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What motivates you more in a work role: the trust and freedom to create high-quality work, or the potential repercussions of mistakes?
For most people the answer is the former, yet many organizations and management teams rule with the specter of the latter. It’s simply an accepted part of corporate culture.
The concept of “corporate culture” is itself a stereotype, and is often the subject of memes. There are entire TV shows and movies focused on its worst and most absurd elements. (If you haven’t seen “Office Space,” drop everything and go watch it now.) We find media about corporate culture funny or tragic because most of us have firsthand experience with it.
Fortunately, the software development industry in recent years began saying “no” to stereotyped corporate culture. They started implementing DevOps and related best practices such as continuous delivery that dare to be different by trusting and empowering teams instead of ruling over them.
Successful DevOps adoption means organizations must change much about how their software teams operate and think about work. This approach suggests continual process changes and improvement, new tooling, and investing in staff and their knowledge — but none of that works without a culture that supports it. The laughable, cringeworthy, stereotyped “corporate culture” is not it.
So, what is the reality of corporate culture? To answer that, look to the work of Ron Westrum and his research into team typology, which inspired DevOps.
Westrum’s research distills most workplace cultures into one of three categories:
If you want the complete rundown, seek Professor Westrum’s full research. I highly recommend the summarized, DevOps-focused version in Octopus Deploy’s “The DevOps Engineer’s Handbook” (and not just because I wrote it).
All three cultures face similar challenges, but it’s how people within each culture respond and react to those challenges that can determine whether employees are happy and engaged in their work or disconnected and disinterested. Those reactions can be the difference between success and failure.
Of the three cultures, only one encourages the behaviors needed for DevOps (or any positive work environment). The other two are poisonous to goals, DevOps or not, yet are still rampant and unchecked in workplaces worldwide.
You can probably guess the good one from their names alone: It’s generative culture that you should try to cultivate.
Generative workplace culture fundamentally changes how organizations treat their staff. This culture requires a complete realignment, addressing both action and attitude. Generative workplaces create environments of high cooperation because when everyone shares the same responsibilities and goals, people work together to meet them.
I most want to draw attention to how generative workplaces treat their staff, as it’s a real game-changer for productivity. It all starts with trust.
Leaders in generative cultures trust that their staff want to do good work. No one does bad work on purpose. No one wants the drama that comes with not delivering good work, especially if that work is related to their expertise — I mean, why would they?
Instead, the strategy should be to set up staff to succeed. Maybe there are processes that aren’t working for some, or maybe the thing slowing someone down is something they could automate. The default position shouldn’t be assuming that someone is lazy, but that they’re having a problem. Find out what that problem is and try to solve it. If you’re doing DevOps right, improvement should be part of your development cycle anyway.
Trust extends to allowing people to make quick decisions and take risks, and even letting them step outside their specialty if they can add value. Of course, there should be healthy limits — you don’t want a developer changing your entire software architecture without consultation — but staff in generative cultures can take calculated risks without fear of blame or being cast out if something doesn’t work.
If a risk turns to failure … that’s actually really great! Failure is a gift, and you should embrace it. Failure gives you all kinds of great feedback about the resilience of your teams and the systems they maintain. It tells you what you can improve, and what safeguards you can add to the deployment cycle so similar problems can’t happen again. Generative environments focus on learning from mistakes and failure while building resilience into their systems.
Leaders from bureaucratic and pathological workplace cultures usually need to rethink their roles to adopt generative thinking. Leaders in generative cultures are not enforcers but rather problem-solvers and enablers. They and their team members are considered equals with different areas of expertise, so honest feedback should flow both ways.
In “DevEx as a Service,” my Octopus colleague Matt Casperson talked about the importance of leaders respecting developer boundaries. The book’s takeaways are beneficial to anyone in any team: Respect people’s time, let them work how they’re most productive and can find flow, and reduce cognitive load where possible.
When I joked about “corporate culture” earlier, you instantly knew what that entailed. All those awful, cringy things we’ve experienced come from pathological or bureaucratic cultures. Both are very different but equally poisonous to organizational goals.
If you’ve ever heard, “I know it’s bad practice but it’s what the boss wants,” you’re likely in a pathological culture. Pathological workplaces are where big personalities rule at the expense of team goals, and interactions become battles to win. Other telltale signs include:
On the other hand, bureaucratic workplaces operate on one misplaced idea: The more rules in place, the fewer problems there’ll be — a direction usually formed by past failures. Unfortunately, this type of thinking only slows everyone down.
Did something not go as planned? Well, we’d better bury it under mountains of checks and approvals. Does someone need a tool to do their job better? Well, they can just make do with what they have, even if it’s to our goal’s detriment (and we’ll still complain if their working speed seems slow).
Bureaucratic workplaces believe that ideas cause problems, and when there’s failure … well, someone definitely wasn’t following the rules closely enough. We should probably punish them and add more rules!
In both of these cultures, well-intentioned staff kind of just give up trying. It’s hard to make a positive difference when you’re shouted down by several others, or continuously ignored out of caution. You have to ask: Where’s the motivation for people in these cultures?
“It’s not that I’m lazy. It’s that I just don’t care.” — Peter Gibbons, “Office Space”
So, where’s my proof? Well, for one, I’ve been in the trenches; I’ve lived the difference. Until joining Octopus, I’d had a string of not-great workplace experiences in both pathological and bureaucratic workplaces — and one was somehow both bad cultures at once.
I’ve seen people effectively exiled to work on insignificant work because of an honest mistake. I’ve seen ideas that would unquestionably help customers go ignored because they wouldn’t artificially boost our executive leader’s popularity. I’ve seen people rebuffed when they made small requests to work in ways that increased their productivity — and each time, the idea of playing to people’s strengths were waved away because leaders did not trust their staff.
When this happened to me, I thought I was a little broken. Maybe there was something wrong with me for not finding any of this motivating. But now, having worked in a generative environment, I realize it was really that workplace culture had to catch up. DevOps proves it! I’ve never felt happier and more productive than I have since I landed in a generative workplace environment.
But it’s not just my experiences — there’s tangible proof available in mountains of research and data about DevOps and all its facets, including workplace culture. DevOps teams that embrace these cultural recommendations are thriving, are more productive and become elite performers because workers feel trusted, valued, engaged and in control of their work. Google‘s 2023 Accelerate State of DevOps report found that a good culture is foundational to team success, and teams that embrace generative cultural recommendations have 30% higher organizational performance.
DevOps in action proves that trusted, empowered and happier staff are more reliable and productive. So why do so many organizations persist in making its people miserable?
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