Digitalizing Leadership for the 'New Normal'

About a month into the new year; the sudden abnormal of last year is here to stay as the 'new normal'. Multiple interactions and experiences over the past few months have intrigued a contemplation on how our leadership style needs to evolve and transform, to lead our teams and organizations in the post-Covid world of 2021 and beyond.

In a digitally hyper-connected world where we have been rigorously driving digital transformations of our products and processes; how do we digitalize leadership to make it more inclusive, for ourselves and our teams?

Sharing my thoughts here as a lot of us deal with common challenges in our professional spheres. Hope to have a dialogue (in the comments section) on how you see it and how can we learn from our experiences, together.

Foundation:

• Empathetic Collaboration: By default, starting a relationship with TRUST, especially when most of our new relationships are starting online and not in-person, builds a baseline of goodwill and a belief that everyone is in it, with a positive intention. Understanding and appreciating each others' space and, as leaders, being empathetic towards variations caused by changing environments and diverse cultural backgrounds, is vital to a collaborative relationship for achieving organizational goals and personal fulfillment.
• Adaptive Infrastructure: A sudden transition we all made last year was to start working from our home offices. This being a part of the new normal going forward, we need to look at our daily work environment as an Office at Home instead of Home Office. Organizations need to be cognizant to equip offices at home with the right tools and infrastructure that have, for years, made everyone more productive - from ergonomic furniture to displays to lighting to quiet rooms to other ancillaries, that keep us fit and focused.
• Continuous Learning: While continuous learning is indeed a continuous topic, its relevance has never been more pronounced because of the rate of transformations that would be needed to be successful in the world of tomorrow. Teams need to be Up-skilled, re-skilled and cross-skilled around not only technologies but also human skills across all levels within the organization, as that would be a keystone for sustainable growth - of the individual and the organization.

Pillars:

• Customer Centricity: We learn some of the most important and the most needed things from our customers, albeit, sometimes the hard way, that learning is indeed invaluable. Focusing on the needs of our customers, listening intently to them and involving them in our strategic decision making are part of our journey that helps us create customer value and business success. Not being able to meet our customers as often, we need to evolve ways to continuously engage with our customers remotely, at multiple levels within both our's and our customer's organizational hierarchy. Leaders not only need to drive co-creation and collaboration, but also build newer relationships and evolve new business models matched with the changing requirements and realities.
• Accelerated Innovation: While the last year has been very productive in terms of both the speed and the number of innovations that we could drive, a lot of them were 'need of the hour' innovations and some targeted towards changing realities of the new normal. Innovators look at problems as the genesis of innovation. We need to regularly scratch our heads together to not only solve existing and future 'known' problems but also discover new 'unknown' problems or NPIs that fuel our long-term success, and this is where the accelerator needs to be pressed and pressed really hard.

The most important NPIs are not New Product Introductions but New Problem Ideas.

• Personalized Management: The lunch hour and ad-hoc coffee break have made their importance felt profoundly over the last year. That's the opportunity to know the person behind the professional, that's where we talk about work, not about what we are working on. Personalization helps build alliances and alignment on seemingly difficult topics, and sometimes it's the only way to oil the organizational machinery for achieving better and faster results. Another important aspect of personalized management, especially for large organizations, is its potential for information brokering with multiple business divisions; where it is critical to avoid duplicating work and more importantly strategic alignment.
• Empowered Accountability: Now, more than ever before when we are operating as virtual teams, empowering our teams and individuals to make decisions at their respective levels guarantees systemic efficiency and organizational learning. Accountability fosters an ownership culture of being deeply connected with the outcomes, both good and bad, and owning up to the responsibility of continued learning and creating positive outcomes for the organization. Empowered Accountability thrives in a culture where high performance is aptly rewarded and bad decisions are seen as an opportunity for joint learning and growth.

Summit

• Culture of Purpose: Nothing else is more inspiring and motivating than driving with the power of purpose. With the new normal driving us physically apart, purpose is the glue that binds us all towards a common goal. One of the most vital tasks of leadership is to communicate often and make sure that the Purpose is consistently understood and ingrained at all levels and by everyone within the organization. Purpose is both very deeply an individualized passion and broadly an organizational vision. Purpose, like culture, is built brick by brick bottom-up with a very top-down oversight and sustained engagement of the leadership.

Purpose keeps us TOGETHER as a joint force for a larger good.

Like Digital Transformations are impacting every aspect of our products, our solutions, our processes, and our professional lives; Digitalizing Leadership will impact each one of us and drive the human capital in our teams and organizations, to lead and create leaders for a new world.

Let me know your thoughts, suggestions and experiences in the comments section below. What other elements do you see most needed to lead in the 'new normal'? What other perspectives can we add to evolve this structure and learn TOGETHER?

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hash Cloud: #DigitalizingLeadership #Leadership #EmpatheticCollaboration #Trust #Diversity #Inclusion #AdaptiveInfrastructure #HomeOffice #ContinuousLearning #Learning #Up-skill #Re-skill #Cross-skill #CustomerCentricity #BusinessModel #Innovation #NPI #PersonalizedManagement #EmpoweredAccountability #HighPerformance #Culture #Purpose #HumanCapital #Together