DevOps Is Where Culture Lives

Next week at DOES20 Virtual - our session on “Impression Management and Psychological Safety for High Performing Teams” is on Wednesday the 14th at 2:05PDT and we’ll be answering questions live on the Slack channel meanwhile so gather all your “Do CEOs bite their lip too?”; “Should I raise a point even if the team may hate me for it?”; “How can we check when we don’t speak up out of fear in our team and does this hurt our performance?” questions and see you then but make sure you see all the other talks too, here’s why.

If you read through the stupendously well laid out schedule Gene Kim and the kick-arse ITRevolution team and community put together, and you’ve never attended a DOES before, you can’t help but be shocked that aside from stories from the trenches of own experiences of what actually happens in the field when there’s a major transformation that may mention the particular technology pitfalls, not one other talk is about any tool, process or piece of software but the leadership, way of working, thought process, EQ and mentality change needed to use them. 

As usual, I’m amazed how well kept a secret this is. How few people know that it is a lot more about the WHO and the HOW and much less about the WITH WHAT in technology businesses. Truth is, you’re a waterfall dinosaur recently tasked with “becoming DevOps” so you make a product your customers love fast enough and remain alive, you could knock out what the best Agile way of work is, set up a pipe on paper and decide on all the licenses you’ll need within a week. Then the hard work begins. The glares, the mistrust, the doubts, the fear, the hope, the storming, the resistance, the enthusiasm pockets, the motivation work, the keeping on track, the building of psychologically safe and resilient teams, the making sure everyone is happy and healthy enough to make all of that happen. 

This is why, every time I speak to those who are in other areas of the business touched by a sudden impetus to reduce their “human debt” I tell them to please look closely at what they already have in DevOps. It’s why, whenever I hear anyone is “working on culture” without even being sure what DevOps is, without having even read “The Projects”, I have to wonder. Every time HR starts a new “initiative”, any time they bring in organisational development consultants who are divorced from understanding the technology, any time there’s “change work” and so on. How any of these can be thought of and planned on paper, in isolation, with no understanding of the dynamic the tech brings, in another area of the enterprise when there’s so much moral, emotional and even hourly investment already there if the company is doing any Agile or building a DevOps organisation, is beyond me. 

The divide between HR/business and tech leadership in IT-driven businesses is incomprehensible but it is growing greater by the day. The book I’ve written is attempting to bridge it, but we’re going to need a lot more talk about it and a lot more voices recognising it before we can stop the loss of potential that happens by not closing the gap. There’s so much value that our people are deprived of because it falls into this gapping hole between the two. 

Think of it as two pockets of the organisation which have different job descriptions but work on the same thing. Be it that arguably, one works on it in theory, and the other in practice. One declaratively and one silently but oh so efficiently. Claiming these two parts don’t the same thing, or that it’s not happening, is pretending that we think the once-a-year-NPS-survey and hated, dry evaluations are the same as reaching someone deeply in a 1-on-1, looking them in the eye and asking “Cool, but between us, how do you *really* feel about it, bud?”. In reality, no one actually thinks they’re equivalent, but one part of the business often lost the channel to have that heart-to-heart and the only lines of communication that remain open and deep are at the tech team level and that’s why the team leader, the scrum master, the Agile coach, the CTO, the architects, the POs, even the COOs are the new keepers of their people’s true feelings and therefore hold the key to making them high performers. 

This isn’t new, it’s a few tens of years in the making. Ever since the new ways of work were so dramatically different from the old ones that they required people’s genuine investment. Lean Six Sigma, Agile, you name it, they needed professionals to challenge their conventions, transform their habits, come out of their comfort zone and bring their best selves to the table while embracing learning, collaboration and flexibility so they were instantly about the humans. 

Laying out what technology or what process was needed for that, was the easy bit and anyone attempting these, hasn’t had to learn of a slide deck about servant leadership, that command and control won’t work, they lived it. They haven’t been told to care more intently about their people and to understand how they feel, help them adapt and bring them enthusiastically along because it would be “nice”, they discovered it’s a sine qua non condition of succeeding. They haven't build a DevOps organisation with a healthy culture by design, they arrived at it by heart. They haven’t been retrained in Psychology, Sociology, etc or gotten some impromptu HR qualifications - they became the greatest specialists on human topics the enterprise has as a by-product of having had to make this work. 

This is why I keep saying DevOps practitioners of all denominations are the de facto CHROs. Do they want the job? Probably not, let’s face it, the vast majority of us (and that includes heroic HR people too) would much rather not have to deal with this massive “Human Debt” of ours, these overwhelming people-topics! -They’re messy, emotionally expensive, time consuming, hard, they’re downright ingrate and painful at times but they are unavoidable.- The change-makers couldn’t either ignore them or expect others to solve them because setting up the human foundations couldn’t wait. 

But maybe now that they are somewhat done on the foundation work they’re ready to pass the baton back to HR, back to leadership teams, back to any bit of the business who wants to take their culture, ethos and soul lessons to heart. Real lessons not theory. Learnings born out of trial and error in the complex theme of team dynamics and human connections that bring immediate and tangible value not empty rhetorics.

Maybe it’s time (or even "high time" considering how stringent the needs are during this decade-long-2020) that DOES was attended by all the non-techies who can take these lessons and these extended hands and then maybe we can have a new team, one that would be truly cross-functional, truly collaborative, truly invested in our people irrespective of their job title, department, knowledge or skill set. 

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Don't send your teams home with a laptop, a Jira and Slack account and a prayer!

Get in touch for our Team Psychological Safety Dashboard and our Stay-Connected-When-Remote question pack at www.psychologicalsafety.works or reach out at [email protected] and let's help your team become healthy, happy and highly performant.