How to Become an Effective Business and Digital Transformation Leader

Strong and clear leadership is one of the most important success factors for any digital transformation . What exactly does it mean to be a transformation leader? Most people intuitively recognize and understand that leadership is important to a digital transformation, but many don’t understand what that means to be an effective leader for these specific projects.

Many people think that leadership means simply setting a high-level vision for a project, recognizing the need for new technology, or perhaps approving a large transformation project. Yes, those are certainly elements of successful transformation leadership, but barely scratch the surface of the types of leaders and leadership skills that you need to demonstrate to be effective in the digital transformation.

Today I will outline how to be an effective business transformation leader. I’ll also provide some recommendations for those of you that may not be a leader per se – but you’re on a project team or part of an organization that’s going through a transformation. What are some of the things you could coach your leadership team to be aware of in order to be successful?

Symptoms of Poor Leadership
First, it helps to understand what the symptoms of poor leadership before knowing how to lead a digital transformation. Simply put, how do we know that we haven’t been effective in our leadership?

Some of the most common symptoms we see with this phenomenon of poor leadership is you have total chaos during your implementation. Some of the signs are:

A lot of misalignments, and people not agreeing on what the path forward should look like.

You don’t have the right project governance and controls in place.
Your system integrator is essentially taking complete control over your project.

You spend more time, money, and resources than you should or than you expected on the project.

If any of these things sound familiar to you or if you can relate to any of these, chances are it was a symptom of a deeper root cause, which is you lacking strong transformation leadership. Mitigating these core systemic issues may take time. But more importantly, how do we get to the root cause of making sure that we have strong leadership in our transformation?

Business Strategy & Vision
The first step in effective transformation leadership (which should start well before you start bringing in a system integrator to start deploying technology) is to define a clear strategy and vision for what you want this transformation to be. More importantly, what you want your organization to be and how will this transformation support that vision. This sounds simple enough, but you would be amazed how many organizations fail to execute an aligned company strategy.

If you’re an executive sponsor or you’re working with your executive sponsor, you want to make sure that not only do they have a vision for what they think the transformation should be, but also making sure that your other key executives and stakeholders are aligned with that vision. This process is typically pretty messy. It’s messier than most organizations think. If it doesn’t feel messy, chances are you’re not getting into the heart of what needs to be aligned.

At the end of the day, it is imperative that your leadership has a clear vision of the target future state and you have an alignment that can ultimately translate to a strategy and trickle down the organization. That’s a key first step or prerequisite to being an effective transformation leader.

Operational Alignment
The next step to effective transformation leadership is to ensure the strategy and vision that you’ve defined and that alignment that you’ve secured now translates to business operations. So now that we’ve decided as an organization our overall strategic goals, we now need to understand how this effects our operating model.