All posts by hindfarag

In my previous post, I discussed some typical leadership pitfalls that derail digital transformations. I got some good feedback that it resonated with many who’d been involved in or leading such transformations. There seems to be some good consensus around the danger of neglecting the cultural and commercial implications of digital transformations and treating them like isolated technology initiatives. Also in follow up conversations, some common themes began to emerge around strategic approaches that actually worked. Collective experiences suggest that a combination of the top four strategies discussed below establishes a solid foundation for the successful integration of digital technology.

Communication: simplify the message

I actually heard this repeatedly from technology heads who felt that their teams and larger organizations would benefit immensely from simplified top leadership communication. These high-level messages need to articulate the rationale behind the transformation and what to expect during the journey:

• What are the goals of integrating new digital technologies and going through an organization-wide transformation? How is this going to affect the bottom line, operations, or safety? Is the organization being reactive or proactive considering where clients and competitors are on their transformation journeys?
• Which teams and functions are responsible for figuring out how to get there? The answer- which typically requires some investigation- need not include the fancy solutions that some executives tend to promote prematurely: the Internet of Things (IOT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning, Analytics, the Cloud, etc.
• What is expected from other functions to support the planning and execution of the transformation? Will some roles and responsibilities change during or after the transformation? What exciting growth opportunities does this transformation present for people and teams?

Execution: demonstrate success

Securing stakeholder buy-in and commitment can be extremely challenging in ways that slow down transformations. Anticipating and mitigating this and other risks are not necessarily straightforward. One proven strategy is to start with small demonstration projects with direct commercial or efficiency impacts. Successes can then be scaled up and failures can be avoided. Organizations that use this strategy typically scope out and implements individual projects to achieve very specific digital transformation goals similar to the following:

• Improving efficiencies in data gathering, manipulation, and analytics to liberate resources for higher value activities;
• Raising safety standards or overall quality levels across operations;
• Extracting better insight from employee and candidate data to inform HR strategies;
• Enhancing existing products or launching new innovative offerings; or
• Gaining additional intelligence on clients and competitors to support product development, and sales and marketing efforts.

Change management: engage the wider business

This is another strategic imperative that technology and data analytics team leaders are very big on. Their tech-savvy teams require so much support on understanding and transforming the employee and client experiences, which are what it all eventually comes down to. Therefore, it is critical that teams that are responsible for operations or interact with clients are sold on the value of the transformation and are partners in making it happen.

Effective engagement starts from the top and very early in the journey. It requires proactive communication and genuine solicitation of input related to the transformation. Otherwise, most employees will continue in a business-as-usual manner expecting some new invention to drop on their desks one day or maybe they won’t even have faith it will! Ineffective stakeholder engagement can easily make the latter a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Personnel: attract, develop, and retain hybrid talent

The scary pace of technological advancement is removing geographic and functional barriers much faster than we are able to adapt to it. Understanding and addressing this challenge is not only a strategy for success but also a necessity. Digital transformations involve changing the employee experience, or the way employees carry their jobs and interact with each other and with clients. They may also involve changing the client experience through enhanced and new products and services or more innovative methods of delivery and client interaction.

This requires not only solid understanding of legacy processes but also the imagination to visualize how these experiences would change. The latter calls for familiarity with the available technological options, what they can deliver, and how they can change employee and/or client experiences. Organizations will therefore benefit from the ability to attract, develop, and retain employees with hybrid skill sets that allow them to consider the operational, commercial, and technological aspects of the transformation. Defining what the ultimate hybrid skill sets and roles look like takes some work, but it is a clear necessity.

We are still in the middle of an overwhelming digital transition, which means there is still so much to learn about how organizations can make digital transformations successful. But our collective experiences are increasingly offering significant input on strategic approaches that work. What’s interesting about the strategies discussed here is that they are probably critical for orchestrating and executing any major transformation- digital or not!

Developing and implementing effective digital transformation strategies is becoming more and more imperative not only for growth but also for survival in many industries. If your organization does not become capable of fully leveraging the opportunities offered by new data technologies in innovative ways, your competitors will. Also, new competitors will emerge with the ability to readily adopt new technologies. Where relevant, this is being largely realized by executives who are making digital transformation strategies a corporate priority. However, to what extent are their approaches helpful or actually detrimental to the progress of their organizations?

Throughout my experience in the energy industry, which is pretty data intensive, I have noticed that the technology-driven transformations can easily be derailed by the same strategies that aim to support them. Some of these pitfalls can be more tragic than others of course but some combination of two or more typically collide to reinforce the natural resistance to change. Here the top four I’ve observed over the years:

• Communicating the digital transformation as an end rather than a means. Introducing digital transformations as a vision for the future can actually be pretty confusing. A digital transformation strategy is actually a means to develop the ability to quickly leverage state-of-the-art data technologies to realize an already well articulated commercial vision. Through time, this is becoming more of a must-have than a differentiator. Clarifying the specific objectives of the transformation is the first step towards success. Are the new technologies and the data they avail going to offer more insight into clients and/or competitors? Are they going to improve the quality of the offering or enable the development of new offerings? Otherwise, if the ongoing global technological revolution calls for an overall vision revisit, that should be well articulated. Otherwise, eyes should still be kept on the prize!
• Getting overly excited about solutions before defining the problem. Let’s admit it. Most, if not all, executives are not necessarily the most tech savvy in their organizations. A leader, however, may get extremely excited about the opportunities made possible by a specific concept like Big Data, Analytics, the Internet of Things (IOT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning, the Cloud, etc. And if a leader constantly raves about specific solutions, these may end up being perceived as the desired answer regardless of the question. Going back to your vision as a leader, it’s best if your guidance focuses on where you think technology can be helpful. And trust your organization to identify and implement the suitable solution because before I finish writing this some even more exciting concept, technology, or application will have emerged!
• Creating an unintended parallel organization. Investing in and empowering a highly talented technology team to migrate systems and data to new platforms is critical. But, if operations, subject matter experts, sales and marketing teams aren’t all fully engaged in the journey, the desired holistic shift could easily be slowed down or miss its business goals. Old systems and approaches may remain a mystery to the technology team, negatively affecting efficiency, quality, and, as a result, brand. Employee engagement and client centrism are significant ingredients for successful digital transformations. This requires a well formulated strategy for securing buy-in and establishing a sense of partnership among stakeholders.
• Isolating innovation as an independent business function. Allocating a department or function to innovation can be useful at a time when technology is evolving faster than we can figure out what to do with it. But it can signal that the rest of the organization has no business being innovative. Also, innovative efforts across the organization that go unnoticed can be a huge demotivator. Adopting an innovative culture that engenders creativity, on the other hand, will have positive impacts on the pace as well as the benefits of the digital transformation.

As the digital revolution unfolds, leaders are challenged with having to develop and implement transformation strategies while learning from their own mistakes. The importance of dynamically understanding and managing the wholesale cultural and commercial implications of this transformation can not be overstated.

There is clearly no shortage of literature, training programs, degrees, and other efforts specializing in leadership development. There is also no shortage of professionals offering to develop and coach leaders, including yours truly. However, professionals typically go through these development experiences after they are appointed to leadership roles. Leaders are, hence, chosen but to what extent does each leader get to make the conscious decision to become a leader and keep climbing the ranks?

Since students wouldn’t go into undergraduate programs to specialize in leadership, a systemic approach to treat leadership as a career choice similar to major professions doesn’t really exist. Rather, a leadership role is generally perceived as an opportunity for advancement and who in their right mind would say NO to that? In many cases, this opportunity is offered due to the success of the selected leader in a technical role or maybe a smaller or very different leadership role. Of course, it’s highly unlikely that we’ll start saying no to promotions. But approaching the decision to take a leadership role like a typical career choice can be very helpful for effectively selecting and even developing leaders. This boils down to two simple questions:

• What’s the desired capability profile of the future leader?
• What makes the leadership role attractive for the ideal candidate?

As to the first question, each leadership role may require a unique profile. But there are certain capabilities that are simply required for success regardless of the size of the organization, team, or program. These basically enable a leader to define the destination, design the path, and bring people along for the journey:

• Imagination of how the wider economy and relevant industries and communities could evolve or transform given how game changers would play out
• Insight into the potential of individuals and teams and what it takes to realize it
• Vision of how the organization or business would fit into the likely future scenario(s)
• Influence to build cohesiveness and establish team-wide ownership of the vision
• Inspiration of a growth culture that naturally attracts and cultivates leadership talent, thereby multiplying and extending the positive outcomes

As for the second question, it is probably more critical that leaders are fulfilled than it is for them to exactly fit into the role profiles. Developing some of the desired capabilities is less challenging than becoming effective while being unfulfilled and constantly struggling with personnel, financial, and competitive pressures. In addition to being results-oriented, highly successful leaders share personal characteristics that bring personal joy to their experiences:

• Excitement about what the near, let alone the distant, future holds for their organization and people
• A genuine desire to see people reach new, previously unimaginable heights, watch them grow, and celebrate together
• Trust that their people have their minds and hearts in the right place and (with the right support) can and will do what it takes to achieve seemingly very ambitious goals
• Appetite for failure because failures offer the opportunity for a leader to practice being creative and compassionate, and address the issues head on

Leaders who possess these attributes will typically find fulfillment in their leadership roles and create positive and fulfilling environments for their teams and organizations. Approaching leadership as a means to an end, or the surest way to get to the top of organizations and simply make more money is the most ineffective way to lead. Raising the two simple career choice questions about what it takes to lead and what’s in it for the leader is not just critical for making mutually satisfactory decisions about selecting leaders. It also offers a framework for developing leadership talent across a wide range of experience and expertise.

I have struggled for some time with whether every leader had to be visionary- which is defined by the dictionary as “thinking about or planning the future with imagination or wisdom.” Expecting the visionary leader to have imagination and wisdom implies that the their envisioned future state is a pleasant one. Ideally, visionaries are able to imagine and articulate a destination for their organizations to grow into. Growth aspirations send signals to businesses that there is abundance, i.e. there is more than enough success to be had and more than enough money to be made!

My recent experiences have taught me that while not all  leaders are visionary, every leader has a vision. And while leaders may spend so much time on crafting and communicating goals and objectives, their unspoken vision is perhaps the most accurate predictor of the future of their organization. A leader’s perception of how the future tends to unfold becomes clear from they way they carry themselves and make decisions. Foreseeing abundance, visionary leadership instills hope and inspires the creativity needed for unearthing and capitalizing on new opportunities. Non-visionary leaders run the risk of projecting into their vision of the future their perception of the past and the present. And the most dangerous ‘non-visionary’ vision is that of scarcity, instilling fear rather than hope. The future becomes about going after the opportunities of the past and the present, using old or new method. This makes scarcity a self-fulfilling prophecy that limits the imagination of the organization to grabbing a larger slice of the same good ol’ pie. But how?

• Externally, the perception of scarcity generates a desire to beat rivals to protect and/or gain market share. This places the organization in a reactive mode to retain or attract clients away from competition. In the meantime, competitors are finding or even creating new opportunities in a world of abundance. They are leading the way in identifying new client needs, taking advantage of technological advances, and empowering creative talent. Scarcity-lead organizations continue to play catch up and even the most loyal clients may start to loose their patience. This reinforces the leader’s perception of scarcity, which in turn re-energizes the fear and the reactive catch-up craze.
• Internally, slower growth and mounting competitive pressures sell employees on the notion of scarcity. Job security is not necessarily at its highest levels, nor is upward mobility. Squeezed between pressure from the top and dissatisfaction from employees, middle managers are in panic and barely surviving. In this ‘sink-or-swim’ work environment, competition with peers wins over collaboration. When it comes to sinking or swimming, one outcome is certain. Motivation, productivity, and innovation sink and even the most loyal employees may start to loose their patience.

It’s not that difficult to predict what the future now looks like given the combination of more innovative competitors, disenfranchised employees, and less satisfied clients. Destination scarcity  has now become an unpleasant reality. Clearly, no leader desires for their business to contract but what they miss is how influential their mindset is versus their stated goals and objectives. A mindset of scarcity rather than abundance paints a vision of rivalry and protectionism, rather than one of growth and expansion.

As a leader you probably invest heavily in assessing and addressing your external environments and team performance. But how much focus do you place on understanding and transforming your mindset? To what extent is your spoken vision aligned with your mindset? What is your plan for deliberately articulating a growth vision that reflects a mindset of abundance?