Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

In this Advisor, we identify five key success factors for realizing the benefits of a Breakthrough Incubator implementation.

Discover how an organization can truly engage its people by understanding their behaviors, and how balancing empowerment, vision, engaged leadership, tolerance for failure, tangible incentives, and the belief that transformation can actually happen and can ensure successful digital change.

The path to becoming a digital company is difficult and the challenges are multifold. It means ensuring customers remain connected even with the drastic changes that may be needed and overcoming resistance to new business models. Becoming digital does not simply mean implementing new technology; it also requires developing new leadership skills combined with connectivity among a company’s people, proc­esses, and data. Cultural changes may also be a challenge if the digital transformation must cut across silos in the organization. This Advisor’s case study examines the implementation of a digital change in a US community bank meant to retain its loyal customer base and to put in place newer ways of monetization.

There is a giant universal mental challenge when it comes to agilifying. Yet the goal of the modern organization is to rebuild itself all the time. Agility can mean different things to different people, and it should. Still, it is important to vividly understand its various meanings and to allow the organization to be aware of these meanings and then prioritize them. This Advisor offers some con­crete ways in which we can both shift our perspectives and act to “agilify” our organizations.

Much of the wisdom, books, academic papers, and so on, concerning Agile, focus at the team level. Yet an Agile transformation focuses on the adoption of Agile principles at the business or organizational level. Agile transformation, therefore, presents senior leaders with challenges they need to work out for themselves without such recommendations. The temptation is to reach out to their traditional business advisors; however, as this Executive Update illustrates, this may not be the optimal path.

Many organizations are now focusing on a hybrid cloud strategy: moving part of their IT capabilities to the cloud, while maintaining core elements in-house, hosted on-premises. The hybrid model is becoming immensely customary among organizations, as it enables them to optimally allocate their resources while keeping their current IT infrastructure operating at low risk. A hybrid cloud strategy not only prepares an organization for the future but also protects its investment today.

The way we do business is transforming. It’s being pushed and pulled by many factors, most notably by a younger workforce demanding new interfaces and services necessary to perform jobs their way. At the heart of every digital transformation project is an immutable pain wrapped in competing motivations: doing more, doing it faster, and avoiding missed opportunities. How can we reconcile these motivations in our day-to-day business? When we discuss the concept of “a culture transformed,” we can draw many parallels against the way a society votes and spends, but that’s out of scope. What is not out of reach is your influence over your teams and whether you can embrace the change that is upon us all. It’s up to you to set the tone of the conversation within the organization: robots aren’t here to steal our livelihoods; they’re here to make us more productive and lighten the load, right?

Disruptive changes within a company can result either in a spectacular rise if done right or an abrupt decline if not handled well. People are at the center of every change. If employees do not connect with their organization, do not see the need for change, do not buy in to the leadership’s vision, or are not motivated, any change will fail. For employees to see value beyond the defined work parameters, they need to feel connected to the company. Connection, respect, and trust will help a company maintain employee support for the changes that a company wants to implement. In this Advisor, we discuss in brief two such initiatives that brought about drastic increases in employee support and participation.