Digital leadership : What's Different?
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The document summarizes the key findings from research conducted by MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte on how business and leadership are changing with digital disruption. While some core leadership skills remain the same, such as articulating value and owning the transformation, digital leadership requires certain new skills. The top skills identified are having a transformative vision, digital literacy, and adaptability. The document also outlines lessons from digitally maturing companies, such as hiring digital leaders, regularly refreshing senior team's digital literacy, creating an environment for new leaders, and cultivating a culture of experimentation.
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Digital leadership : What's Different?
- 2. The rapid changes associated with digital disruption can be disorienting, so many of us assume the leadership handbook must be completely rewritten for the digital age. OR Is it possible that the leadership challenges of the digital world are more the same than different but we are overly focused on what’s different because we are so alarmed by the threats to the status quo? What is changing?
- 3. MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte in a joint research project , studied how business and leadership are changing as a result of digital disruption. They surveyed more than 20,000 business executives, managers, and analysts around the world to understand the challenges and opportunities associated with digital transformation. They have found that while many core leadership skills remain the same, the particular demands of digital disruption call for certain new skills as well. This presentation is based on findings of the research article . Here, we will explore what is new about Digital leadership & what remains the same? We will also learn from organizations that are digitally maturing — that is, those that have been transformed by digital technologies and capabilities that improve processes, engage talent across the organization, and drive new value-generating business models. The Research Source:https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/how-digital-leadership-isnt- different/
- 4. How Digital Business differs from traditional business? Source:https://sloanreview.mit.edu
- 5. What Makes Digital Leadership Different The biggest challenges faced by survey respondents are: • Accelerated pace of doing business. • Constant change in organizational culture (tensions between “change makers” and employees with a traditional mindset). • The need for a flexible and distributed workplace, and greater expectations of productivity. leaders need to constantly adapt or augment some of their core skills to navigate these challenges in an increasingly fast paced digital world. To identify capabilities that matter most in organizations, survey respondents were asked , “What is the most important skill organizational leaders should have to succeed in a digital workplace?” The responses paint a compelling picture of what's effective leadership looks like in a digital environment.
- 6. Skills Leaders need to succeed in Digital work place? Source:https://sloanreview.mit.edu
- 7. Most Important Skills for Digital Leadership 1. Transformative vision and forward-looking perspective. Leaders with a transformative vision are equipped to provide purpose and direction. • 22% of respondents say the most important leadership skill to possess in a digital organization is a transformative vision, which includes the ability to anticipate markets and trends, make savvy business decisions, and solve tough problems in turbulent times. • The second most important is being forward-looking (20%), which includes having clear vision, sound strategy, and foresight to asses the evolving technology trends. • How is that even possible when you’re facing an uncertain future? John Glaser, senior vice president of population health at Cerner, described his approach: “Work on things that are likely to be relevant to many possible futures. Tell me a future in which engaging patients to manage their own health is a bad idea, because I don’t see that future at all. So I may not know how it’s going to play out, but under almost any conceivable circumstance, these things will be relevant.”
- 8. Important Skills for Digital Leadership cont.. 2. Digital literacy. Understanding technology is the most important skill for leaders. Survey respondents define it in a particular way. They put a premium on previous experience in a technology leadership role but also leaders with general digital literacy, as opposed to hard-core technical skills like programming or data science. Digital literacy is critical for three reasons. 1. It supports the first two leadership skills cited: having transformative vision and being forward-looking. A leader who is not digitally literate will struggle to keep abreast of emerging trends and developments and will fail to grasp how those trends can bring new value or represent a threat to the organization. 2. Understanding at a high level how technology does (and does not) work enables leaders to make more informed decisions in an uncertain environment. 3. It is often much easier and more effective to help established business leaders become digitally literate than it is to teach technologists the strategic knowledge they need to lead effectively.
- 9. Important Skills for Digital Leadership cont.. 3. Adaptability. • Third most important capability, a leader must have is change-orientation i.e., open-mindedness, adaptability, and innovativeness. • It helps leaders respond to a fluid environment and change course if the technology and market environments evolve in unanticipated ways. • This mindset also enables a digital leader to continually update his or her knowledge stores to account for changes in technology and avoid obsolescence. • Leaders can upgrade their knowledge through continuing education, in- house training, cross-generational reverse-mentoring programs, or any of the abundant online programs.
- 10. What Stays the Same? Fundamentals of leadership in the face of digital change
- 11. What Stays the Same? Fundamentals of leadership in the face of digital change Articulating the value ‘‘Digital change’’ will bring — and investing accordingly. • Digital transformation is driven by new technology, but that technology is only as valuable as the new business strategies and practices it enables. • Before leaping into any new technology, leaders must be able to clearly articulate why they need to invest in it. All the digital noise make it difficult for executives to display this kind of discipline. • leaders also need to provide proper financial support and resources to digital transformation projects . • Its not surprising that 75% of survey respondents who say their company has made appropriate levels of investment report successful initiatives, while only 34% of those who say their company does not commit sufficient time, energy, and resources report successful outcomes.
- 12. What Stays the Same? Fundamentals of leadership in the face of digital change Owning the transformation. • As with any change effort, top managements involvement and prioritization and can help align the rest of the organization behind a digital transformation • It becomes a cross-enterprise, cross-functional endeavor, which makes it possible to move from simply doing or adopting new technologies to being more of an active digital ecosystem in the organization. • According to research, when executives delegate responsibility for digital business to the technologists, it is a recipe for near-certain failure. • Technologists flawlessly implement enterprise social media or collaboration platforms without conducting any training or behavioral change initiatives to accompany the launch. The result is often a beautiful technology platform that doesn't bring business value.
- 13. Respondents in digitally maturing companies say their CEO’s office is primarily heading up transformation efforts. In early-stage companies, it’s often IT. Who leads Digital Transformation? Which part of the organization was most likely to lead an organization’s digital initiatives? The least digitally mature companies tended to situate projects in a functional area, such as IT or marketing. Digitally maturing companies, however, were nearly twice as likely to drive digital efforts through CEOs office. Source:https://sloanreview.mit.edu
- 14. What Stays the Same? Fundamentals of leadership in the face of digital change Equipping employees to succeed. Another aspect of good leadership that has not changed involves enabling and empowering employees to carry out new initiatives. • Leaders must set up employees for success. Among respondents who report their organizations provide them with the resources and opportunities to thrive in a digital environment, 72% say their digital initiatives are successful. Among respondents who say their company does not provide such opportunities and resources, only 24% report successful digital initiatives. Digital transformation is both a top-down and a bottom-up effort. • Leaders can support employees in many ways — for instance, by providing adequate training, moving employees within the organization to learn other ways of doing things from coworkers, and giving them time and space to adapt to new technology in the context of their other job responsibilities.
- 15. Lessons from Digitally Maturing Companies.
- 16. Lessons from Digitally Maturing companies to initiate & maintain Digital Transformation. Hire digital leaders to get the ball rolling. • To kick start digital transformation, organization can onboard so called anchor hires to catalyze the process. These are outside leaders with deep digital transformation experience who can provide the needed expertise and perspective. • What skills do you need to look for in anchor hires? Having a track record of producing digital products with measurable value. Demonstrating the ability to enable and systematize into the organization a new way of thinking and doing. • Once the digital initiatives begins to flourish, the anchor team can use the successes to serve as a proof of concept to begin driving change across the organization.
- 17. Not Enough Digital Leadership. Source: https://sloanreview.mit.edu
- 18. Lessons from Digitally Maturing companies to initiate & maintain Digital Transformation. Regularly refresh your senior team’s digital literacy. • Data and analytics, artificial intelligence, blockchain, autonomous vehicles, additive manufacturing, virtual and augmented reality, and other emerging technologies are poised to radically reshape the business environment over the next decade. • Organization can have continuing technology education sessions for leadership. As a part of those sessions, leaders can engage in what many call zoom-in/zoom-out strategizing, guided by facilitators with deep digital knowledge. • In this process, executives forecast what business or industry will look like in 10 years as a result of a particular technology or general digital trends, and then they plot what moves will be necessary in the next 12 to 18 months for their organization to begin preparing for that future. • While it is unlikely they will accurately predict the future, this exercise helps avoid the all-too-common trap of strategizing about the current digital environment instead of the one that will be here by the time strategies come to fruition.
- 19. Lessons from Digitally Maturing companies to initiate & maintain Digital Transformation. Create an environment where new leaders can step up. • Leaders need to clearly communicate strategic objectives so front-line and middle managers can make sound decisions on the ground and have enough time and opportunity to experiment with new ways of leading in a digital environment. • One of the most critical skills everyone needs to develop is the ability to lead networks of people and teams, rather than leading via a hierarchy. • A network approach facilitates iterative, fast, collaborative conversations and decisions by proliferating many small nodes of communication and decision-making that extend far beyond organizational lines and boxes. • If decision rights are clear, enabling, and communicated, senior leaders can enhance the quality and speed of these expanding networks by opening doors, removing barriers, engaging with teams in collaborative work, helping them become more agile, and focusing on innovating day-to-day work.
- 20. Lessons from Digitally Maturing companies to initiate & maintain Digital Transformation. Cultivate a culture of experimentation. • leaders should think like innovators and provide the space for employees to try new things, learn from them, adjust, and scale. • To avoid conveying mixed signals, you can actively encourage and reward learning that comes with less-than-successful efforts — often called failing forward. • Richard Gingras, vice president of Google News say, “It’s really not that important if the experiment succeeds or fails; it’s what they learn from it. Good, bad, or indifferent, it is intelligence that they can lay claim to. Maybe it didn’t work out the way we thought it would, but we learned X, Y, and Z, and we’re not embarrassed by the fact that our initial assumptions were wrong. There are no failures. We tried something, and we learned something.”
- 21. Thank You