Andrew Davis - Transformational leadership

And yeah, today, Andrew and I will be actually tackling the topic of transformational leadership. I'm sure it will be a good one. Andrew, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for joining us. It's really great to have you here. I want to add anything before we dive into the questions.

Andrew Davis: No, I'm really delighted to have a chance to be here, Tim.

Thank you so much for the invitation and delighted to meet the Agiledrop and digital and agile transformation crew.

Tim Butara: Thanks so much for joining us. Yeah. And as I said, I'm also happy that we got in touch and that we agreed to speak in about really important and interesting topic, as I said, transformational leadership.

But before we define this and talk more specifically about transformation leadership, I want to set the stage by us discussing the main challenges or maybe the main obstacles that leaders face in the current digital economy.

Andrew Davis: Yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a vast question. It's a good question. I'm, I'm not sure I can give a definitive answer to what the main challenge leaders face.

And obviously it's very circumstantial, but depending on the leader and the, and the situation, but the, the things that are top of mind for me in terms of general challenges for leaders are First of all, a time of such incredible rate of change, pace of change, the fastest pace of change in the history of our species.

One of the fastest paces of change in the history of the Earth. And we are struggling to adapt, I would say. We have a lot of preconceptions about what it means to be a leader, preconceptions about what companies are like. Reconceptions about what, what it means, you know, what, how employees should act, these kinds of things.

And these are not necessarily keeping up with the full pace of change and the full scale and scope of what we're dealing with today. So. One thing that's on my mind a lot is with what IT has enabled is this incredible globalization of organizations where information flow is so much faster and cheaper and easier than it ever has been before.

So you can create and you can sustain global digital enterprises. You can have companies where everybody is distributed around the world. You know, video conferencing has been popular in some crews for, you know, 20, 25 years, but it's now ubiquitous. It's, it's, you know, this you have, so you have people who are distributed across the world and by virtue of being distributed across the world, they're also distributed across time typically.

So you've got people in different time zones and so forth. So you're not coordinating in physical space as much these days. And we evolved to coordinate in a physical space. And so There's a lot of sense of orientation that we derive just by being in the same physical space together. We get a feeling for people on an emotional level in addition to just knowing the explicit context of what's being discussed.

And that is really important for building trust. And connection with others and a shared sense of common purpose. And in the absence of that in person interaction, it can be, I think, quite difficult for people to feel fully connected to their co workers. A deep sense of trust, alignment, connection, because you're not in the same physical space, you're, you, and you also don't have access to the same information.

There's such a fast pace of information flow that it's pretty It's possible for you to spend your entire day just trying to keep up with information in your domain, and you're getting information that may be totally different from the information many of your co workers are. And so there's this, the amount of information and folks being distributed across time and space creates, I think, a great disorientation, where different people may be, each on their own laptops, looking at their own kind of world, not necessarily very oriented to the whole of what the company is trying to do.

And so in the, in the book flow engineering, we talk about three main afflictions that arise as a result of scale, but we need to understand that the scale of modern organizations is created by It technology to a great degree. I mean, this, this, the speed and scale would not be possible without without digital technology.

And the three main afflictions we experience are disengagement, which is that it's, it's hard for us to really feel emotionally connected with each other. or emotionally connected with the customers and the main mission of the organization. And it's very easy to split off and get a little bit focused just on your own particular needs or your own department's needs and not really see the big picture.

Disengagement is one, disorientation is the other, I think because of the, just the massive amount of information that we're presented with. Difficult to make sense of all that information. And then distraction. And when you have people who are disconnected from each other, they're working on separate projects.

And so they each, like, need to get their projects done. So they ping other people around the organization to get that work done. And you get this explosion of meetings and simultaneous parallel projects. And not everybody's working on the same thing at the same time. And everybody's trying to look busy.

You know, an act, act busy, and it creates this incredible mass of distraction. So, I would say that, that most organizations are facing those three issues to different scales. And I would say we just have not, it's so new, relatively the whole idea of working digitally, that there's a lot of Mistaken assumptions, especially this idea, the idea that we need to all be looking busy all the time and you know, because it enables such a fast pace of work, we should just like go, go, go, go, go.

But if you don't actually know where you're going or on what basis you're going or who you're going with, then the go, go, go ends up just burning a ton of energy and time and not actually leading to productive output.

Tim Butara: Yeah, that was a very, very, very good point right there at the end. You basically just explained in one sentence why burnout is on the rise and why similar issues are on the rise.

And also it's interesting because all three issues that you pinpointed here, so This remoteness or, or being, not being in close contact with others physically, this information overload, which is itself basically very closely connected to, to more distractions, right? Because it's usually the access of information which distracts these, none of these would have been possible.

Without, like, advancements in digital technology, right? So it's interesting how, like, in order to reap the benefits of digital technology, you have to deal with these new, new negative impacts that digital technologies have on your attempts on making the most out of them, I guess.

Andrew Davis: Right. And the people who, you know, But these technology systems in place didn't necessarily anticipate all of these kinds of issues.

It, it all looks good on paper. It makes sense in theory, but you know, the reality when you actually try to, you know, have it roll out, play out in your organization, you encounter new problems that you had not anticipated.

Tim Butara: Okay. So what exactly do we mean by transformational leadership?

Andrew Davis: So transformational leadership is a leadership theory.

It's a theory about what really makes a great leader. And there've been a lot of different leadership theories over time. Over time, over the last century, the great man theory that there's got to be some, typically a man, like this, the historic views of leadership, who are all the historic great leaders, typically men, and, you know, that there's something uniquely special about their character that draws people to them, and that has fallen away a little bit.

As a main theory of leadership, but then ideas like adaptive leadership as well, just leadership theories about what is needed to make someone effective as leader. So one of the most researched of all of these theories is transformational leadership. And at least the simplified presentation that I like to focus on has four aspects, which is I use the acronym VAST, V A S T.

So transformational leaders are vast. They put forward a vision. They model authenticity, they provide support for everyone on their team, and they transmit fully the authority and the responsibility to the people who report to them to uphold the goals and mission of the organization. So thank you very much.

with the idea of vision, it is always critical for a leader to put forth. The idea of a leader is they're seeing something that others are not seeing perhaps, and they're having a courage that others may not share. And so a leader, Is moving towards some destination and they're moving at the front of the pack.

That's by definition, and they're able to convey that vision to their team. You know, that this is what would be possible. This is what, where we're going, this is what's needed, and so forth. And, and modeling the KDS to get there. The a in the vast. acronym stands for authenticity. And it's critically important that a transformational leader, the meaning of this is that a transformational leader is undergoing a personal transformation in the process of working to Bring about a transformation of their people and the, the personal transformation that leaders bring about is a shift away from their self natural instinctive self centered mindset to a mindset that deeply cares about all of the people on their team.

And you can't be modeling that deep caring without a willingness to actually see from. others points of view and stand in their shoes and actually do the work yourself in a way that's similar to what you're asking others on the, on the team to, to do. And so that level of authenticity is critical because it's only when a leader actually steps into the shoes of others, sees things through their eyes.

That the leader develops a full appreciation for how difficult it is, right? And ideally, it would be more comfortable for leaders to just stand at a distance and bark orders and, you know, get angry and frustrated when things don't happen the way they are hoping that they'll happen. But the authenticity aspect is that leaders really are in, in the trenches, so to speak, with the people they're trying to help, and going through those difficulties, and in that sense, modeling having, showing that discipline of authenticity.

The supportiveness deals with the generosity of leaders, that they are generous with their, with all of their resources, you know, Bringing whatever resources they have to bear to support the individual members of the team, but most importantly, they're, they're generous in terms of caring about the individual people on their team and take investing the mental energy and the time required to understand the unique needs and dispositions of everybody on their team.

And so they, they have such a respect for the people in their team that they take the time to really understand what they need and what their challenges are, and then think with them about how. they can best be supported and how we can bring the resources together. And finally, the T in this vast acronym stands for transmission, which is the idea that leaders transmit the full authority and responsibility to the people that they lead.

As they have grown in their capacity, then leaders step back. and let others take more full responsibility. They, it's sort of a leader leader model, as one of my colleagues likes to refer to it. And, and in the book, Leadership is Language by David Marquet, he also talks about this leader leader model.

Sorry, sorry, that's extreme ownership, I think, talks about leader leader model. The idea of transmitting, not just knowledge, not just instructions, but the full authority, the full responsibility implies that the leader needs to step back and give. There are people autonomy and freedom, which we, we know people thrive when they have autonomy.

And that's a key offering of transformational leaders.

Tim Butara: Yeah. And you mentioned like one, one other keyword here is trust that you mentioned earlier, right. And a lot of these in particular, a and S so authenticity and support, but also the last one transmission. You know, trust is a very, very key component in all of these, maybe not so much.

I mean, vision. Yeah. It is trust of the leader in their own vision. It's not so much, you know, mutually build trust on a team. So, but, but it's, it's, you know, it's like, it also ties to things such as psychological safety, you know, which is closely related to trust and something that's. You know, crucial for working effectively in a team culture.

And especially if we return back to one of the main issues that we, that we highlighted in the intro. So this rise of remote working and remote remote distributed maybe either where that'd be facially distributed or temporarily distributed teams, trust and psychological safety become even more important, right.

In those environments where it's like, yeah, we can be face to face every day. Right. You know, even if we are, or, or, you know, another example, we can be face to face, but, you know, I'm part of a company that got acquired by another company that got acquired by another company, you know, some time ago. And like, yeah, you know, I'm, I do work face to face with the people that are like in my original company, but I don't really have that kind of interaction with like, like the leadership of the, of the company that's acquired us, you know, so that that's also something to consider here.

Andrew Davis: The trust, one thing that brings to mind when you talk about trust is, I mean, trust is a beautiful word. And I could, I'm, I'm visualizing, you know, one of those inspirational posters on the wall of your corporation talking about trust and the power of trust. And, you know, we all can agree that, you know, we should, We need to promote trust and so forth.

But trust is not something that you can consciously just turn on or off. It's something that you feel viscerally, like deep in your body towards another person. Or not. And it's actually, I think, a question that we need to investigate as, as individuals. Do I, to what degree do I trust the people around me?

To what degree do I trust my leadership? To what degree do I trust my own vision? And we need to accept whatever answers we, we find, because probably there's a significant degree to which, you know, one of the things that I'm working on as a skill is delegation. And like, I hadn't fully recognized that my reluctance to delegate is a lack of trust in the people on my team that I would be delegating to that, you know, I don't think that they would do as good a job as I might.

So I'm, you know, hold on to the things, you know. And that's an issue that and that's an that's an unconscious lack of trust in my mind for those folks. And it may be correct that they in their present state, they wouldn't be able to do as good a job as we need to do on that. And so one answer is, okay, don't delegate, hold everything yourself and be overwhelmed.

And the other answer is, okay, let's break this down a little bit. Maybe I can break the, the project or the challenge down into smaller pieces. Parts and delegate those to the person and also along the way, giving them clear guidelines and taking the time. And this is what I mean by the supportive aspect of leadership, that you're actually investing the time to break the work down to a level that people can actually do to explain it, to give your.

clear criteria for what success would be. If there are problems in that work to, to support people in making whatever corrections may be needed. And so it's a, it can be quite a slow process to both build trust over time and to take the time to figure out how to delegate the work in a way that people can understand.

And I think the slowness of the process. is a particular challenge for IT people. I'll speak for myself, because I think my brain has been rewired to think that most problems should be solved in a matter of milliseconds. And if necessary, you'll take minutes or hours to solve a problem. But most IT problems are very fast moving.

And so if your brain has been, You know, accustomed to thinking that problems should be solved, you know, within a few minutes or hours. These trust problems don't get solved in a few minutes or hours. These things are very slow moving challenges. Just the way the traditional projects of like civil engineering, they take months and years to accomplish, right?

So civil engineers, architects and so forth, their brains operate at a slightly slower cadence than IT people. So.

Tim Butara: Does this mean that transformational leadership would not be as, as good of a fit for IT or, or like development teams or, or like, you know, is there just a different approach needed here or something?

Andrew Davis: So, I mean, the, the, the model of transformational leadership implies that the role of the leader is to create followers or followership. And to become a follower, you have to change from not being a follower to being a follower. And if you, if at present as a leader, people are not naturally following your direction, then it means you also need to change.

And so, you know, to being a person that people will be willing to follow. And if there is no trust. Then nobody will follow you, of course. So there's no way around transformational leadership. If your, if your response, your role in it is to guide other people, there's no way around transformational leadership in the sense that you have to change to be the kind of person that others would follow and other people, and you have to figure out how to help them to change.

What I'm saying is. That most technical leaders are not necessarily, I feel like a lot of technical people were folks who fairly early in life had a fork in the road, and they had the choice to either spend more time working with people, or more time working with computers, and that for whatever reason they chose computers.

To spend more time working with computers, because it takes a lot of time working with computers to develop technical expertise. And the thing that I like about computers, you can always debug the problem in the end. And once you fix it, it typically stays fixed unless somebody changes something. The problem with people is it's very hard to debug them.

They don't have debug logs. You don't know exactly what's going on. The observability and monitoring is very low, right? You can't refactor them. You can't upgrade the software very easily. People are are very challenging problems compared to computers and the most challenging problem is ourselves, right?

Like we, we are fundamentally not linear, not rational, not as predictable as the computer systems that we like to, to imagine the world could be like. So transformational leadership or any kind of leadership, any style of leadership requires for IT people that they get to know. themselves. They get to know other people.

They get to know social interaction. And so wherever you took that fork in the road in life, you know, and stopped worrying about the messy, difficult problems of dealing with people, you got to backtrack a little bit and say, well, there's no way around this. I've got to get to know myself better. I've got to get to know people better.

I've got to understand things like sociology, psychology, political science, communication, all the liberal arts stuff that you might've ignored in your early education. Become really

Tim Butara: important later on, but it sounds like it's in some ways even more important for technical leaders because they basically the skills that got them to this leadership point in their career are completely different skills in a lot of cases.

I mean, obviously a lot, a lot of people, a lot of engineers, a lot of developers. obviously have naturally good leadership and people skills, but you know, it, it, you being a great engineer and progressing to a, to a technical leader because of that doesn't necessitate great leadership skills. So whereas, you know, in another sector, it might be, You know, it might be more closely related.

You know, the, the, the thing that you did previously to then managing people who are doing this, but you're still working with people. You're still working in a team. You're still, you're still kind of working on these different stuff, different things together. But if we have like the case of, you know, somebody very, very technical who is now able to work from home, who doesn't, you know, need to have face to face contact, I can imagine why.

You know, doing a transformation leadership would be even, even more beneficial and even more necessary for, for this kind of person to kind of more, more easily thrive in their new position.

Andrew Davis: I think so. Yeah. This, the skills that got you here won't get you there, you know, as you say, but you know, both your technical skills, but also your, your strengths as an individual contributor are very different from the strengths that you need to try to be a beneficial influence to the people around you.

Tim Butara: So what's, what's your way? Can you tell us a little bit about your approach, your way of, you know, providing the, this essential training to, to, I guess, new founder or any kind of technical leader that needs it basically.

Andrew Davis: Well, it's a work in progress and a lot of my interest in this area comes from my own challenge to figure out how can I be, you know, the most effective technical, technical leader.

And so I've, I've tried to play with, you know, we, we all learn based on a current starting off point. And so the, the starting off point that I, I think that I've been playing with is. And the idea of video games, that when you play a video game, you can immediately step into that character, that persona, right?

Or the same if you read a book or watch a movie, something like that. We as humans just immediately identify with the main character. It's just natural, instantaneous. And You go from, you know, walking around your current environment, if you play a video game, something like that. You get, your mind gets drawn in, your attention gets drawn into that world, and you begin to treat that character as if they're you.

Like, oh, look, I got this thing, and look how, you know, high I jumped, and look how, you know, oh, they almost got me, right? And you start referring to that video game avatar as you. And one of the interesting, you know, and we love, you know, we love movies and books and video games and so forth because by getting into another character, we get out of this character and this character has so many problems and difficulties, very difficult to know how we can solve all the problems of this character, the character that we play most of the time, the avatar, the role that we're playing, you know, In our nine to five job, we really need a break from that person's problems.

And so you know, getting into the problems of some other character just feels like an enormous relief. When, but it's really interesting to think about when you're looking at a video game character, whatever, there's, there's a, there's a distance and there's a freedom that we often don't feel that we have.

In our present life, like you can see what's going on around that character, you know, you can see it a little bit from the outside, you can see maybe incoming dangers, and you have a chance to redo things, you know, you die on one level and you redo it, you know, you know, you get another life and you come back and you, you do it.

And so there is this character of experimentation and playfulness and gamification. That I think we don't really have in our normal life. A lot of the time we feel like we're just stuck in a particular job, stuck in a relationship, stuck in a, you know, body, certain, you know, whatever health issues and so we feel very stuck in our current identity and we don't feel that sense of distance and playfulness and So forth that you, you feel when you're playing a game.

And so the, the approach that I'm building a leadership training program and based around this approach of just stepping back a little bit and like looking at the game of our life and trying to take more of a playful approach to the game of our life and understand who's the, who's the big boss at the end that we're trying to work up to, you know, tackling that and what are the little obstacles we have to get through and what are all the dynamics of the game.

And also, so just knowing that there's this learning process, we can go through this learning process, continual change, and there's six practices that I took. I had my background prior to becoming, going full time into IT, I'd spent 15 years as a Buddhist monk, and so training in that context. And so all of the, all of the practices that we did in that context, we organized into six practices, giving moral discipline, patience.

Joyful effort, concentration, and wisdom, and I don't have six fingers, I can't point to all of them. And there's an expression, from giving comes wealth. That's a little bit paradoxical, from giving comes wealth, but the main purpose of, in all of our companies, in the business context, is the companies, people join a company because they'll get paid, and hopefully, ideally, you have a good time at work, but most of us wouldn't be doing exactly this job, in exactly this way, if nobody was paying us.

But you're not going to keep getting paid unless the company keeps getting paid, right? And so the company's financial health is You know, is critical, you know, for the longterm job stability of everybody in the company and to the degree that we're doing this job because, you know, we have to, to get paid to, you know, then the financial health of the company becomes critically important.

And so when we want to think about how do we help the company to be financially successful, how do we help bring about wealth for the company, for the organization? The key there is giving. And when, when I say giving, I mean, we're giving our care, our attention, our time, our skills. We're giving to our coworkers.

We're giving to our customers. We're trying to give to. shareholders, we have investors, and we're ideally you're in an organization of business that's giving to society, right? And so this mindset of how can we give skillfully, and how can we train ourselves to, to take everything, to take an attitude of generosity, that long term is what will end up with us being more successful financially and in other ways as an organization.

Of course, it's giving is not meant to be reckless. You know, I mentioned these six practices. The last of them is wisdom. So we need to be giving with wisdom. And that wisdom part is really where the playfulness comes in and the scientific approach where you're experimenting, you're understanding, you're trying to deepen your Understanding of the financial dynamics in the organization, the social dynamics in the organization, the technical dynamics in the organization, our organizations are very, very, very complex.

Customers are complex and changing, ever changing, employees are changing, everything is complex, right? And so the big challenge is how do you build the wisdom? To understand how to skillfully approach your day at work with a mind of generosity that you're that even if you're in a role of as a salesperson, right?

And your, your, your job is to collect money for the company. You need to be going in with an attitude of giving rather than taking. You want to be able to, you want to connect with a customer and give them through your organization so much benefit that they. It's a small sacrifice for them to part with some money, you know, in to, to compensate you for the value that you've brought.

Right. So everybody in the organization from sales through support, they need to be taking this attitude of, of generosity, but a wise generosity, skillful generosity. So that's kind of the summary of the program.

Tim Butara: Yeah, I mean, I mean, me or us being better off doesn't necessitate somebody else. having to be worse off, right?

We can all be better off. It doesn't, it's not an either or it can be a both. And man, man, I was thinking that this conversation was actually suspiciously spiritual. I love it.

Andrew Davis: Good. I felt really I'm kind of coming out of the closet as a spiritual person. I felt really quite uncomfortable, awkward about even though using the word spiritual in a business context, because we've had, you know, a long history of trying to kick religion out of the workplace and religion and politics, kick them out of the workplace, the two most contentious topics, so that people can just work together because you need a collaborative, harmonious workplace.

And so spirituality, of course, nothing to do or very little to do with religion, but it's, I think about spirituality as like the, the levels below the conscious. You know, what's going on in our body, what's going on in deep emotional levels, spirit, meaning, meaning like breath, like what is going on?

What is driving our breath? What is driving our life force, life energy at a deep level? Like why do we wake up? Why do we do things or not do things in that, that whole learning journey of really understanding what's this, what's to use a technology term, what's the stack, you know, on which our conscious existence is, is, is operating, you know, and we've got to debug the stack on which our conscious experience is operating.

We want to really be maximally effective individually or collectively.

Tim Butara: Debug the stack of our consciousness. I love that, Andrew. Let's talk about this more on some other conversation, but I love the topic. And I love today's conversation with you, Andrew, a really, really great one. If anybody listening right now is interested in learning more about you, learning more from you, connecting with you, what's the best ways to reach you?

Where should they contact you?

Andrew Davis: LinkedIn is pretty much the only social media channel that I'm active on because it's the only social media platform that's boring enough to not be addictive. So hit me up on LinkedIn. I'd love to connect. Yeah, and you can find out more about my other activities and Autorabbit and so forth there.

Tim Butara: Oh yeah, you also have a podcast with Steve, right. It's the flow engineering podcast.

Andrew Davis: That's right. So Steve Pereira and I wrote, coauthored this book, flow engineering. We have a podcast in the early days, but we've got episodes coming out at least every couple of weeks.

Tim Butara: Cool. So we'll make sure to link that as well, as well as like a, an Amazon link to your book.

And yeah, thank you again. As I said, this has been great. I really enjoyed having you as our guest today. Great pleasure.

Andrew Davis: Nice to be with you, Tim.

Tim Butara: And to our listeners, that's all for this episode. Have a great day, everyone. And stay safe.

Outro:
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