Technology leaders: cultural transformation starts with you

How do you react to the launch of a cultural transformation programme in your company? How does your team react? With anticipation and delight, or with the suspicion that this will be a parade of slogans and new names for old things, and that it will melt away after a few months? I know that I have been responsible, with the best of intentions, for eliciting the latter reaction several times in my career. How do we learn to avoid it?

A few weeks back, I wrote about my first day at Google, and how pleased I was by the focus on culture, and the message that as Nooglers we were, from day one, custodians and participants in this culture. (And I should say that, just like that article, the views here are my own: if you’d like the official Google view, you can find plenty of that here.)

But Google is not alone in paying attention to culture. Most companies and most leaders understand that their culture is a profound determinant of the experience of their customers, the wellbeing and satisfaction of their staff, and the performance of their business. But they also often feel that they haven’t got it right yet - hence the continuous cycle of cultural change programmes.

The emphasis on culture in my first days at Google prompted me to reflect on the change programmes I have led and taken part in - and on what worked and what didn’t work. And I should say that as a career-long technologist, I only feel qualified to write about cultural change within technology functions.

Fortunately, there has been plenty of that, especially in recent years: technology teams in large organisations seem to feel that there is something not quite right about their culture. They envy the agility and speed of smaller and newer organisations, and wonder how they can achieve the same results. They see that those desirable characteristics are correlated with cultural features such as autonomy, respect and psychological safety, but are not quite sure how to create those features within our teams. As with many problems in enterprise technology, it is hard to figure out how to get there from here.

I don’t claim to have all (or even many) of the answers, but there is one lesson that I have learnt from my experience of frequent failures and occasional successes: as a technology leader, you are more likely to succeed in your transformation if you start with yourself. The boundary of change should firmly include you and the other leaders of the technology organisation, and their commitment to personal transformation should be highly visible.

This might seem obvious, but is not always followed in practice. For example, change programmes which aim to create a culture of engineering often focus solely on the culture of the engineering team (here’s a thought: perhaps the engineers are the ones most likely to already have a culture of engineering) rather than the people who consider that their jobs are to tell the engineers what to do.

I know that I have made the mistake at least once in my career of thinking that my job was to change the culture of the teams reporting to me, to transmit what I thought I had learnt from books, articles and consulting engagements - and to leave myself out of the programme. Those failed attempts typically started from the wrong place: a frustration with the performance of my teams, and a belief that I needed to impose change on them.

My more successful attempts have started from a different place: a frustration with my own performance and level of understanding, a realisation that I have a lot to learn, that my skills are out of date (technology has moved on), that my leadership skills are out of date (attitudes and culture have changed), or that my tools and techniques no longer work (success is measured in new ways). Such realisations are not bad: rather, they are a prompt to exhibit humility, embrace transformation, and make and break habits.

This does not mean that all that is needed to transform culture is to transform yourself: it’s a necessary rather than sufficient condition. But the first step is to recognise that it is necessary.