How CIOs Can Create Cohesive Teams That Accelerate Transformation
The success of a transformation program relies heavily on the leadership at the helm of the undertaking.
CIO’s play a more crucial role here than ever before. As transformation leaders, they often push and educate the entire leadership team on the most critical, technical, and often the costliest choices to guide the organization’s future.
The book Beyond Digital uncovers how great leaders transform their organizations and shape the future, while undergoing the pressures of constant change. It is based on interviews from executives at some of the largest organizations in the world, like Microsoft and Hitachi.
The ways in which leaders work is evolving. Traditionally healthy competition among teammates has led to innovation, but today, collaboration is the key to continuously transform and innovate in the digital era.
We found that the best leaders understand that transformations require the leadership team to really “lead” vs. responding to the needs of the organization, and they invert the focus of that group to drive the agenda by changes in roles, people, scope and how they work together.
Why is this crucial in the new age of work? Because the transformations ahead will be more challenging than the ones you’ve been through before. Successful organizations that we studied are clear about what they are transforming toward and drive an execution to that destination with great clarity about how to execute well. These leadership teams exist all throughout an organization, and CIOs who have a team that they can rely on to drive change this way will thrive in today’s age of continuous digital transformation.
To bring together their team and support a business under constant transformation, CIOs must look to diversify the capabilities within their teams, help them balance running the day to day with transforming for the future, and focus on collaboration.
CIO’s need to develop teams with a diversity of skills — and each organization will need unique talent that relates to the priorities of the transformation — and the differentiating capabilities it is building. Organizations tend to try to be “great at everything,” but this is unrealistic — your team needs the clarity of where the best talent is required based on clear outcomes the organization is promising to customers.
Technology leaders need operational business skills to successfully collaborate across their business and drive technology-enabled business outcomes. Increasingly, they also need to diversify their understanding of customers, their knowledge of various markets and their ability to lead via influence. Therefore, the team behind the CIO must have a deliberate mix of diverse backgrounds and experiences.
Consider Hitachi’s transformation from a product-push company across many industries — including consumer businesses — into a global leader in social innovation. For this transformation to be successful, the company needed to massively shift the organization’s capabilities.
