Dr. Mario's 2nd 🧠

đź“– Accelerate. The Science of Lean Software and Devops

5 min read

Leaders and Managers

For ✍️ Sin machirulos hay paraiso. Una charla heterofriendly sobre management.

What is transformational leadership?

…means leaders inspiring and motivating followers to achieve higher performance by appealing to their values and sense of purpose, facilitating wide-scale organizational change. It has been observed that there are similarities between servant leadership and transformational leadership, but they differ in the leader’s focus. Servant leaders focus on their followers’ development and performance, whereas transformational leaders focus on getting followers to identify with the organization and engage in support of organizational objectives. (p. 146)

To capture transformational leadership, we used a model that includes five dimensions (Rafferty and Griffin 2004). According to this model, the five characteristics of a transformational leader are:

  • Vision. Has a clear understanding of where the organization is going and where it should be in five years.
  • Inspirational communication. Communicates in a way that inspires and motivates, even in an uncertain or changing environment.
  • Intellectual stimulation. Challenges followers to think about problems in new ways.
  • Supportive leadership. Demonstrates care and consideration of followers’ personal needs and feelings.
  • Personal recognition. Praises and acknowledges achievement of goals and improvements in work quality; personally compliments others when they do outstanding work. (p. 145)

The examples from a survey are very interesting:

My leader or manager: (Vision) ​ –​ Has a clear understanding of where we are going. ​–​ Has a clear sense of where he/she wants our team to be in five years. ​–​ Has a clear idea of where the organization is going. (Inspirational communication) ​– ​Says things that make employees proud to be a part of this organization. ​–​ Says positive things about the work unit. ​–​ Encourages people to see changing environments as situations full of opportunities. (Intellectual stimulation) ​–​ Challenges me to think about old problems in new ways. ​–​Has ideas that have forced me to rethink some things that I have never questioned before. – ​Has challenged me to rethink some of my basic assumptions about my work. (Supportive leadership) ​ – ​Considers my personal feelings before acting. ​ – ​Behaves in a manner which is thoughtful of my personal needs. ​– ​Sees that the interests of employees are given due consideration. (Personal recognition) ​– ​Commends me when I do a better than average job. ​ –​ Acknowledges improvement in my quality of work. ​ – ​Personally compliments me when I do outstanding work. (p. 148)

A good leader is a necessary condition…

…teams with the least transformative leaders are far less likely to be high performers. Specifically, teams that report leadership in the bottom one-third of leadership strength are only half as likely to be high performers (…) though we often hear stories of DevOps and technology transformation success coming from the grassroots, it is far easier to achieve success when you have leadership support. (p. 148)

but not a non-suficient condition:

We looked at the performance of teams with the strongest transformational leaders—those with the top 10% of reported transformational leadership characteristics. One might think that these teams would have better than average performance. However, these teams were equally or even less likely to be high performers compared to the entire population of teams represented in survey results. This makes sense, because leaders cannot achieve goals on their own. (p. 148)

Encourage teams to organize internal “yak days,” where teams get together to work on technical debt. These are great events because technical debt is so rarely prioritized. (p. 151)

Matrix organization

Measuring performance

Four metrics, known elsewhere as DORA metrics (p. 43)

  • Lead time: the time between the request of a customer and that request being satisfied. Because there is an initial fuzzy part of design, they measure the delivery part: from a commit to code running on production.
  • Deployment frequency.
  • Mean Time to Restore (MTTR): how quick we fix an incident.
  • Change Fail Percentage: percentage of our deployment that require a fix.

A new one was added in 2021. See Announcing DORA 2021 Accelerate State of DevOps report | Google Cloud Blog:

Reliability (…) Specifically, we asked respondents to rate their ability to meet or exceed their reliability targets. We found that teams with varying degrees of delivery performance see better outcomes when they also prioritize operational performance.

Employee satisfaction

High performers have better employee loyalty, as measured by employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS). Our research found that employees in high-performing organizations were 2.2 times more likely to recommend their organization as a great place to work, and other studies have also shown that this is correlated with better business outcomes (Azzarello et al. 2012). (p. 129)

Net Promoter Score is calculated based on a single question: How likely is it that you would recommend our company/product/service to a friend or colleague? Net Promoter Score is scored on a 0-10 scale, and is categorized as follows: Customers who give a score of 9 or 10 are considered promoters. Promoters create greater value for the company because they tend to buy more, cost less to acquire and retain, stay longer, and generate positive word of mouth. Those giving a score of 7 or 8 are passives. Passives are satisfied, but much less enthusiastic customers. They are less likely to provide referrals and more likely to defect if something better comes along. Those giving a score from 0 to 6 are detractors. Detractors are more expensive to acquire and retain, they defect faster, and can hurt the business through negative word of mouth. (p. 129)

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