range.

If you break that out by the individual behaviors, now, one of them, the MLQ breaks into IIA and IIB, so it's still the same four behaviors. You can look at the individual areas, and again, all up and down the board, they all land pretty consistently in the range for transformational leadership.

The survey actually also tests other behaviors. So it's good in academic research to not just focus in on one area. It also includes questions that test transactional leadership, which is more of that carrots-and-sticks type of leadership, as well as passive avoidant, right? I'm just going to lock myself in my office and maybe the problems will go away.

So again, as a transformational leader, you should see less and less of those behaviors, as indicated by the green area. Again, if you look at the blue bar, which was our test group, the presenters at the conference, again, they follow that pattern. They don't just do transformational leadership sometimes and these other behaviors other times. They really lean on their transformational leadership skills as they lead and guide through their organizations in implementing DevOps.

If you think about it, and as I've sat through all of the plenary sessions and the sessions like this that I've been able to go to, and you look at how they talk about how they're leading and implementing, and they're talking about their DevOps journey, it's just funny, because knowing that four-quadrant slide and those behaviors, I could see those exact kinds of things just coming out of their presentations.

Clearly, it wasn't just the survey that said this. You can see it in their description of how they are guiding and leading as leaders in their organization, which I thought was pretty cool. A very nice affirmation.

So here's what we've learned.

Organizational change is hard, and it's prone to failure, especially when it comes to altering the culture. Lean, Agile, and DevOps adoption frequently, if not almost always, leads to organizational change and many times also cultural change.

Anybody wearing the T-shirts from the conference, right? It's right on the front.

Knowledge workers involved in DevOps adoption are working hard, and they want to do well. What we need to do is understand that the challenges are in the system. Leaders, because of how our organizations are structured, are the only ones who can ultimately change the system. More importantly, how they lead through that change is going to have a direct influence on the success level of that organizational change and the outcomes.

Transformational leadership behaviors by lean-Agile leaders can have a positive influence on the factors that contribute to successful organizational change, like resistance to change and employee engagement, that list of things we talked about. The research indicates that type of leadership does affect those variables.

I love this: anyone can learn to be a transformational leader.

Then, of course, the last thing that we just shared with you is that our hypothesis was confirmed, that the presenters at this conference over the last three years have demonstrated strong transformational leadership behaviors according to the survey that was conducted.

Clearly recognizing this was a self-assessment, so the bias and the skew factors in academic research are certainly true, and that survey is done in a 360 in normal implementation. But again, I think it was just a good, fun experiment to think about in terms of the folks that are standing in front of us speaking to us at this conference.

I included in the presentation, when it's posted and you can download it, all of the different studies and books and resources that I used for this presentation, and you'll see the citations from slide to slide. Absolutely feel free to go and read them for yourself. Some of them are fun. Some of them are real... If you have a problem with insomnia, I would highly recommend some of the reading.

But yeah, that's it. Right on time, we've landed right in the time box.

I assume we need to switch out, is that correct? Or do we have time for questions?

We have probably time for one or two questions. Okay.

I'm happy to answer one or two questions until she pulls me off the stage.

Q&A

Q: In terms of how to learn transformational leadership, did anything come out of the literature about how to learn?

A: Yes. So the question was, does the literature say anything about how to learn to be a transformational leader?

There's tons of organizations that do clinics and workshops and trainings in transformational leadership. In my last company, I was actually part of a team that created a transformational leadership training process. It wasn't a class. It was actually a year-long experience of a cohort that we took through four in-residence experiences, plus mentorship and coaching and a development project to help them learn how to exhibit those behaviors.

One more question, and I think we'll have to close. Anybody? Any questions?

All right. Thank you very much. You've been a great audience. Thank you for your time.