Introduction to Transformative Leadership @ Scale

Goals, Principles, and a Culture of 360 degree paradigms and Virtuous Cycles

The goal of any IT or Operational team, organization, or professional should be maximizing Return on Investment (ROI) of people, processes, and technology. When it comes to teams and organizations, maximizing ROI requires leadership with the ability to establish a transformative culture.

Principles

When establishing ROI driven cultures, adherence to two principles play a critical role:

(1) Increasing Net Present Value of technology and operational ecosystems. At a high level, this is accomplished by accelerating the implementation of systems and processes through the delivery of small, but frequent modules*, while focusing on minimizing on-going maintenance costs (I discuss in detail, the NPV concept in “Relating Agile Methodologies to Principles of Finance”);

(2) Maintaining a healthy resource pool to allow the delivery of high NPV projects to endure. The key to sustaining a healthy resource pool is not only retaining good talent, but also accelerating the on-boarding of new talent.

*Implementing in small, but frequent modules is a deeply rooted Agile principle, which will be fleshed out in later articles.

Establishing the Culture

Identifying goals and establishing the principles aligned to those goals are very critical when breaking down and addressing complex problems. However, both topics reside in the abstract layers of problem solving, and must be accompanied with explicit efforts. This brings me to the meat of this article…the establishment of a transformative culture. A culture is more apt to be transformative when it contains the following three components that, when addressed properly, create a virtuous cycle of effectiveness within the organization**.

**I will get into each of the three components in more detail in the future (both as main topics of future articles, as well as incorporated as part of other informative topics). This article is meant to introduce the concepts at a high level.

(1) Ideation

Ideas are the foundation to any problem-solving effort, and when properly harnessed, the volume of ideas has a strong correlation to innovation. In order to increase the number of ideas, and broaden their impact, we should embrace them from, and apply them to 360-degree paradigms. Embracing ideas from a 360-degree paradigm is similar to the employee evaluation concept, whereby an idea, like an evaluation, can originate from organizational peers, business constituents, management, and members of the reporting hierarchy. Far too often, organizations establish silos of idea generation, thus limiting members of one group from contributing ideas to another group. As with idea generation, idea application should also be across a 360-degree paradigm, albeit a different spectrum. At a minimum, ideas should be applied to processes, team structures, technologies, and/or business domains.

(2) Effective Execution

If ideas are the body of a problem-solving machine, then execution is the fuel. All the great ideas in the world are meaningless, without the effective execution of the solutions to complex problems. Going back to my abstraction reference, without proper execution, ideas will remain abstract. The path to a team’s ability to effectively execute lies in its ability to (1) break down the domain and its pain points, (2) harness ideas to derive relevant and practical strategies and architectures, (3) structure and execute a pragmatic roadmap with short and frequent feedback loops (this allows for assessing, learning and adapting) and, (4) provide transparency to stakeholders, and other vested parties throughout the process. When this level of execution is achieved, system or process implementations accelerate value delivery, while minimizing on going maintenance costs, thus maximizing NPV.

(3) Learning

So, we have a well running machine, but how do we keep it that way? The answer is simple…through continuous learning. Similar to ideation, learning should be achieved at a 360-degree paradigm. All participating parties should be able to learn from other parties in the team or organization, regardless of hierarchy or organizational structure. In addition, each party should have the opportunity to learn within the context of processes, team structures, technologies, and business domains. Learning comes in many forms, with structured training and explicit mentoring being the most prevalent. However, neither of those are truly continuous. In order to be continuous, learning should be embedded and deeply ingrained in our day to day operations. A theoretical result of this approach is if a team or organization has “N” number of people, then every member or employee has “N-1” implied mentors. There are many methods that can achieve this, which I will dig into in later articles. But once achieved, the ubiquitous learning helps retain top talent and can attract new talent, as well as accelerate the impact that new talent can offer.

The Virtuous Cycle

I have mentioned above that the components of a transformative culture have a positive, continuous, and cyclical effect. Said simply, the more we learn about how to generate and execute ideas, the more we can continuously improve on ideation, execution, and even ways of learning. As a result, a virtuous cycle is introduced into the team or organization.

Bringing It Together

By establishing goals and principles that focus on maximizing ROI, we have set ourselves up to create an effective culture. Through focus on the Net Present Value (NPV) of systems, processes, and team structures through sound execution of innovative ideas, we will transform how the team or organization works. In addition, continuous learning offers a significant opportunity to maintain a healthy pool of resources that will consistently generate and execute those ideas. The self-fulfilling and cyclical effect of the culture allows it to endure over time.

• Related Articles:“Relating Agile Methodologies to Principles of Finance”