Your organisation is made up of people, probably lots of them. Hopefully, they are happy and fulfilled in their work, they feel secure in their jobs and look to you as a leader they trust and respect. Do you really know those people though? When was the last time you ran an employee engagement survey, an anonymous one, and then took the time to go through the survey and respond to the comments and questions raised by your team? Your team can be your biggest asset or your greatest area of risk in a digital transformation. To achieve a successful transformation you must understand and engage regularly with your team.
Employee Engagement Survey
Set up an employee engagement survey, an anonymous one, and put time and effort into it, it will help you scorecard your organisation, and will give your team a great avenue to connect with you.
Who do you need? To know who you need, you need to know who you have, their appetite & ability to embrace this new digital vision for the business. It can be helpful at this stage to work with your leadership team, those who sit closest to you, who themselves can embrace digital, and redraw your organisation post-transformation. Once you have this visualisation it can be incredibly powerful in terms of defining what skillsets are missing from your current team, and can help you define a strategy and plan to recruit the skills you need or train your team in them.
Your Target Organisational Structure
Visualise your organisations structure post-transformation, and then try to put your current team into seats to identify skill gaps, and recruit or train based on this.
How do you know? If you have actioned the above two points you will have a set of responses from your current team through an engagement survey, as well as a visualisation of what the team will be doing and look like from an organisational structure perspective. An approach we like to use next is to get yourself and your team to scorecard the organisation against the 5 pillars, examples are provided in this book. Scorecards will let you understand where you think your organisation’s strengths are, and areas that need strengthening, it will also reveal what your team thinks are the organisational strengths and weaknesses are and priorities in terms of addressing them. Powerful stuff! You will see how all this fits together as you read through the rest of the book.
Scorecards
Use scorecards the same way you use employee engagement surveys to gather valuable insights into your current position, and priorities during transformation
How are people affected by Digital Transformation? The effects can be both positive and negative. It is your responsibility as a digital leader to make sure it is positive for as many people as possible. The biggest issues we see in helping organisations who are having difficulties in digital transformation are usually rooted in the culture & people of the organisation. Also, this happens at every level of an organisation, be it the newly graduated MBA who is concerned her department may not exist within the organisation post-transformation. All the way up to the longest-serving exec in the business who sees this as just another enormous IT project that will inevitably run late, and cost way more than we thought delivering less than was promised.
It is your job to sell digital transformation within your organisation. It’s the best way to compete in today's markets, and the best way to secure a successful future for your company.
We will cover some of this in the process chapter of the book, and how there are different speeds of digital transformation, and depending on where you are from a people perspective you may well choose 1,2 or 3-speed transformation. Ultimately you have to create a vision that is both inspiring & palpable for your organisation, without this, your team will not believe in it, and if they don’t believe in it then they will certainly struggle to deliver it with you.
Vision
Create a vision of your digitally transformed company that offers your team a real future, and your customers an exceptional experience.
The best digital transformations happen in organisations that enable experienced people to adjust/be trained to a digital mindset, while also recruiting digital natives, with the right mix of these people great things happen.
Key Roles in a digital transformation:
Large organisation typically
CEO - The visionary, and part of the driving force behind the transformation. It has to come from you, and your team to be successful.
CFO - The challenger, you can provide a great service to the organisation by checking and measuring ROI and Value from various initiatives that will emerge during a transformation. You have to accept though that transformation or evolution in the digital world is not completely predictable in terms of duration. Once started you cannot hack away at funding for this exercise or it will very likely fail.
CTO - Also visionary, but certainly the major driving force. Obviously the technical strategy & a major part of the delivery will be your gift to the organisation. Key to this role is pragmatism, you will be able to adapt initial purist thinking to the realities of the organisation.
COO - Coupled with the CTO you will guide and control the speed of transformation within the organisation, there is only so much change any organisation can handle before it breaks, and you are best placed to judge that. You will have a healthy tension with the CTO by challenging how the technology choices enable the business vision to be digital.
SME sized organisation typically
Managing Director / Owner - Similar to CEO role but by default you will have a smaller leadership team around you so may find yourself involved in cross over with other roles during transformation
CTO / Technical Director - Similar to CTO again as CEO you may find you cover more than one role during digital transformation. As someone who works in an SME environment this will come as no surprise to you. However, the trick to getting it right is to not end up executing two roles that conflict!
Commercial Director / Financial Director - Similar to CFO, however it is possible you will need more support than a typical CFO in a large corporate around this as you will likely not be as well versed in technology at a lower level.
Head of Delivery - Similar to a COO, a head of delivery in the SME environment will wear many hats but ultimately be held accountable for day to day operations of the organisation. You will be essential in delivery of the technical strategy for your organisation, and a centre pin when it comes to process in digital transformation with your organisation.
Digital Transformation eBook
Read me more about this subject in the free book, Digital Evolution. The people chapter covers the following topics:
Employee engagement survey
Post-Transformation Org Chart
People Scorecards
Vision of the company post transformation
Know your role in this story
Enjoyed this? why not give our free People Scorecards a try? It may well reveal insights into your team you have never considered!
