How to introduce transformational leadership traits:
- Establish and support a generative, high-trust culture.
- Support technologies that enhance developer productivity. Reduce code deployment lead times and improve infrastructure reliability.
- Encourage team experimentation and innovation.
- Collaborate across organizational silos to achieve strategic alignment.
How to enable cross-functional collaboration
- Build trust between teams by keeping promises, communicating openly, and maintaining predictable behavior.
- Encourage practitioners to move between departments.
- Actively seek, encourage, and reward work that facilitates collaboration.
- Create a training budget and advocate for it internally.
- Ensure your team has the resources for informal learning and the space to explore ideas—learning often happens outside of formal education.
- Make it safe to fail. If failure is punished, people won’t try new things. Treat failures as opportunities to learn. Hold blameless postmortems and help people feel comfortable taking reasonable risks.
- Create space to share information, such as weekly lightning talks, demo days, and forums.
- Ensure your team can choose their tools—this is a major contributor to job satisfaction.
- Make monitoring a priority. Collect meaningful data on the right services.