Servant leadership for cloud transformation (or any other transformation)

What character traits do you need to lead Cloud transformation? Which should you avoid?

I recently wrote a series of blog posts about seven key roles for Cloud transformation - or for any other large scale, technology enabled transformation. That prompted me to ask myself a question: how should leaders behave when they fill these roles? I believe that leadership requires more than the competent execution of a set of tasks and responsibilities: it requires the adoption and practice of a set of behaviours which will make your transformation successful - and make the experience rewarding and fulfilling for the people in the team.

When asking questions about behaviour, my philosophical background leads me to Aristotle’s theory of the virtues. In Aristotle’s philosophy (and much philosophy which has come after), virtues are behaviours which we value, whose practice is self-reinforcing (the more often we are honest, the more honesty becomes a habit), whereas vices are self-reinforcing behaviours which we don’t value (if we lie frequently it is hard to stop).

I think that there are many leadership virtues which are important to complex transformation: for example, courage, humility, honesty, curiosity and persistence. However, I think that there is one which is more important than all the others: servant leadership.

Servant leadership would not typically appear on a list of virtues (and I don’t know the Ancient Greek word that Aristotle would have used to describe it). But I believe that it should be recognised as a virtue: it is something we should value, and it can be habit forming (even if it can be a hard habit to acquire). It also has a corresponding vice.

Practitioners of servant leadership believe that, while they may have the job of setting a vision, of organising people, and of delivering outcomes, their most important job is to create the conditions for their teams to be successful. They are there for their teams, rather than the other way around.

I believe that servant leadership is the best mode of leadership in all cases, but is particularly important when attempting complex transformation. True transformation often involves extreme uncertainty - in tasks, plans, roles, organisation and the future prospects of the enterprise. That uncertainty cannot be dispelled by top down directives: it can only be resolved through teams navigating, probing, testing and learning - with the support and backing of their leaders.

Servant leadership can be a hard habit to acquire at first. However, if we take the trouble to trust, power and support our teams, the rewards can be great enough to build any habit: not just business success, but a more rewarding and fulfilling working environment.

Just like all virtues, however, servant leadership has a corresponding vice. I don’t know the English name for this, let alone the Ancient Greek name, but I think we know it when we see it. Let’s call it master leadership. Master leadership looks like the opposite of servant leadership: the leader is focused on their own success rather than the success of their teams; they are likely to respond to challenges with criticism than help; and blame is a finely honed tool.

We might all like to believe that we don’t exhibit any of these behaviours, but if we are honest with ourselves, then, just like the other vices, we must admit that we succumb to it from time to time. We must also admit that master leadership can be seductive when things get difficult: when things take longer than planned, or the POC doesn’t P the C, or the team misses a target, it is tempting to micro-manage, to search for blame, to apply pressure.

This temptation is precisely what we must resist if we are to deliver complex transformation. Complex transformation requires sustained and pervasive change over time in conditions of extreme uncertainty. Master leadership might ensure that we get our tasks delivered tomorrow, but we need servant leadership to build and enable the team that will deliver the whole transformation.