Nigel Stacey, one of Accenture Industry X.0 global lead was writing about ‘Leadership, not technology, makes digital champion’. There are several things that caught my attention in that article, mainly because I was contemplating a similar topic for quite some time without knowing how to address this issue properly or professionally. This article solved some of my questions, and even came up with other studies that support all the theories I’ve been having in the simplest word.
What is “LEADERSHIP” means in this digital era? Does it still need, given that people relied on the technology so much it's blurring the hierarchical lines and departments? The answer is “YES”. And it is even “HIGHLY” needed. Because technology changes nothing without the people ‘driving’ it.
Changes are exciting. But how can it become growth?
Growth requires focused execution and keeping this kind of implementation on track is the job of leaders. What kind of focused execution is needed then? That is strategic, deliberate changes in the behavior of a company and the people within.
Within the industry changes, there bound to be winners and there must be losers. And more often than not, the percentage of the winner and loser is not even 50:50, but it can be 20:80, or even an exaggerating number of 1:99
So what sets WINNERS apart?
There are many studies available that told us about how to be a winner, but not many can actually implement the suggestions or how-to in their life, less their company. For a company to be a winner, there must be something else that sets them apart from their peers or competition. One that was pointed out in the article was:
“To maximize their scaling efforts, they’ve developed a muscle memory reflected and supported by their structure and organization “
This means that it is a habitual thing that was set in the beginning, with a joint effort from the whole organization within the company that continues to be perfected over time. Due to the repeating process of doing specific things, it became a muscle memory that does not even need any reminder anymore.
Continuing with the growth topic, the leader job can be quite hard too. Leading well and driving execution has never been easy. In fact, both companies and leaders have struggled with ever since the invention of the organized venture. And both have gotten even harder due to the inherent complexity of software, connectivity, and data.
A recent piece of Accenture research, ‘How to successfully scale digital innovation to drive growth’, points towards the key differences between the “WINNER/CHAMPIONS” and other companies, that can be linked to issue of leadership and execution. This research might not be the perfect answer to how leaders can succeed in handling the decision complexity, but at least it shows that all around us, companies are also struggling with the same.
There are 5 (five) critical areas that corporate leaders should focus on and master – with tasks to execute and skills needing to be developed that were highlighted by the report.
1. Define the value that will guide innovation efforts
The leader needs to have the definition of the value company wants to create before setting the organization to the task.
This is critical because when the goal of the company is not clear, employees are more likely than not, end up trying to scale-up something that does not have rules or boundaries yet in order to succeed.
While it is good to have an aggressive stance on determining success, but the company needs to give a certain limitation in order to make sure that the employees can be held accountable towards their own work instead of flying over their scope and asking their leader to clean up after.
Creating a goal or value needs to be clear and concise. Therefore the much-needed element is clarity – of vision, strategy and the language within both – and also, aligning it with the business’ top management intention.
2. Focus on internal organizational change and external digital value
What leaders should do is to strive to bridge the gap between what you are trying to scale for customers and the technologies deployed internally to support that scaling effort.
The best way to do this is to continuously blend digital transformation efforts with wider-reaching organizational change and change management.
Finding the right balance between implementing new technology and creating new ways of working is crucial.
3. Build in-house innovation factories with targeted influence
Strive to grow new digital capabilities and talent within your organization as best as you can. Do not over-invest in hard-to-reintegrate spin-offs (or cheap copies) corporate start-ups or joint ventures.
New talent might be a solution to boost the growth of the company, but existing talents also need to be integrated and developed to be able to follow the current trend in the market. The company then integrate these talents into a new team which linked, and accountable to, the company’s profit and losses. By doing this, executives can have a preview of the impact on certain specified process or request before starting the larger-scale adaptation within the company.
In the study, the improvement shows what usually takes three years to be completed can be finished within eight months, using the same specific sets of requests.
4. Find out what enables innovation in each business function
Technology alone might not change things, but it makes a difference than not. Leaders should learn enough about key technologies to understand where in their organization they might yield the best results.
This is also in line with the old saying, putting the ‘right’ person into the ‘right’ place than others, to their benefit. Those were called ‘enablers’, that help facilitate the process. Using Haier's famous unique organizational model “RenDanHeyi”, innovation technologies will never be separated from people and what user needs. Literally, “Ren” refers to each employee, “Dan” refers to the needs of each user, and “HeYi” refers to the connection (between employee and the needs of each user).
5. Treat digital and innovation spending as investment, not as cost
Do give people the needed training to enhance their skills and give them the time and space to experiment and build innovation. Also, expect things to go slightly wrong before they get massively better instead of pressuring them to integrate the newly learned skill and expect that the result will be perfect.
Changes are difficult and driving it is never straight-forwards. But leaders should embrace the difficulties because over-time, leaders will learn to do it better. And once they know how to do that, growth will follow.
With the ever-growing need for technologies, innovation is highly needed and sought after. Yet despite many success stories and failures over the years, many are still grappling with transitioning to digital. To become a winner themselves, the company needs to catch up with the trend and quickly because the trend tends to fluctuate. If they failed to ride the wind of this, they need to wait for another trend or another breakthrough. Regardless of what kind of changes there are, technologies, innovation, or trends, it all was pointless without the people behind to drive it towards the desired destination.
Achieving success will depend on the commitment to develop and sustain an organization that is as innovative internally as it aspires to be for customers. When will you start your journey to become the winner? Start now!
-AS-
March 15th, 2020
Sources taken from here and here
