From Accelerate,
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. Such leaders encourage their teams to work toward a common goal through their vision, values, communication, example-setting, and their evident caring about their followers’ personal needs.
In the context of the devops movement, it means:
- Establishing and supporting generative, high-trust cultural norms
- Create technologies that enable developer productivity, reducing lead time and supporting reliability
- Supporting team experimentation and innovation
- Working across organizational silos to achieve strategic alignment
This is accomplished through
- Vision :: Understanding where the org should be in 5 years
- Inspirational communication :: inspires and motivates folks, even in an uncertain/changing environment
- Intellectual stimulation :: challenges 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; personally compliments outstanding work.
For line-managers, a critical aspect is connecting the work the team is doing to the larger strategic initiatives of the company.