Five Principles to Lead and Succeed at Digital

Lastly we have to actually execute the day to day tasks and activities for the projects and initiatives to be embedded into the organizational DNA and drive value sustainably over time.

We all have a bias an individuals and organization to focus on one level at the expense of the others. But if we hope to deliver a transformation that is sustainably successful, we have to build our team’s competency around all three levels.

Principle #2: Be Obsessed with solving relevant problems

Too often technology leadership falls prey to the “My baby” syndrome where they focus on how great their solution is. Instead of getting blinded by this bias, build a healthy focus and obsession on the problem itself, understanding that problem and solving it.

Principle #3: Executive Sponsorship

The statistic still holds true that over 70 percent of change initiation efforts without executive sponsorship stall. You must take a disciplined marketing approach to engage your leadership, especially those influencing key decisions or holding the resources to succeed, and actively manage those relationships. The best strategy is to focus on making the dominos of key stakeholders fall. This focuses you on that one key “domino” stakeholder and fully engaging them instead of trying to manage large groups of stakeholders and only being partially effective.

Principle #4: Stay Calibrated to Truth

To lead digital transformation you must create standards, dashboards for performance that are SMART and also objective and provide one source of truth for how the business is doing and how the projects being delivered are doing. We have to avoid relying on subjective feedback for project status where possible and track output variables like process KPIs to validate benefit delivered. Lastly we must stay calibrated to the end user of the applications and how they feel about the application and its usefulness. Too many times we get the middle management filter on how the application is doing in terms of user adoption and feedback. Creating a strong process and tracking performance with objective and validated metrics where possible is critical to avoid these traps.

Principle #5: Personal Transformation

If we hope to stay ahead of the technology curve and lead an organization into 2025 and beyond we must make it a personal obsession to continually disrupt ourselves, to open ourselves to new thoughts, trainings and learnings and to install that passion for growth into our teams. The pace of a team is the pace of the leader’s growth in today’s digital marketplace.

These five simple principles, if practiced consistently will dramatically improve the changes of leading digital transformation successfully and leading your organization into 2025 and beyond. Let’s work to build those habits now as we are collectively in need of Digital Leaders that can survey the terrain and lead us to higher ground of passionate employees, a growing organization and raving fan customers.