Lead Change with Everyday Digital Narrative

The digital transformation is not an overnight phenomenon but a step-by-step business evolution. 

The effects of an increasingly digitalized world are now reaching into every corner of the business and every aspect of the company. In the era of digitalization, any business can be at risk of survival at any minute due to the continuous disruptions and rapid changes. The success of the digital transformation will depend on the business vision and leadership competency. The inspirational digital leaders can drive changes with everyday digital narrative and motivate people to overcome obstacles and make continuous progress.

Communicate, connect, inspire, and motivate: Effective digital leaders understand the psychology behind changes and see the value and need for coordinated communication. The authentic and candid communication harnesses trust and encourages problem-solving. Listen to people, listen to the needs of the company, help people achieve the goals and objectives by overcoming barriers and more importantly, help people navigate through difficult changes. Digital leaders make their everyday narrative, they are good “storytellers,” able to inspire and motivate, help business customers and partners gain open perspectives on the growth potential of the business, close perception and collaboration gaps. With emerging digital platforms and collaboration tools, digital leaders can build their leadership capacity for connecting, inspiring, motivating, and providing the business justification, selling the digital vision, and creating a highly integrated and highly engaging workforce.

Think, discover, act, and influence: The digital transformation is likely to follow a non-linear pattern as the pervasiveness of the digitization increase. Digital disrupts not only the business boundary but also industry boundary and geographical boundary. Digital leaders should break down their reductionistic management pattern and leverage nonlinear thinking to understand the density and intensity of the digital dynamic. Non-linear thinking characterized by expansion in multiple directions, rather than in one direction, is a system thought process to handle changes and problem-solving in the hyperconnected and interdependent digital world. It’s based on the concept that there are multiple starting points from which one can apply logic to problem-solving. Digital leaders equipped with nonlinear thinking can make a spiral of conscious awareness, discover better ways to break down silos, current beliefs or assumptions about important elements of the organization, get their voice heard by telling a compelling story to advocate change and innovation. The change leader or agent is not a title, but the game-changing mindset and a set of differentiated capabilities to make the change and be the part of changes. Digital leaders today need to have thinking, communication, and influencing skills to be able to represent themselves, to be able to persuade and to gain respect. They lead through influence, not through the status quo.

Plan, clarify, guide and guard: Digitalization is a strategic move and takes the long-range planning with continuous communication. This is especially important in the uncertain time today with high velocity and uncertainty. Digital leaders need to guide the business with a clear vision, spend their time with business teams, clarify which direction is progressing. They are guardians who can give people confidence on where to go and how to get their, empower them and also stretch them to live to their full potential even on a daily basis. They set the right level of guidelines to streamline the changing scenario, not to stifle the business flow or get too “pushy.” They also motivate people to acquire relevant knowledge, ride the learning curve, and develop professional competency to truly make change happening. Guiding and guarding go hand in hand. Monitoring the change pulse of the company is about assessing digital business traits such as adaptability, flexibility, resilience, or speed. Beside hard numbers or numerical success indicators, digital leaders should also get informed of the qualitative information that is crucial to understand the health and well-being of the company’s efforts to going digital and being digital.

The digital transformation is not an overnight phenomenon but a step-by-step business evolution. Digital leaders need to be proactive, proficient, and progressive. They come up with their everyday digital narratives, deepen their thought processes, practice multifaceted management disciplines, and take the structural approach to drill down all critical success factors that underpin each of the high-level business dimensions. Organizations can reach their strategic inflection point when they can synchronize and conduct changes, amplify business competencies to achieve the higher-than-expected business results and maximize the full potential of the business.

Posted in: Change Management,Digital Master