Strong leadership is the catalyst for driving digital transformation, as they’re responsible for creating the narrative for change and inspiring the workforce to embrace digital transformation.
But how exactly can you or your leadership team be most effective during a digital transformation? This article covers key skills, challenges and factors to consider within leadership when implementing a full digital strategy or transformation.
Leadership in Digital Transformation
Organizations across a multitude of industries are being forced to embrace digital technologies to enhance their processes, productivity and overall business offering. However, a digital transformation doesn’t just involve the implementation of a few technologies here and there; it requires restructuring of an entire organization.
This process requires changes to the business’s processes, culture and overall approach to digital technologies, which is why a top-level understanding is so crucial for a successful digital transformation.
Key Things to Consider as a Leader in Digital Transformation
As a leader navigating the complex terrain of driving digital progression and change within an organization, there are key considerations that can make the difference between flourishing in the digital age and falling behind. These factors have been outlined below and, when used correctly, will empower leaders to thrive amidst the ever-changing digital landscape.
There Will Be Roadblocks; Be Prepared to Tackle These
Unfortunately, the journey towards digital transformation is rarely a smooth one. Therefore, it’s essential for leaders to anticipate potential roadblocks that can impede progress and to have an understanding of how to resolve them.
Challenges to your digital transformation can emerge in a variety of forms, such as a resistance to change, resource constraints, or even unforeseen technological hurdles, which is why it’s so crucial to prepare for even the most unexpected risks to your digital transformation.
Preventative strategies may involve developing robust change management plans, seeking buy-in from key stakeholders, or ensuring that you have additional resources at your disposal, if needed.
Proactively addressing potential roadblocks will enable your organization to be better equipped to keep your digital transformation initiatives on track, increasing the likelihood of a successful outcome.
Helping Others to Understand the Greater Context
One of the fundamental characteristics of a successful leader is their ability to help others understand the greater context of their vision, which is very much the same for leaders during a digital transformation.
This involves not only communicating the “why” behind your digital transformation, but also helping individuals and teams see how their specific roles fit into the bigger picture. Instilling a sense of purpose and direction in every member of the organization, partnered with effective communication, is key to reducing the resistance to change and ensuring an effective on-boarding of digital transformation initiatives.
To help team members understand the greater context, digital leaders should encourage questions, facilitate open dialogues and provide clarity on how digital initiatives align with both the individual and organization’s strategic goals. By ensuring that everyone understands the greater context of digital leadership and how a digital transformation will benefit their personal progression, leaders can foster a more cohesive and motivated workforce.
Build a Digital Transformation Initiative that is Adaptable
Leaders should ensure that any digital transformation plans are flexible and responsive to change. This means recognizing that the digital environment can shift unexpectedly, and the strategies that may be feasible currently, might need adjustment in the future. By embracing agile processes, a culture of continuous learning and improvement and a digital transformation framework that allows for change, you encourage innovation and the exploration of emerging technologies. Once adaptability is built into the core of your digital transformation, you can ensure your organization will thrive in an ever-changing digital ecosystem.
There Will Always Be Opportunity for Further Digital Innovation
A digital transformation is not a check-box activity; it’s an on-going journey. Even after making significant progress, leaders should continue to seek opportunities for further digital innovation.
Aside from exploring opportunities yourself, it’s essential to promote an organizational culture that advocates innovation and a forward-thinking mindset. Teams should be encouraged to stay informed about emerging technologies and trends, but also provided the correct resources and support to actively explore new possibilities. Creating a workforce that understands the importance of finding new opportunities for innovation will help to guarantee that your organization remains agile and competitive within the digital age.
Challenges Faced by Leaders During a Digital Transformation
Resistance to Change
A challenge that is universal to all organizational transformations, is an internal resistance to change. This is often due to reasons such as the fear of the unknown, concerns about job security, or a preference for existing processes. It can often be daunting using new systems and learning new business processes yourself, as it puts a lot of pressure on employees who may feel they need more time to adapt to new systems compared to their peers. To overcome this challenge, leaders must effectively pinpoint what is causing the resistance and provide one-to-one support where possible, to better help employees adjust to new ways of working.
A Shift in Culture
A lot of resistance to digital transformation can often be attributed to the existing culture within an organization. Organizational cultures can often become rigid and lose alignment with the importance of change and innovation. Organizations and particularly their leadership teams must recognize that, by giving way to more agile, collaborative, and innovative approaches, they’re paving the way for the long-term success of their digital transformation initiatives.
Talent Gaps
As a result of the rapid evolution of technology and the digital space, the digital skills shortage is an on-going challenge that many organizations are facing across the globe. Leaders must be able to accurately identify skills gaps within their workforce that may impact the on-boarding of new digital technologies and take steps to address them. These skill gaps can be reduced through training and upskilling programs for existing employees or the recruitment of talent with the necessary skills required. Bridging talent gaps is crucial for a successful digital transformation, as it makes certain that the organization has the expertise required to implement and manage new digital tools and technologies effectively.Â
Cyber Security Risks
As the depth and breadth of technologies increases, so does the risk of cybersecurity threats. It’s crucial that cyber security risks are considered and are proactively avoided, to guarantee the protection of organization’s sensitive data, systems and reputation. Moreover, this will also ensure that the organization maintains compliance with the relevant data protection regulations.
Leaders should ensure security protocols are updated to cover new technologies and that employees are educated on cyber security awareness, to make sure the organization is vigilant against emerging threats.
Resource Allocation
A digital transformation often requires the use of significant financial and human resources. To avoid resource wastage or overspending, leaders should carefully allocate budgets and personnel to support digital initiatives. Organizations can improve spend value by prioritizing investments that align with strategic goals and assessing the cost-benefit ratio of various projects. However, it’s important for leaders to regularly review and adjust resource allocation as the digital landscape evolves, as it’s likely there will be further opportunities for improving the value of digital initiatives.
6 Leadership Skills Needed for a Successful Digital Transformation
Visionary Leadership
The success of digital transformation hinges on visionary leadership. Leaders need to supply a clear and compelling vision of where the organization is headed within the digital age. This vision should not only be inspiring but should also make sense strategically, ensuring digital initiatives are aligned with the overarching business objectives.
If visionary leaders are able to effectively articulate clear vision of the “big picture” to their team, this will help motivate employees to collaboratively work toward achieving both individual and organizational goals within the digital space.
Clear and Effective Communication
It’s one thing to be able to communicate the “what” and “why” to an organization, but it’s the “how” and the support provided as a result of this, that ensures the end goal is reached. Clear and effective communication is a staple within any successful project, as it keeps all involved parties in the loop and ensures each team member knows their role within your digital transformation.
Creating a Clear, organization-wide understanding of the project and your expectations will not only help with the effectiveness of implementation, but it will also help to reduce transformation resistance, as employees kept in the loop will have more time to adapt to new technologies implemented.
Reliable Change Management
For the successful initiation of a digital transformation plan, it’s crucial that change management is considered as this can help to guide teams through the transition effectively. This is supported by the World Economic Forum, who also claim that an agile approach to collaboration is a key quality for effective digital leadership.
Change management can be applied by identifying potential resistance to change, addressing concerns, and providing the necessary support and resources for employees to adapt to new processes and technologies.
A Thorough Understanding of your Workforce
Providing adequate support to employees requires understanding their unique concerns and challenges. Prior to any organizational transformation, leaders need a thorough understanding of their workforce, including their skills, strengths, and areas for development. By understanding these areas, leaders can make informed decisions about the management of talent, including upskilling, reskilling and the necessary training plans to support your digital transformation.
An In-Depth Knowledge of Technology
While they may not need to be technical experts, leaders in digital transformation should possess a strong understanding of technologies relevant to their digital transformation. At a minimum, leaders should have a grasp on the opportunities and potential limitations of emerging technologies; As Apoorva Chhabra from Gartner says, it’s challenging to get value out of technology if you don’t understand what it does or doesn’t do.
This knowledge enables leaders to assess the impact of technology on their business models and make informed technology decisions that ensure digital initiatives remain aligned with strategic objectives.
Building Consensus Among Leaders
Building consensus among leaders is crucial for cohesive decision-making during digital transformation. According to research carried out by Google, 72% of digital leaders say that consistent C-level collaboration is essential for successful digital transformation. Not only must leaders collaborate with their teams and employees, but they must also ensure all other decision-makers are on board with the proposed digital transformational strategies for the organization.
It can be challenging to build a consensus within leadership, especially for projects that involve significant changes to an organization. Therefore, it’s important to make time to negotiate differing perspectives, find common ground and create a shared commitment to digital goals. By taking the time to build a mutual understanding of digital goals within the leadership team, you significantly reduce the likelihood of fragmentation or conflicting priorities throughout your transformative process.
Additionally, fostering digital alignment within your leadership team will help to uncover skill gaps across both your executive and non-executive workforce. By recognizing skilling opportunities, you can proactively plan the correct digital skills training to upskill your existing workforce, which will help to empower employees and progress a culture of continuous growth within your organization.
Lead Digital Transformation Initiatives with Elev8
Regardless of industry, a strong leadership force is the backbone of a successful digital transformation. Without this, you open the possibility to a plethora of issues, which may impact your transformational efforts and could result in a waste of resources.
Elev8 specializes in developing role-specific training programs that assist leaders in implementing digital transformations within their organizations and help them to thrive in the digital sphere.
If you’re looking to be a successful leader in the digital reskilling revolution, we can help. For more information, please find a range of articles on digital transformation here or alternatively, contact us here.
