Digital Leadership? Or Leadership in a Digital World?

Digital Leadership is a phrase fast becoming a buzzword for more and more businesses and business leaders.

However, the word digital has built an impression or understanding that it’s all about technology.  If you think that you are on a slippery road.  It is as a result of the digital revolution that we need to revisit and rethink leadership, business models and ‘the way we do things’.

But, Digital Leadership is less about a single person and more about bringing together a coalition of power, skill and vision that can collectively start the first wave of transformation.

Why do you need Digital Leadership?  Well we all need to become more digital – not just do digital but be digital and that means technology change, people change and business change…so one person alone doesn’t work.

What does this coalition look like and what do they need to do?

Well as with most transformational change efforts – nothing works without a fully embraced mandate from up on high.  So you need to ensure that the highest level of the business fully supports the effort.  Don’t stumble at this first hurdle, believe me, the effort to secure this support will be the biggest success factor in your business becoming more adaptive, more digital.

Then you need three key skill-sets and people of influence in this coalition: Someone who knows technology, someone who knows communication, and someone who knows about people and culture. Why is this important?  Well digital might not be all about tech but it’s going play a huge part in your transformation efforts – moving to automation, creating collaborative environments, aggregating data to make it meaningful, just having someone who knows what new and emerging tech is out there is hugely important.  This is a person who can show the business the art of the possible to achieve business objectives and meet audience needs. 

Communication is another key area that often get’s ignored when it comes to transformational efforts but it’s vital that there is a communication plan.  Don’t just send an email or have a meeting and think it’s done, and you can’t leave people to their own devices – you need to nurture them, keep reminding them of the urgency of becoming more digital.  There are two key areas that need to be managed; the participation of key people to build credibility and a reason to follow, alongside the creation of conversation throughout the organisation; a focus on sharing and receiving.  And then of course there is the need to address culture – because the way you do things at every level of the business is going to change and only the right mindset will allow for this to happen.

Then you need believers, inspirers, people willing to have a go, test things, try things, learn new things…these are the people that already have the mindset of change.  These people are those who will generate your initial quick wins and good news stories.  These people will create momentum to help move the transformational process along.  Don’t forget them, go out and find them as one of your first key steps – this is your first group of advocates.

Lastly, one of the big outputs of digital transformation is the democratisation of business.  So at this very first and key stage, bring some new and fresh digital native blood into the mix, there is much for us to learn from the digitals, as there is much for the digitals to learn from experience.

What I’ve just described is a really key step in your journey to becoming a more digital business.  You need power at the table, you need capability at the table, you need advocates at the table and some of your newest DNA to help you understand what tomorrow will really look like.

Obviously, I’m only talking about one small item that is needed at the beginning of your journey towards becoming adaptive.  You need to understand where your business sits digitally today so you know where to start and where to focus. 

You need a vision, and rather than a digital strategy sitting alongside your business strategy, create guiding principles that fit with your strategy that can be embedded within the business to help everyone start to become more digital.  You are also going to need some good news stories, most businesses we find have at least a couple of good news stories that can help people see that in some way, shape or form you are already demonstrating success in digital. 

We know the world is changing, we know as consumers we are changing, we know our daily lives are changing.

Digital does have a lot to answer for.  But in a good way.  We now know that things are in a state of constant change and that those who can see change, assess change and act accordingly i.e. adapt to change will be the successful businesses of the future.

Bringing your business up to speed with digital in 2015 really needs to be your number 1 agenda for the New Year.  Create a sense of urgency and start your journey.

The Mavericks Guide to Becoming a Digital Business

You now have to be a Digital Business or at least be considering it otherwise you are doomed for failure. That’s the message coming out of all the large management consultancies and research houses. Act now, act quick, put a huge amount of budget aside for your impending and unavoidable ‘Digital Transformation’.

It’s true. Businesses do need to be thinking about how they are going to address the digital challenge, the increased pace of technology and rising customer expectations have made it so. In fact, if a business hasn’t already put ‘digital’ on the boardroom agenda, they are already way behind the curve.

But businesses don’t need ‘Digital Transformation’. Businesses need to become adaptive. Change is not new, never has been, it’s just that now, change has become so fast, it’s scary, meaning there is huge reluctance to change anything within the organisation that holds risk for the bottom line. And the term ‘Digital Transformation’ has not helped. Wow, do I have to transform everything, all at once and it’s going to cost how much? And it could fundamentally and negatively affect the way the business operates and through a multitude of high profile, failed projects, and the list goes on. Only a couple of weeks ago did Mike Bracken talk about the disillusionment of so-called ‘digital transformation’ due to the failure of long term ‘BIG IT’ contracts within the Civil Service.

It is inevitable that the business world has to embrace digital…every business does, large or small, if they are to survive into the future. And this is not a technology/IT discussion, this is embracing digital across the entire organisation; it’s a change to the business model, the development of people, a shift in culture and the way a business communicates. Digital is affecting every pillar of the business and thus needs to be addressed across every pillar, holistically, to make the most of the digital opportunity. The rewards are proven. There is more research out there than you can shake a stick at demonstrating the benefits, cost savings, revenue growth and increased innovation possible when businesses are more digitally mature. So rather than focus on the obstacles to change, perhaps it’s time to focus on the advantages. 

We have to think differently. We have to take the fear out of digital and provide a means for action rather than just talking all the time. So if Digital Transformation is not the answer, what is?

Here’s our Maverick’s guide to becoming a Digital Business. It is based on the Adapt2Digital: Digitally Adaptive Framework & Methodology™ that helps businesses become adaptive over time. Think of digitally adaptive as taking the best of what a business has today and then looking into the future and pulling both together, in small incremental stages to create meaningful change. Not so scary now is it?

Take the time to understand the difference between technology and digital. Technology has an important and valid place within the organisation but there is a need to change the perception of technology from an internal service provider to a place that can share insight into the art of the possible to create business solutions. Digital on the other hand is about the whole business from the organisation, to the people, to the culture to the wider business ecosystem, it’s about the point of connection between technology, people and culture…and it’s always continuously changing.

It doesn’t matter who in the organisation starts the transition to becoming a Digital Business. The standard interpretation of changing your business to be more digital is starting at the very top. So this is getting someone, generally the CEO to mandate the digital directive. This is not the start, this is actually the tipping point. It actually starts with an advocate, someone who has recognised the digital imperative and can see the business benefit and communicate this upward and outward.

Find your champion. Maybe the advocate is the digital champion but maybe not. If not, find the champion. This needs to be someone who:

• Can talk up to the business

• Who believes and participates in digital

• Has credibility as an individual

• Has courage to challenge the status quo

Build a Business Case for digital. You aren’t going to get anywhere without a strong business case that is bought into but the senior leadership team. Make sure you include a broad assessment of current digital capability and competency across the business and what the effects of the transition could be in real terms.

Find some good news stories. There will be pockets of digital happening in your organisation. Find the good stuff and demonstrate the value of this. Use these as best practice examples, think about how learnings from these initiatives can be repeated, enhanced, and made more of. 

Bring people together. Vitally important. Bring the senior leadership team together and do something with them that shares the business case, that creates digital definition for the organisation, that builds agreement and consensus. Everyone needs to be aligned and committed to the digital cause because it is everyone’s responsibility.

It’s all about lots of little. The business isn’t going to transform overnight. Thinking this would be very unrealistic. Neither do you need big digital transformation projects to adapt to digital. What is needed are as many believers and advocates as possible that can start to seed positive change in many areas and just start small.

Break down the barriers and collaborate. Find some areas where you can collaborate, invite different people to meetings, learn something new from someone. Get away from hierarchy. Businesses in the modern world are not hierarchical; they foster collaboration to enable innovation. Empower people to make data driven decisions.

Make sure you have a framework to track progress. So many times ‘digital’ is happening without a structure to monitor results and progress. A robust framework is needed to ensure you are moving in the right direction. Anchor digital back to the business and find a way of proving real, tangible ROI. This is the only way to ensure digital is seen as impacting positively on the business from a financial perspective.

Take care of mindset. No business can change without the right mindset. A collective digitally adaptive mindset shifts culture. Seek the solution, not the reasons to fail, be an enable, not a blocker and remember that mindset is learned, it is not a given. 

Nobody believed in Steve Jobs when he first took the concept of the personal computer to market, in fact he had to describe it as ‘putting a TV screen and a typewriter together’, which to most was a crazy idea. But as Apple has proven, belief by a few can change the world.

It is time to believe in a new business model, one that is adaptive, one that is not stuck in traditional ways of working and operating. Here’s to the crazy ones…

Collaboration & Integration: A Match Made in Heaven

Collaboration has become quite the buzzword within business recently as leaders start to realise one of the future success factors of surviving in the digital age is dependent on enabling a collaborative environment. And this is for many reasons, improvements in communication, an empowered workforce and importantly, the ability to continuously innovate at a time where innovation can mean the difference between business success and failure.

There are many examples of collaboration within business. Google for instance introduced the concept of Google Garage. A space where “Googlers can come together from across the company and learn, create, and make.” Apple has always been known as a collaborative company, as referenced in this interview with the late Steve Jobs where he talks about how the company is organised like a start-up. AMP Bank in Sydney spend time with their employees side-by-side to understand how they work and how new technologies and strategies can enhance their personal and professional lives. Cisco leverages a collaborative environment to crowd source issues and requests, enabling them to find the best and fastest solutions for improved customer experiences.

So we can all agree that collaboration is a necessity. As businesses move to become digital businesses, adapting internally so that functional areas do not operate in silo is a real imperative.

So where does integration come into it? There are many definitions of integration. Here we are referring to integration as systems, as technology that enables collaboration. Interestingly, there are very few examples of businesses that are successfully combining collaboration with integration, which is somewhat odd given the amount of tools and systems that are now available for businesses to utilise. There is very little point investing in a collaboration tool that is never used and in this day and age, there is very little point having a meeting to collaborate on something without the tools to enable further collaboration and effective progress. Time and time again, systems and tools are introduced into the organisation to promote and encourage collaboration yet they fall by the whey side because there isn’t an explanation of why it has been introduced, the reasons for using it and how to use it – therefore you end up with just another platform or tool that becomes a burden for the employee rather than an aid. 

Collaboration & Integration are key parts of a continuous journey, and also key elements of successful digital business. What they require however, is combined focus and a committed driving force to keep both moving forward to generate value for the customer. What is important is understanding the parameters of both as part of a wider digital business strategy, how far it should be pushed across audiences (and by audience, I mean not just employees but customers, supply chain/partners and wider stakeholders). In addition, they require ownership. Who owns collaboration and integration in the organisation? Motley Fool has a Chief Collaboration Officer (CCO) who is charged with making collaboration part of the daily doings of the company. Of course, this responsibility could also fall to another member of the C-suite. So who owns Integration? You could argue this is the future role of the CIO, who historically has been kept at arms length from the senior leadership team. This would make sense given the growing importance of the CIOs role and responsibility in driving the organisation from being a traditional business to a digital business and all that entails. And then of course there is the challenge of bringing these two roles together so that they are not working in isolation. Moving forward, both of these roles will be integral to building a digital culture internally across the wider workforce.

As our working environments change due to the combined forces of technology advancement and customer demand, the need for collaboration and integration to work together will be key. Workers will be spread across many time zones, employee demands will be greater, and technology will continue to advance. In the end, the future workplace will be a digital and analytical environment and businesses should be starting the journey now to put a workplace infrastructure in place that accommodates this – one that smartly enables innovation to increase competitiveness and the bottom line.

Who is really in control of digital? If you don’t know, read on

Do a Google search on the above question and you’ll likely be bombarded by huge amounts of opinion pieces and research papers that extol the rise of the CIO as the true controller of the digital agenda, or maybe the CMO who has been the first customer contact and supposedly the key to unlocking the mysteries of social or perhaps even customer services, those who understand the customer best due to more physical contact.  But then we are told it is the CTO as surely digital and technology are synonymous with each other and this is the most obvious answer.  With vast amount of research studies being undertaken on the subject of Digital Transformation, we also see that the most consistent element for success of any kind of business wide Digital Transformation is the CEO.

Well, that just about covers most of the senior people on your leadership team, without even mentioning the rise of the CDO (Chief Digital Officer).

Personally we believe they are all wrong. 

Why?  The opinions above only serve to do two things:

1. Try and solve a 21st century business problem using 20th century structures and ideas

2. Start to cause the very thing you don’t want, that of ill perceived ownership of something that just simply doesn’t belong to you.

That’s all well and good but what is the answer?

The answer is easy, though when you first read it you’ll think we’ve led you down the garden path:

The Audience.  The audience is in control of it.  When this is understood, you can start to address the key steps you must take to begin to adapt to the changing digital world. 

Who is the Audience?  Audience can be defined as any human being that has contact with your business.  There are four main audience pillars with one new pillar emerging.

In a digital world customer centricity is not enough.  The engagement, competency and capability of your workforce will determine your effectiveness in customer engagement. Equally supplier and partner relationships are becoming deeper and more experimental. The emerging audience pillar is fast becoming a strategic asset for digital businesses; The Crowd.  From design to investment, from customer support to marketing, the crowd is quickly becoming a game changer for many businesses. 

But back to the topic question:  Who is in control.  Well if the audience is in control that leaves us where?  It actually leaves us quite rightly where we should be, in a horizontal and collaborative situation.  Consider the following scenario:

The CEO has ultimate ownership and command of the vision.  That vision is the digital vision and the business vision all rolled into one. The digital strategy, usually in parallel with the business for those only just beginning their journey towards being digitally adaptive, is owned by those who control the fundamental areas supporting audience control.  The implementation and delivery of the strategy is controlled by a slightly wider team that includes communicators, influencers and advocates.

If you are writing a digital strategy ensure you bring the right people to the table at the start, but remember one thing, always have a seat for the audience. For us that means an in-depth understanding of audience journeys. This should be of equal importance at that table to those who have a physical invite.

Ensuring your business becomes audience centric to survive in a digital world means bringing the core leaders together, under the CEO’s vision to build a strategy, with the main stakeholders owning the strategy. A team effort will lead you along the path to success.

Keeping pace with digital change

Digital is vast. It has redefined IT, Sales & Marketing, Customer Service and Operations; every area of the business and every industry sector has been changed forever. Why? Because the demands of the customer and the employee are rising at a pace faster than most businesses are adapting to these cope with these changing needs. This pace and the fundamental “access all areas” shift that digital has created has also generated a melting pot for new and disruptive competitors into sometimes hugely monopolised verticals.  If you want to find out more, pick up a copy of James McQuivey’s Digital Disruption.

The bottom line is clear for all CEO’s and business leaders. To be a leader in a digital world you need to:

• Really commit to digital

• Be prepared to go back to school – build up your knowledge and understanding of digital and the opportunities it can bring to your organisation

• Adopt a mindset that focuses on finding the right pace that matches your customers

• Keep pace with your customers (that’s digital maturity)

• Don’t delegate your vision; own the vision and empower the organisation to implement it

When something comes along that fundamentally changes the way we do business across the globe, we still see a struggle to take hold of both the challenge and the opportunity. All too often this results in a failure to use it to our advantage.

As far as digital is concerned, we still have a long way yet to go.

Christopher Columbus went out in a ship and realised the world was round.  Similarly, businesses need to realise digital is pervasive, it has no edges. It has changed things forever because it’s shown us that what was once thought to be the throne of power has flipped. The customer drives the pace of business now.  Customer Experience is a business-wide priority and Digital neither resides within the siloes of IT or Marketing. In fact, digital is not owned, digital just is.

Seize the moment

If you are a CEO, I hope you have already actively embraced digital and matured beyond allowing it to live in those siloes. I hope you have seized the moment, and that you are learning and awakening an almost youthful passion for experimentation and change. I hope, also, that you are beginning to experience and realise that honest and open communication is reciprocated tenfold in sales and advocacy.

On the other hand you might be about to head into a meeting to assess the business Quartile results thus far, only to realise sales are down, morale is at an all time low and the board wants answers… If so, commit to digital!  Think not about how you are currently performing. Think about how you are currently losing out because you haven’t already started to drive change in a way that is adaptive; your opportunity to really increase market share, enter new markets and gain competitive edge. We need a call to arms.  Those of you who have taken onboard the role of a true leader, I encourage you to share your stories, to seek out other peers and help them make the move.

Becoming Digitally Adaptive is no buzzword, but a call for all leaders to ensure they are aware and actively addressing the transition required to stay in the game.