Unveiling the Secrets of Effective Digital Leaders

Digital transformation is typically one of the most complex programs in many organizations. These programs require significant changes in terms of organizations (see my last article on the Digital Maturity of organizations).

Digital leaders also play a pivotal role to make the digital transformation strategy and initiatives to be a success.

Here are some of the key traits of successful Digital Transformation Leaders.

Digital Leaders help organizations to become talent Magnets:

In today's world attracting talent is one of the toughest jobs. Excellent digital leaders make this one of their primary responsibilities, they help organizations attract some of the best talents. This is possible through their work, external presentations, and some of the challenges at work.

Digital Leaders help organizations become talent magnets by providing significant experimentation opportunities, freedom to work, and driving visionary work.

Availability of the best talent plays a crucial role in your Digital transformation strategy and its execution, and Digital Leaders know how to deliver that with the best talent.

Digital Leaders Excel at finding employees with a growth mindset:

A growth mindset plays a key role in an organization looking for a big transformation. Individuals with a growth mindset understand that their potential is not fixed or predetermined but can be expanded through learning, practice, and resilience. This growth mindset could be available in an existing employee as well as an external person you are talking to. Digital leaders excel in terms of identifying and nurturing people with a growth mindset and bringing them in for the transformation program.

Create Conditions to Experiment and Take Risk:

Digital leaders always encourage experimentation and learning journeys. They ask the right questions to trigger rapid tests, build, learn, and improvise. They focus on what can be learned from a failure Vs fearing a failure.

Learn Fast and Fail Fast

For a business, one of the foundational requirements is how effectively you manage the risks, while continuing innovation. The digital leader excels at managing the risks of failures and minimizing the impact on the business. This way they are able to push the boundaries for learning and experimentation without significant business impact.

Digital Leaders collaborate intentionally:

Digital leaders collaborate across the organization, internally and externally. They bring out the best in people.

Today collaboration is one of the foundational requirements and needs everyone to be at their best. However, at the transformation program level, this collaboration is much more than a simple Zoom call.

The Digital leaders ensure there is a lot of re-applicability of the work they are driving and collaborate with the rest of the organization to bring in the best from other parts of the company. They share their knowledge, and awareness with the rest of the organization and coach others.

Digital leaders shamelessly re-apply

Digital leaders never fear to re-apply an existing piece of technology and approach from others, this reduces the learning curve. You can also build upon the success of other teams to develop a technology/ approach further.

Sometimes the enterprise may not have skills internally, Digital leaders do not fear reaching out to digital transformation consulting firms to collaborate. These digital transformation consulting firms are often with some of the best and broad experiences which help the program to move forward seamlessly.

Digital Leaders bring out the best in people.

They Keep it Simple, use Common Sense, and are proactive:

Digital leaders avoid using technical jargon while communicating, they simplify the communication for their audience and help them talk their own language. e.g. if you are talking to a business leader, you must be able to help them understand the concept in clear simple understandable language.

They use common sense to put things in perspective for the program to drive clarity in communication. They are also proactive in taking the first step.

They provide a balanced perspective:

Having a balanced perspective means avoiding extreme or biased viewpoints and striving to understand the complexities and nuances of a given topic. It involves being aware of one's own biases and being willing to challenge them. Instead of jumping to conclusions or making assumptions, individuals with a balanced perspective take the time to gather information, evaluate it critically, and weigh different viewpoints before forming an opinion.

Digital leaders have to interact with always the tech team and a set of business people. Most challenges and issues would have more than 1 side to the problem. Digital Leaders take time to understand all possible points of view before making a decision, a critical trait.

Digital Leaders Have True Self-confidence:

You can not be the master of all and the digital landscape is changing very fast. Digital leaders know this and are keenly aware of their strengths and limitations.

If they come across a topic in which they are not aware or expert, they admit it and get into the discussion from a learning point of view and accept they don't know.

A digital leader always shows willingness and keenness to learn and understand the topic.

Showing your vulnerability to your team is not easy, but true digital leaders have mastered that.

Digital leaders bring Genuine humility and are compassionate:

Digital leadership is an art in itself. Even if you have a best-in-class tech, it may not get adopted by the rest of the organization. There is a softer aspect that is must-have for all digital leaders. Your organization should be willing to adopt your solution. Digital leaders have the humility to learn from others, they go into every discussion to learn other's work processes and understand pain-points.

Often at the start of the project or during the project, Digital leaders drive (or are part of) discovery sessions, understand real business needs, having discussions with the internal/external customers. Digital leaders demonstrate compassionate leadership and humility.

This helps digital leaders to have a conversation with customers (internal and external) and identify opportunities or work on some of the toughest problems and implement them successfully with high adoption.?

If you are a Digital Leader or have interacted with some of the best, I would love to hear back.

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Amit Kurhekar is a Digital Transformation Expert with over two decades of experience in Fintech and CPG.

He regularly writes on the topics of?#DigitalTransformation?#industry40?#ai #digitalbusinesstransformation