Importance of Employee Leadership in Digital Transformation

With the digital landscape transforming at a frantic pace, marketers and businesses, irrespective of size and turnover, are realising that good leadership at the helm of the business is what is leading to the digital transformation. Companies are placing their leadership skills in the foray, thereby, fastening the digital transformation strategy they have in mind. This makes one wonder – Why is leadership in digital so crucial?

Many industrial experts have observed closely the real experiences of companies in the threshold of a digital transformation. According to them the biggest challenge is those organisations who doesn’t implement leadership skills through their employees. There are countless professionals who know what their company has to do but they are unable to do it, thereby resulting in frustration. In most cases employees complain that their digital leaders are not supportive of the digital change.

To overcome this setback, organisations has to commission their employees as changemakers, empowered and active, instead of being in the side-lines waiting for a change to happen. Experts believe that when middle managers are empowered to become digital leaders in an organisation, their influence on the course of their company is mind-blowing.

On examining a wide range of leadership principles experts have shortlisted the following key attributes as the biggest change-inducing motivators for digital transformation.

• Being a digital champion
• Being collaborative
• Thinking about the customers first
• Being innovative

Being a Digital Champion

A digital champion bridges the gap between digital capabilities, company and customer needs. A digital champion not only discusses new technical features, but also apply digital technology to help their colleagues and consumers to overcome their challenges. Achieve maximum impact by recognising tools at your disposal and streamline them for correct implementation. Going beyond technical knowledge enables you to become a change maker in your organisation. Applying this attitude in your marketing strategy changes the attitude of people around you.

Being Collaborative

In any organisation the structure of silos has to be broken. Caring beyond your department is the first step for being collaborative. In this way connections can be built between teams thereby creating an understanding among employees across the entire organisation as a whole resulting in an increase in respect for each other. This ultimately leads to, the right employees raising up to the right challenges irrespective of their department. A cross functional project team is vital for a digital transformation to happen.

Thinking about the customers first

Large Organisations having silo structures not only decreases the efficiency but also hinders the organisation’s goals and customer interaction. The extent of a silo structured organisation’s inefficiency can be easily realised by looking at your organisation from a customer’s point of view. Customers want a seamless experience and they don’t care about your org chart. Building your goals on the basis of the way your organisation is treating its customers enables you to become a powerful change maker. When you build your goals around customer and their experiences, it becomes easy to align all your employees across different departments as the ultimate goal of any business would be customer satisfaction. This way unwanted issues dealing with specialists or senior decision makers could be avoided.

Being Innovative

Accepting and engaging with the uncertain is what innovation is all about. Transformation becomes impossible to achieve when people are struck with an idea of optimising an already existing something that they are doing in the past. This is due to main reason of leader expecting ‘innovation’ with a definite proof that it will work instead of traveling to the uncharted territory. Some digital transformation takes time and sustained investment to produce any measurable result. Even when negative results are encountered the digital leaders should take it as a measure to enhance themselves rather than giving up on the transformation.

Being innovative will make you realise new unchartered path through trial and error, thereby enabling you to become an established leader in your genre. One tactic for achieving this would be allocating a proportion of your company’s budget for innovative products and research. However, understand that the goal for this measure is to learn and prepare for the future, by investing in it, testing it and moving it into your regular business to optimise it further.

Conclusion

These change maker attributes have to be in place to realise digital challenges of your organisation so as to achieve digital transformation from it. All of these motivators are important contributors in themselves but they have to work seamlessly and effectively under one essential mission. This way employees could be motivated to drive digital first ideas and principles into reality, by understanding the challenge, realising the urgency and finally establishing the required transformation, irrespective of where they are in an organisation.

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