Article by Warren Knight

What makes a strong leader in today’s digital business world? Successful business leadership used to be all about high performance in strategy and execution. Then business leadership became about building high performing teams, developing emotional intelligence in yourself and others, and growing business communities through trust, effective conflict management and innovation.

All of the above, and other attributes and skills, still hold strong. But now, added to those skills sets are expectations of high level skills in another area: digital leadership.

Until a few years ago, you might have been forgiven for dismissing that as ‘something for the IT department’. But in today’s business context, digital leadership is not just related to technology. We’re talking about the whole business ecosystem, and how technology creates and drives value across the whole range of business functions.

So successful digital leaders need to fully understand the business in the digital age, how digital technology creates opportunity by acting as a disruptor, and the impact that this must have on organisational culture.

As organisations transform to become increasingly dependent on digital technologies, skilled digital leaders will be in high demand – and effective leadership will be essential to future sustainability and success. I met Nick Skytland from NASA recently and he agreed to my sharing with you some of NASA’s insights from recent research on the future of work, which you can read here.

What are the attributes and skills you need, and the steps you may need to take to stay ahead of the curve?

1.Strong business skills

The fundamentals of business have not changed in the digital age, and you’ll still need a good grounding and experience in all of them: profit and loss, cost control, cash flow, customer service and retention, people and stakeholder management, commercial management.

But whilst, in the past, business leaders may have been able to rely on their IT or marketing heads for this, in order to Think Digital First you’ll also need to become technologically savvy enough to identify the opportunities and drive through digital transformation programmes.

2.Technological and digital awareness (and knowing the difference)

Boards and senior executives need to become more engaged with technology. As a leader of a digital first business you’ll have to be comfortable not just talking about, but also using, technology; and be informed enough to promote its use and underline its importance.

If you’re currently a business leader who is a self-confessed technophobe, you need to address that, starting right now. A digital business requires every member of its senior team to be able to make meaningful contributions to discussions about technology and articulate its value. This doesn’t mean you need to have a deep understanding of how digital technologies work, but you need to understand what they are capable of, and how they could be applied in your organisation.

But Thinking Digital First is about a lot more than embracing technology, so being comfortable talking about technology matters is just a first step to becoming a successful digital leader.

Thinking Digital First is about transformation – creating new business models, products and services, generating new revenue streams, and creating a unique customer experience. Leaders who still believe that digital is just an IT project, or is just about improving their website or increasing their social media activity are not digitally aware.

Providing the leadership required for a successful digital transformation will require you to understand how digital drives the entire business. You can read more about a future leader’s role in digital transformation here.

As a future digital business leader, you’ll need to understand how key digital technologies work together to completely transform an organisation’s culture and the way it operates.

You’ll need to be aware of developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) that could transform how a business interacts with its customers, and how blockchain could impact the way you use data.

An aspiring future digital leader who shows little interest in digital products and services will struggle to maintain their credibility within their organisation, especially as Generation Z begins to join the workforce.

Your journey towards digital leadership may start with exploring digital offerings and experiences on a personal basis, but ultimately you will need to understand how digital products and services will generate value for the business – as well as the investment and resources needed to create and manage them.

3.Design thinking and agile methodology

Agile methodology and design need to be learned and understood at all levels in the organisation – beginning with high level leaders but spreading throughout the business and independent of function and role.

Good design encourages experimentation at a level which would otherwise be impractical. It allows digital leaders to draw on a whole team’s imagination, intuition and customer knowledge, and fosters a true culture of innovation. This shortened cycle increases the opportunity for innovation to add business value. Design thinking is a problem-solving approach which speeds up learning, and shortens the time needed to get an idea through development and into the market.

You can learn more about design thinking and agile methodology for digital leaders here.

4.Collaboration

Digital business relies on collaboration – across the different areas of the business, and, potentially, with third parties. Digital flows through an organisation, breaking down the traditional boundaries between business functions to create a seamless customer experience. Achieving this relies on leaders to be able to look at the business from a customer perspective, and spot opportunities to improve their experience and anticipate their needs. You’ll need to be capable of leading without boundaries, and enabling others to do likewise, to allow your teams to make the best use of new digital tools to provide innovative solutions.

Your approach to collaboration will also need to embrace virtual teams – both within and outside your organisation, in order to get the most value from the right people, and gain true advantage from the opportunities provided by digital technologies.

5.Actively seeking new ideas

Truly collaborative working practices come from a culture in which new ideas and innovative practices are actively encouraged, across the business. This means that the responsibility for new ideas belongs to everyone – staff in every area, partners, suppliers and customers.

As a successful digital leader, you will need to create the right environment and processes for ideas to be shared, debated and acted upon.

You’ll also need to take into account your workforce’s preferred ways of working. As generation Z enters the workplace, understanding how they (and remember that they are true digital natives) will expect their working lives to be. I’ve explored this in more detail in my blog on the subject of embracing Gen Z in the workplace.

6.Risk taking

You will need to be the kind of leader who is willing to take risks, and to support and encourage your workforce in doing so.

Digital markets are more dynamic than traditional markets, and disruptors can enter the market quickly. So to stay ahead of the competition, you will need to be able to respond quickly to changes, and ready to introduce new features, products and services.

This will require you to be a rapid decision-maker, sometimes on what may seem to be minimal information – encouraging your teams to try new things, test their ideas and learn fast.

I’m not necessarily talking about taking big risks; the most successful digital businesses regularly launch small initiatives to test new ideas, products and services. But you’ll be testing in the real world, with your customers, instead of carrying out lengthy ‘offline’ research.

7.Being prepared to fail

Inevitably, while some ideas will work, others won’t, and the business will need to be able to recognise this and move on, quickly. Your organisational culture needs to accept failure as part of innovation – as long as it is small, and fast. As a digital leader, you will need to be able to set realistic boundaries within which innovative ideas can be tested and assessed without the threat of repercussions if they prove unsuccessful.

If any of this sounds like a challenge to you, you have work to do in order to get ready for successful future digital leadership. The good news is that all of these capabilities can be learned or acquired, and if you already have a good grounding in more ‘traditional’ business leadership skills, that certainly won’t go to waste.

If you’re willing to learn all the time, and have the capability to learn, adapt and implement in every area required as you grow, it will give you a critical competitive advantage in the marketplace, and enable you to become a successful digital leader of the future.

This article is copyrighted and authorized by Warren Knight

For more information about Warren Knight “hyperlink for his page”

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Article by Warren Knight

Innovation is at the core of business development – whatever stage of the business. With rapid developments in digital technology come more opportunities to adopt technology that will help organisations to experiment with innovation and explore different development frameworks.

Many of these opportunities stem particularly from developments in information and communication technologies and the growth of service-based economies.

With the vast range of options out there, though, comes the challenge of decided where to invest. I’ve heard from many business leaders who have fallen into the trap of investing resources and money into new technologies without having first assessed the strategic area that they will impact.

In this article, I’m going to look at the key areas of business innovation you need to be considering when you’re deciding on the priority areas for investment in new technology.

But first things first. Any organisation considering investing in digital technology to drive the business forward needs to ensure that their employees have the skills sets to match.

Increasing Your Organisation’s Digital IQ

The most important element of any digital transformation programme is not the technology, but the people. A great team can lead to high performance, but just one individual can cause a project to fail. The need for digital skills in organisations is gaining traction – becoming front and centre as business technology use increases and customers become more reliant on digital interaction.

Poor digital skills hamper digital transformation programmes, damage the confidence of your staff and harm your organisation’s competitive advantage.

Although businesses are increasingly making investment in technology, in many cases this investment isn’t matched by investment in digital skills development in their people.

According to the European Commission in 2019, 88% of organisations have taken no measures to improve the digital skills among their employees.

As part of your planning for building a more innovative culture, consider whether your workforce needs to be upskilled first, and be aware of the realities of the investment needed to make that happen.

The 9 key innovation areas:

1. Strategy

Your business strategy is the foundation of its future growth and sustainability. Many organisations are still basing their future on traditional, or even outdated, growth strategies.

New and emerging technologies support innovative growth and competitive positioning strategies, potentially offering you the opportunity to completely change your game plan, and become a real disrupter in your sector.

2. Business Models

Similarly, could new technologies enable your business to innovate in the way that it generates income?

Could you adopt new forms of pricing (eg subscription services or retainer programmes)?

Are there new technologies which will enable you to implement more effective management control methods and models? Information management, knowledge protection and management are areas in which digital technologies (such as blockchain, for example) can streamline and improve business processes.

Access to improved technology presents the potential to share information as well as protect it, opening up opportunities for new strategic partnerships and alliances.

3. People Roles

People in any organisation can put up resistance to change. It moves them out of their comfort zone, and may radically alter the way they work. Successful leaders of organisations aiming to escape the status quo have often used promoters (or champions) internally to support and shape the innovation process in order to bring people on board.

Top management needs to be fully on board in order to exert influence through power and persuasion.

But the larger and more complex the organisation, the more necessary it is to establish a project steering group as having a clear project owner. The group will encompass executive representatives of all the key areas of the business – such as production, finance, marketing and sales as well as IT. As well as guiding the project owner as to the impact of technical decisions, the steering group will have a promotional role across the business, helping to engage people at all levels.

4. Organisational Culture

Innovation encompasses behaviours as well as systems and processes. Generating a new organisational culture can influence the way that people think, behave and work, and open up more opportunities for innovative thinking; improving levels of teamwork. Opening up new channels for creativity and employee participation promotes change and can improve levels of motivation.

I can’t overstate the impact and importance of culture. An organisation’s digital transformation programme can success or fail based on it. Look at Apple, as a prime example. Its flexible, collaborative and creative culture was responsible for early success, but with this success came a shift towards more control, resulting in Steve Jobs being ousted from the company. 

Whilst this shift in culture was, to a certain extent, necessary, and resulted in a hugely efficient, marketing-savvy corporation, it reduced the company’s ability to innovate through rapid cycles, and it began to lose relevance.

It wasn’t until Jobs returned in 1997 that Apple got its creative mojo back.

The lesson for you as a digital leader is this: your processes and control may be important, and the level to which they matter may well depend on the sector you operate in. But to innovated, you need to enable creativity and collaboration. In this digital world, organisations depending on outmoded systems and processes which stifle creativity are likely to fail

5. Process

Process innovation tends to be operationally focussed, looking at improving efficiency and effectiveness at all levels.

Digital technologies are able to impact process management systems and drive quality improvements. They can support innovations in process management systems and drive more agile approaches.

6. Products and Services

When considering new product or service design, be aware of the distinction between ‘push’ and ‘pull’ possibilities.

Access to improved customer data through adopting information management technologies gives organisations the potential to identify and customer needs more rapidly, and innovate in order to meet them. Whether creating new products or services, or extending or augmenting existing lines, meeting a known customer demand

7. Marketing

Traditional business models see marketing as a cost centre rather than a centre for innovation. Yet marketing teams are often already familiar with the need for creativity and speed that the whole business needs to adopt, and could be well placed to drive customer-focussed innovation across the organisation.

Putting the customer up front, and making customer need the driving force behind decisions can be a good way to bring leadership together and reduce organisational conflict when it comes to questions of ownership or budget allocation.

Ensure that the company is brand-led, with a purpose that is true to itself and the customer. Allowing a clear set of values to drive marketing and customer experience strategies across the organisation creates a more innovative and customer-focused culture.

This culture makes it easier to recognise opportunities to exploit new market segments, marketing channels and approaches to customer service.

8. Sales

Developments in technologies that can drive sales (such as Artificial Intelligence – chatbots, for example) can be hugely effective in building relationships with customers, or a huge turnoff. The secret lies in maintaining a human touch.

The sales supply chain from producer to end-customer is becoming more streamlined, with technology offering the ability to link all transactions and logistics in one transparent network.

Information gathering and management technologies allow organisations to collect vastly more information about their customers, markets and competitors, enabling them to plan better. Capturing comprehensive customer data from every touchpoint, illuminating customer behaviour, purchasing preferences and profiles will provide a completely holistic sales view.

9. Technology Innovation

You might have expected me to deal with this one first, but first I wanted to demonstrate how, even when focussing on digital technologies, digital leaders need to consider all areas of the organisation. Innovation in business doesn’t happen in isolation.

Adopting new technology in your organisation could be incremental – automating a particular process, for example – or transformative.

Digital transformation of a business can increase connectivity across the organisation and with markets, find new ways to meet customers’ needs, and enable new partnerships.

But the adoption of new technology needs to be aligned with the overarching business strategy, not just tech for tech’s sake. People need to be trained, and motivated to engage with change for it to succeed.

This article is copyrighted and authorized by: Warren Knight

For more information about X “hyperlink for his page”

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