Leadership Considerations for Technology & Services Organizations in 2021

In Dan Millman’s classic “Way of The Peaceful Warrior” there’s a fictional character named Socrates who is the protagonist’s guide on his journey into self-discovery, and a quote from him stuck with me,

“… the secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.”

As I reflected on that, it brought to life recent conversations with leaders from the technology and services sectors in recent weeks – moving from the problem statements of COVID-19 disruptions to beginning addressing a post-pandemic world. Importantly, these discussions are around visualizing the next year or two, applying their learnings from this disruptive journey to help shape their organization’s strategy and shaping how many of them were engaging with their stakeholders. Some key leadership themes seemed to emerge:

Resilience and a focus on digital transformation

Bob Pryor, CEO of NTT DATA Services, the US arm of Japan’s NTT DATA, mentions the realization that the status quo and historical practices were unsustainable alternatives. Having moved 90% of their global workforce from offices and client locations to working remotely, whilst helping many of their clients do the same, Bob shared that “for us and our clients, it’s about accelerating our business transformations, modernizing our IT environments, and moving faster towards adoption of cloud and digital technologies.” How does that translate into NTT DATA’s approach to growth? It’s about moving away from a singular focus on preserving cash and the balance sheet – as many organizations withdrew into doing in early March – to recognizing resiliency in their business model and re-engaging on investing in growth initiatives, all around a “clients first” model. NTT DATA’s growth focus is all based on the recognition that across most of their clients, the environment created a massive and urgent shift of spending for true business transformation, with many companies accelerating moves to cloud, digital technologies and ‘as-a-service’ models.

On resilience and “repivoting”, Ranjit Tinaikar, CEO of Ness Digital Engineering, a global leader in Digital Engineering services spread across North America, Europe, India, Singapore and Israel, spoke about Ness’ opportunities to invest deeply in enhancing existing capabilities and building new ones as an unintended outcome of the situation. Specifically, given reductions in travel and related costs as well as strategically addressing SG&A costs, Ranjit and his leadership team have repurposed these costs to better enhance and equip their workforce with computing, bandwidth and other tools – that are now allowing these distributed teams to be more productive. In addition, all this has allowed a reevaluation of their planned acquisition strategies to be more thoughtful of unreasonable valuations and invest in building targeted capabilities, themselves.

Engagement and communication

Organizations are waking up to the criticality of the cadence and quality of their employee and client communications. Ranjit found himself in a somewhat unique situation, early in 2020, when he joined Ness with a clear mandate to drive a deep transformation of Ness’ strategy and their go-to-market approaches. Ranjit and his leadership team found themselves having to deal with not only driving a strategy reset at Ness, but also to address the disruptions caused by the pandemic. Ranjit and his team began overinvesting in communication, with purpose. It’s not about simply reaching out and sharing what’s going on but, as Ranjit points out, “being clear about the purpose and direction of where they are heading”, via a weekly email coming straight from the CEO on progress. Amongst other elements, embedded in firmwide communications to their almost 5,000 employees worldwide, Ranjit speaks about simple, yet exceptionally powerful aspects such as celebrating every single client win in the language and context of each team across the world that was responsible for that win. Transparency, visibility and celebrations of shared successes are now playing into consolidating the culture of this globally diverse organization.

Bob echoes this, similarly, at NTT DATA, in speaking about launching virtual all-hands meetings coupled with a constant stream of transparent communication, that included exhaustive information to help employees and clients stay safe. Many leaders we spoke with reflected similar approaches, and also highlighted that these communications led to a massively positive outcome, one of high satisfaction scores. As Bob points out, “Interestingly, at NTT DATA, our employee engagement and client satisfaction is at an all-time high”.

The workforce reset and managing social capital

It is impossible not to confront and address complex issues of productivity, location, distributed workforces and the longer-term impact of all this on organizational culture. Ahmed Mazhari, President of Microsoft Asia, is thinking deeply about how organizations can help prevent the fraying of social capital. As Ahmed points out, “Social capital is built around informal engagement that leads to trusting teams”. He thinks that a clear challenge for leaders is to find ways to prevent the erosion of social capital across teams that need to work closely. Unless addressed, he adds, “Social capital will eat into the reservoir that was built over time.”

Ahmed has hit upon a challenge we will likely see leaders increasingly having to address, one of keeping the culture of the organization “whole” in ways that haven’t, likely, been thought of yet. These aspects will require leaders to address tactical, but related questions. Ahmed points out a couple, e.g. the ability to create trust and build human bonds in a virtual environment, and the ability to build skills remotely. Ahmed also sees an increasingly complex issue that will begin confronting leaders - that is, balancing accountability with empathy. Growth and profitability goals for most organizations will continue to be aggressive, and given the emerging distributed and remote work models, employees will need to still deliver to these aggressive goals. The challenge would then be around assessing, holding accountable and coaching team members who may not be achieving their goals. Ahmed sees this as an important issue to address, for organizations as also for all leaders as they engage with their teams.

There is also an emerging question for the best models for leaders to begin making decisions on how to segment or stratify their workforces – particularly critical in a technology services or customer engagement services delivery context. Ron Gillette, CEO of Continuum Global Solutions which has 15,000 employees across the Americas, Europe and Asia has had to deal with these decisions very rapidly. As an outsider, coming into a relatively newly formed organization which emerged via a spin-off from Conduent, Ron has seen first-hand how employees self-select, via attitude and performance, into either onsite or remote arrangements. The nature of Continuum’s services means that their customer service agents be at the top of their game as they engage with end-customers of their Fortune 1000 clients. Ron and his leadership team had to make real time decisions, based not only on the operating model revisions that were agreed to with their clients to deal with the pandemic related disruptions – but also on the capability, and in a large number of cases the individual employee’s personal readiness - to restructure and split their workforces across fully remote, onsite or some sort of hybrid work model. A key lesson learnt was that not all employees wanted to or were suited to work from home for a large variety of reasons. This will be an ongoing challenge for many similar services enterprises. There is a silver lining in this context. Ron alluded to this as an opportunity for high performing and self-motivated individual performers to emerge, as well as for leaders across all ranks to begin differentiating themselves. In a context like this, this creates an opportunity for leaders to identify and nurture their next generation of high performers.

In summary

It is evident that these are simply just a few areas that will become important for leaders as they shape their thinking, as well as that of the organizations they lead in a post COVID-19 world. There are other critical leadership themes not addressed in this article – Diversity and Inclusion would be top of that list. Heidrick & Struggles has a great set of conversations on D&I that can be accessed here.

One thing is for sure, there is no going back to what was “normal”, nor is there any clarity on what the “new normal” could be. What is clear, though, is that technology services leaders who enable and innovate around the pace of digital transformation that is occurring in their client organizations; and build or acquire capabilities to deliver this to their clients will be the ones who succeed. In order to do that, their ability to engage with their own workforces as well as to empower them to bring innovation to the front lines, directly to their clients, will be critical.

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