“The most important, and indeed the truly unique, contribution of management in the 20th century was the fifty-fold increase in the productivity of the manual worker in manufacturing. The most important contribution management needs to make in the 21st century is similarly to increase the productivity of knowledge work and knowledge workers.”, Peter Drucker highlighted this challenge acutely and it continues to mar enterprises the world over.
Digital Transformation when done wrong exacerbates the challenges and exposes the foundational cracks in the enterprise strategy towards change and growth. The onus for a successful digital transformation lies heavily on the shoulders of enterprise leaders. The executives pulling the strings across the enterprise, the CXOs – the CEO, CIO, CTO, CMO, and all the other leaders are directly responsible for the success or failure of digital transformation within the enterprise. Despite difference between the exact responsibilities of such roles, one thing common to all such roles is defining the constructs of the digital transformation strategy, setting up business standards, and ensuring operational and strategic alignment of objectives across the enterprise. Such efforts are pivotal in enhancing the competitiveness of the enterprise and help it grow, scale, and constantly innovate.
Digital transformation is a multi-faceted giant with several interrelated and often co-dependent elements including process enhancement, change management, technical debt management, restructured business models, improved partnerships, and stronger connect with customers. Throw the pandemic, remote work, and unforeseen disruptions into the mix and you have a highly complex problem at hand. However, this time CXOs are not alone in their efforts to resolve such challenges and are accompanied by a new ally, Digital Enablement. Digital Enablement is the fuel for digital transformation and CXOs need to fully embrace the concept and actively deploy it to ensure success.
Digital Enablement is based on the key premise that digital transformation is not about technologies, its about the people. Technologies provide the possibilities for efficiencies, however it’s the people that need to adapt a digital-first mindset, enhance capabilities, and embrace technology as a tool to achieve scalable digital transformation. Therefore 70% of digital transformations fail when they overlook the most important aspect of change management and making people an integral part of the transformation journey. Instead of a tool-first or technology centered approach, CXOs need to define the broader strategy for enabling people to be able to leverage such technologies. The key to making a digital transformation successful is to empower the employees and make them the agents of change instead of the recipients of enterprise-wide mandates. Afterall, the employees are the subject matter experts with intimate knowledge on what works and what is broken and overlooking these will only result in a disaster.
The issues concerning change management stem from employees’ fear of being replaced and that results in resistance towards adoption of digital technologies, rendering the digital transformation effort ineffective. It is imperative that leaders recognize this challenge, identify the fears of the employees and lay emphasis on digital transformation being an opportunity for employees to upskill, learn more, and view it as a means of doing their work better. Digital Enablement allows leaders to prioritize investments in employee productivity and engagement which eventually translates into higher satisfaction. It is meant to strategically reduce the employee time in shadow work such as administrative tasks, meetings, answering emails, etc. and direct time and effort towards needle-moving activities.
So, what can leaders do to overcome this mammoth issue? The key lies in tackling change management related challenges and truly implementing Digital Enablement which can be delivered by the STRIKE framework –
Structure the business problem – It is the leader’s prerogative to objectively break down the business problem, establish the need for digital transformation, and identify the best-fit approach to manage change within the enterprise. For this, cross-functional collaboration within the leadership team is imperative and all need to be onboard with the proposed transformation. Digital transformation often led narrow-mindedly by one functional leader fail to sustain and scale across the enterprise.
Tactfully build the roadmap – Develop an achievable and a pragmatic roadmap to bring about the change. While change is inevitable, too much change together can break down the growth momentum and adversely impact efficiencies. Hence, a phased program with mutually decided milestones can goa long way in reaping the true benefits of the transformation effort.
Relay the advantages – A massive challenge within large enterprises is the structural disconnect between the leaders and employees which impedes the ability of the employee to fully understand the need for transformation. Leaders need to dedicatedly focus on translating the business benefits, career progression plans, renewed responsibilities, and other finer aspects with the impacted workforce.
Intensify focus on skills– No transformation can go through successfully if the employees feel threatened or intimidated, hence it is critical that it is conveyed in the language of the employees. Installing a structured program for skill enhancement, developing skill maps to support process maps, and encouraging employees to actively participate in upskilling/reskilling exercises can tackle employee resistance to a great extent.
Keep the objectives in mind and evaluate – Managing change need not be viewed as a subjective exercise left to individual interpretation of the results. Instead, leaders need to objectively identify the key tenets of measuring success through a more holistic Active Transformation approach – where focus is on more strategic outcomes such as number of active users, number of employees assisted, productivity and satisfaction.
Encourage accountability – It takes courage to own up mistakes and this is where several transformation programs have failed. Not only do the leaders need to be the drivers of the transformation but also own up failures and shortcomings. This inspires a sense of accountability and responsibility among the workforce which is paramount to the success of the digital transformation program.
Digital transformation will work if the leaders are successful in changing the mindset of the people, revamp the culture and overhaul the processes before the decisions on what tools to use is taken. It is about achieving a head start in the race by instilling the right environment conducive for scalable success – just how business models that were already focused on ecommerce thrived in the pandemic, workplaces that had remote work support soared effortlessly, and a workforce more reliant on collaboration tools rather than emails was more effective. Digital Enablement provides structure and method to the vision of the leaders by making people the carriers of change across the enterprise and augmenting their ability to innovate and grow.