MePush Leadership Fundamentals - Week 3

Leadership, Module 3
MePush Leadership Fundamentals 1.0
Module 3: Empowerment, Trust, and Culture
• Make a connection between emotional intelligence and leadership.
• Discuss intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.
• Learn how company culture, organization, and hierarchy link to
leadership.
• Discuss the currencies of leadership.
• Learn about building empowerment into leadership strategy.
• Explore vision, trust, empathy, and transformational leadership.
• Relate DevOps culture and the Agile Manifesto to empowerment, trust,
and high-performing teams.
• Explore alignments of rewards and transactional leadership.
DevOps Culture at MePush
• Collaborative and
cooperative environment
• End-to-end leadership,
ownership, and responsibility
• Continuous improvement
• Increased automation
• Focusing on the customers'
needs and experience
• Fail fast and learn from it
• Unite teams and expertise

Connection Between Emotional Intelligence and Leadership
Daniel Goleman’s book “Emotional Intelligence” first published in 1995.

5 Key Emotional Intelligence Skills:
• Self-Awareness
• Self-Regulation
• Social Skills
• Empathy
• Motivation

• Self-Awareness
• Self-Regulation
• Social Skills
• Empathy
• Motivation
• Emotional self awareness: recognizing
your emotions and the impact they have.
• Accurate self-assessment: identifying
your strengths and limitations.
• Self-confidence: knowing your self
worth and capabilities.

• Self-Awareness
• Self-Regulation
• Social Skills
• Empathy
• Motivation
• Become more aware of how you react
to your emotions.
• Practice taking constructive criticism.
• Develop positive coping mechanisms.
• Plant new thoughts: Practice choosing
positive ways to think about a
situation.
All of these are components of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT).

• Self-Awareness
• Self-Regulation
• Social Skills
• Empathy
• Motivation
• Listen and observe others
• Be interested in other people’s stories
Participate in small talk
• Ask open-ended questions
• Practice maintaining eye contact
• Practice being more negative (not a
complainer)
• Get feedback on your ideas

• Self-Awareness
• Self-Regulation
• Social Skills
• Empathy
• Motivation
• Get out of your comfort zone (travel to
new cultures, practice public speaking)
• Examine your biases
• Actively wonder what another person is
going through, thinking, and feeling
• Ask thoughtful questions to understand
people

• Self-Awareness
• Self-Regulation
• Social Skills
• Empathy
• Motivation
• Develop self-motivation based off of
intrinsic rewards rather than extrinsic
rewards
• Take initiative and nurture inner drive
• Learn when to use extrinsic motivation
with yourself and others
• Learn how to motivate and create that
drive and initiative in others

• Self-Awareness
• Self-Regulation
• Social Skills
• Empathy
• Motivation
Higher emotional intelligence yields:
• higher engagement
• effective team communications
• higher ability to collaborate
• stronger relationships with higher trust
• lower turnover
• higher ability to transform and inspire

Discuss personal emotional intelligence assessments.
1. How did you do?
2. How do you want to improve?
3. How would your current level of emotional intelligence
translate into leadership?

Extrinsic and Intrinsic Motivation
Extrinsic Motivation
• External rewards or punishment
• Chasing commissions or bonuses
• Working for a promotion or
recognition
• Feedback
Intrinsic Motivation
• Internal rewards
• Personal satisfaction
• Doing something because of
how it makes you feel (you
like it, you feel victorious)

How Organizational Structure Affects Leadership
Org Structure
• Span of control varies (how many people you are responsible for)
• Autonomous teams may be hard for you to lead
• Hierarchical structures can make it hard to change quickly due to
multiple layers of management
• Matrix organizations give an employee multiple managers, so you
have to compete to lead an employee

Org Structure
• Divisional organizations may put hard walls between divisions,
making collaboration and leadership difficult
• Functional organizations put up departmental barriers, slowing
down change

Image from Pingboard
https://pingboard.com/blog/types-business-organizational-structures/
Different organizational
structures and hierarchies
require different
leadership kung fu.
Complicated stakeholder
relationships require
ninja-like leadership.

How Culture Affects Leadership
• Every company has different values, goals, and priorities.
• Every team has different values, goals, and priorities.
• Teams and employees have different expectations from leaders in
different organizations (different levels of engagement, different
levels of autonomy, different leadership styles).
• Some cultures embrace leaders that are task-oriented,
achievement-oriented, or people-oriented.

Currencies of Leadership (Leadership Capital)
Trust
• Commitment
• Character
• Competence
• Consistency
• Caring
• Centricity self-centered vs. other-centric
Technical Skills
Soft and “Human” Skills
Reputation
Relations quality of relationships, social capital, influential relationships, support systems
Leadership
Capital
Reputation
Tech Skills
Relations
Soft Skills

Currencies of Leadership (Leadership Capital)
• Be authentic
• Communicate regularly (be predictable)
• Do what you say you will
• Share your vision
• Build relationships Leadership
Capital
Reputation
Tech Skills
Relations
Soft Skills

Empowerment as a leadership currency
• Discuss the level of empowerment you feel in your
current role. (In some roles, it is good to have well-defined
tasks and instructions and have very rigid expectations
where you are not empowered to make a decision.)
• Discuss the impact that your current level of
empowerment may be too much or too little. (Do you feel
that you are given too much rope to hang yourself, not
enough, or just the right amount?)
• Discuss the effect that empowerment has on your
customer service ability.
Is a leader empowering
their team to make their
own decisions, take their
own risks, and serve the
customer in their own
ways a relationship- and
trust-builder, or does it
take away from the
leader’s strength?

• How are Vision, Trust, and Empathy related to each other?
• How does this combination lead to Transformational Leadership?
Vision, Trust, Empathy, and Transformational Leadership

4th Principle of the Agile Manifesto:
“Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the
environment and support they need and trust them to get the job
done.”
11th Principle of the Agile Manifesto:
“The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-
organizing teams”
Trust is the bedrock of self-organizing agile
teams.
Trust allows teams to communicate, innovate,
and respond rapidly.

DevOps Culture supports Transformational Leadership
DevOps Leader leads with
1. Vision
2. Inspirational communication
3. Intellectual stimulation
4. Supportive leadership
5. Personal recognition

DevOps Culture supports Transformational Leadership
DevOps Leader leads with
1. Vision: understands and communicates clearly where they are
going and what the roadmap looks.
2. Inspirational communication: says positive things and makes
employees proud of the organization. Encourages people to see
their tasks as full of opportunities.
3. Intellectual stimulation: challenges team members to think and
challenge basic assumptions.
4. Supportive leadership: has empathy towards the team and
supports their personal needs.
5. Personal recognition: commends team members when they do a
good job and recognizes improvements in quality. Compliments
outstanding work.

Leadership Currencies: Rewards and Transactional Leadership
Leadership
Capital
Reputation
Tech Skills
Relations
Soft Skills
Trust
• Commitment
• Character
• Competence
• Consistency
• Caring
• Centricity self-centered vs. other-centric
Technical Skills
Soft and “Human” Skills
Reputation
Relations quality of relationships, social capital, influential relationships, support systems
Rewards or punishments

Leadership
Capital
Reputation
Tech Skills
Relations
Soft Skills
Isn’t reward or punishment a
powerful currency?
As a leader it is crucial
that you align rewards to:
• Company Strategy
• Values/Goals/Priorities

Isn’t reward or punishment a
powerful currency?
As a leader it is crucial
that you align rewards to:
• Company Strategy
• Values/Goals/Priorities
Goes horribly wrong if you
aren’t careful.
People chasing badly-designed
incentives can undermine the
real company goals.
Example: Giving easy
commissions for a product that
brings little margin to the
company. Sales team will chase
those commissions and sell the
wrong product, not focusing on
the ones that the company
needs to sell.

Guidelines for aligning your rewards/punishments
1. Identify measurable business goals from the company vision and strategy.
2. Communicate clearly the mission, vision, goals, and values so everyone understands.
3. Set targets fairly across the entire organization, regardless of skill, team, or division.
• Correct (punish?) those not meeting the standard baseline KPI for performance.
• Incentivize stretch goals or big, hairy, audacious goals (BHAGs).
4. Communicate the incentive structure clearly to the team and explain how it
supports the goals.

MePush Leadership Fundamentals - Week 3

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