Second part of my answer to how I manage people through digital change (with less waffle)

In my article on Friday, I talked about how I was waffling through interviews when asked to describe how I manage people through digital change. A friend advised me to get a good handle on my strengths. And I have done a lot of work to frame these in the right way. Now, how do I approach managing people with differing digital abilities?

As any product/transformation professional knows, the technical part is the easiest. There are so many frameworks we can employ to drive an innovation culture; data maturity, agile, service design etc. You can put all the right structures in place but people don't behave in a text book way. So this 6 point interview answer does a better job of explaining my approach. So I can help to make change more enjoyable for everyone in the organisation.

1) How is everyone feeling?

Digitising processes can involve more work at the beginning before it pays off. The key lesson I’ve learned is if that you don’t understand the current employees' strengths when it comes to digital, and their satisfaction in their day to day working life, introducing new changes will be very difficult. Two rounds of 1-2-1s with key stakeholders will help to understand any frustrations or opportunities. No way will an MVP be able to scale, if getting a marketing email out takes 4 months and the team want to stab themselves in the face at every meeting. An employee survey is a great way to take a temperature check and highlight any skills or infrastructure gaps that need to be addressed through training recruitment and formal HR performance measurement.

2)     Align digital strategy KPIs with the company strategy

If the organisation sees the work you are doing as just another project, you’re doomed. High level like for like KPIs help people to understand why change needs to happen e.g.  ‘Reach xx new customers’  could translate to a digital measurement area of ‘Customer onboarding’ with one of the KPIs 'Reduce steps to onboard from x to x' with a stakeholder benefit of providing data to test new methods and channels.

3)    Use a service design/customer journey approach. So everyone buys into the vision and the roadmap

 I may be fascinated with the 17 swim lanes and platform integration needed to reduce the onboarding steps; people with less digital knowledge well, are not. I find employing a service design approach where we walk through the customer journey means that teams feel heard and can co-create the vision. This saves so many presentations and diagrams!! And it reflects that we all need to work together to make a change. I find that converting that into a story roadmap where a challenge is highlighted and the customer or internal stakeholder benefit is provided (and tracked) is a more palatable approach.

4)     Implement training programmes that skill up the teams

Helping people to improve their data literacy, customer insight and the use of personas is a great start. It helps us all to use the same language and introduce other potential ways of working.

5)     Adapt the mechanisms and team structures

To manage the work and information flow, some organisations create squads around a challenge or a customer journey. Larger organisations choose an innovation hub approach driving proof of concepts and MVPs then looking for takers in the organisation to sponsor and scale. Of course we have all the tools from RAIDS to Roadmaps, to the good old status meeting. My approach depends on the organisation, and feedback as to whether the initial structure is still working. In an interview I will suggest an approach based on the number of employees and my guess from the job description on where they are in the digital transformation/product journey.

6) Feedback and measurement

A formal and informal feedback loop with a strong visual representation of progress is a given.  If someone says they don’t get it, they don’t and the way you are communicating needs to be adapted. Or they may be a blocker so you want to create more opportunities for that to be an overt rather than covert communication so you can really get to the bottom of their concerns e.g. My sales team will get smaller or I’m worried that our customer service will be poor.

So, that’s what I’ve learned over time and I hope to god in my next interview I can do a better job of explaining how I manage change, I want to say facilitate change but that means I’m waffling again...