Playbook : Transformational Leadership Behaviours Playbook

🌐 Purpose

To equip engineering leaders and influencers with actionable behaviours that inspire, enable, and sustain high-performing, resilient teams. This playbook promotes a model of leadership that supports innovation, growth, and a strong cultural foundation aligned with our digital engineering goals.

⚖️ Principles

  • Leadership is a behaviour, not a role or title
  • Great leaders create environments where people thrive
  • Influence is earned through clarity, consistency, and care
  • Leading by example is the most powerful form of culture-building

✅ What Good Looks Like

Transformational leaders:

  • Align teams around purpose and outcomes, not just tasks
  • Foster autonomy and accountability at all levels
  • Create psychological safety and promote trust
  • Encourage experimentation, learning, and continuous improvement
  • Champion inclusivity, diversity of thought, and cross-functional collaboration

🔄 Core Behavioural Pillars

1. Inspire Through Vision

  • Communicate a compelling and shared vision of the future
  • Regularly connect daily work to strategic outcomes
  • Narrate progress with optimism and realism

2. Model the Way

  • Demonstrate desired behaviours (e.g. feedback, humility, reflection)
  • Take ownership, especially in failure
  • Hold yourself accountable to the same standards you expect of others

3. Enable Others to Act

  • Remove blockers, not impose direction
  • Invest in coaching, not just task allocation
  • Empower decision-making at the point of expertise

4. Challenge the Status Quo

  • Proactively surface and question assumptions
  • Encourage experimentation and tolerate failure as a path to learning
  • Invite constructive dissent and elevate overlooked voices

5. Celebrate and Grow

  • Recognise contributions (big and small) with specificity
  • Create rituals for reflection and learning
  • Give clear, kind, and consistent feedback

⚙️ Day-to-Day Actions

  • Begin standups or planning sessions by reconnecting to the mission
  • Host regular listening circles or skip-level 1:1s
  • Share mistakes in public forums to normalise vulnerability
  • Use coaching questions instead of giving solutions
  • Rotate facilitation and speaking opportunities across roles
  • Sponsor someone different from you into a growth opportunity

🔬 Behaviours to Watch For (and Reframe)

Anti-Pattern Transformational Response
Leading with control and compliance Lead with trust, context, and clarity
Taking credit for team outcomes Share credit and celebrate others
Avoiding tough conversations Engage in timely, honest feedback with empathy
Protecting the status quo Invite challenge, ask "what are we missing?"
Hoarding knowledge or authority Distribute power and create shared ownership

📘 Metrics & Signals of Impact

  • Team sentiment (pulse surveys, retros)
  • Retention and internal mobility
  • Psychological safety scores
  • Number of coaching conversations held
  • Peer recognition and upward feedback

This playbook supports:

  • Policy: Psychological Safety First, Inclusive & Diverse Engineering Culture
  • Standards: Lead by Example, Conduct Feedback Loops, Support Inclusive Decision-Making, Foster Blameless Culture, Promote Continuous Learning

📖 Further Reading

  • "The Fearless Organization" – Amy Edmondson
  • "Turn the Ship Around!" – L. David Marquet
  • "Multipliers" – Liz Wiseman
  • Google Re:Work – People-First Leadership Research
  • “Leadership Without Easy Answers” – Ronald Heifetz