Leading Digital Transformation: Strategies for Senior Leaders

Table of Contents:

1. Developing a Strategic Approach
2. The Role of Leadership in DX
3. Common Challenges and Strategic Responses
4. Ensuring Org Buy-In and Alignment
5. Best Practices for Executing DX

If you’re a CEO or senior leader, you make decisions that impact your business and employees every day. This level of responsibility is no small task. But even if it sometimes feels like it, this responsibility isn’t yours to bear alone. Considering how to lead a digital transformation is no different — knowing when to take the wheel and when it’s okay for the team to steer is key.

Think about your team for a minute. They come in (or log on) daily to do their jobs. For the most part, they use the same tools and tech they used yesterday. If their daily systems are inefficient or insufficient for addressing employee or customer pain points, the net effect on your organization is massive. It may be affecting expenses, productivity, and profitability, and also your company’s reputation.  

That’s why planning how to lead a digital transformation matters so much. From digitalization and beyond, each small improvement in the transformation adds up, becoming more valuable as operations scale and your organization grows. However, like the processes within the transformation itself, leading a digital transformation requires a long-term strategy and an actionable plan.

Defining Digital Transformation: Digital Technology to Transform Businesses  

Digital transformation means reimagining traditional business processes and models to enhance operational efficiency, create better customer experiences, and foster innovation. Though it’s common to consider only the tools and digital technologies needed to transform, successful transformation demands a strategic change in company culture that prioritizes continuous learning and improvement.  

Developing a Strategic Approach  

As much as they’re talked about, most digital efforts are not full-scale digital transformations. If your company has adopted new systems over time, you may simply need to catch up to the market or incorporate strategies to enable future growth. But, if your organization has less digital readiness or is part of a more disruptive industry, you may require a more holistic transformation.  

Regardless, investing in digitalization and digital transformation (DX) is a powerful way to indicate your organization’s potential for long-term gain. For digital transformation leaders, developing a strategic approach is priority number one. To begin creating your digital transformation strategy, start by defining the desired business outcomes and working backward. By knowing where you want to go, you can prioritize investment in and timing of digital initiatives.  

Roadmap for Transformation  

Generally speaking, the more complex and holistic the digital initiatives, the more leadership involvement they require. However, like leadership as a whole, there’s an art to knowing when and where your skills and expertise are needed and when and where to allow your team to forge ahead buoyed by your support.  

Overall, you’ll want to perform some version of the following steps when strategizing and undergoing transformation efforts:  

1. Identify pain points: Look at your current processes and outcomes, evaluating both internal employee and external customer markers. Consider your current tech stack, how data is used, and potential resources you could need.

2. Create an action plan: Map out how you’ll get from where you are to where you want to be. Assess readiness, evaluate competency gaps, and consider which tools to acquire and how to implement their use. Be sure to identify key milestones and next steps as well as contingency plans. To build momentum from the start, make sure to create opportunities for short-term quick wins.  

3. Establish a change-management team: If you’re a good leader, you already know you can’t lead a digital transformation alone. While you must model change adoption, you also need to tap stakeholders in all departments and ranks to champion change.  

4. Engage and communicate: Dynamic communication is another key to overcoming resistance to change. Encourage engagement using consistent and easy-to-access tools like meetings, physical progress charts, or internal dashboards. Be sure to create a plan for gathering feedback and addressing employee concerns to help mitigate fear and encourage adoption.  

5. Sustain a change culture: Since true transformation is ongoing, it’s imperative you foster a culture comfortable with and eager for continual innovation. Help employees and customers see that change brings ongoing quality improvement and growth opportunities. To ensure continued progress, set up KPIs to measure outcomes as you go.

Digital Transformation vs Digital Optimization  

To identify pain points and create an action plan, you must understand where your team and business are now. Inherent in this is understanding when to tap digital optimization vs. transformation.  

Digital optimization means taking a good business process or customer experience and making it better, whereas a full transformation is a more holistic reinvention of systems and services. Transformation is so much more comprehensive that it may result in new products, services, or business models. Successful digital initiatives include both optimization and transformation on an ongoing basis.  

The Role of Leadership in DX  

The degree of necessary leadership involvement is tied to several factors, including the complexity of transformation and current readiness. Since transformation is ongoing, you must plan for the short term and also the future.  

Remember, true DX is not tied to any one person — it will continue beyond current leadership and teams. However, a comprehensive plan with appropriate leadership involvement will go a long way in shaping future outcomes.

Tailoring Leadership’s Efforts to the Organization’s Digital Readiness and Aspirations  

Small-scale digital transformation initiatives generally involve quicker and easier updates, requiring less leadership involvement. If big-picture growth strategies or customer-facing initiatives are in the plan, digital leaders will likely take a more hands-on approach. To tailor involvement to transformation’s needs, you must be aware of your company’s digital ambitions and the scale of your upcoming journey.  

For example, if you’re a CEO or member of senior leadership at an enterprise organization undergoing transformation, you must consider your company's inherent complexity. Transformation will affect more people and processes, and you may need to work on several digital efforts at once. One unit may be tasked with a certain set of digitalization projects while others are undergoing entirely different changes.

If your organization has high digital readiness and a skilled staff comfortable with change, leaders may not need to be involved with the day-to-day goings-on. In such circumstances, however, leadership must still be highly involved in digital transformation strategy. Even if your company is rife with digital natives, you’ll need to keep your eye on innovation lest you become complacent digital followers.

The Importance of Strong Leadership in Fostering a Digital Culture and Mindset  

To ensure successful transformation regardless of scale, digital leaders will want to create a continuous-learning culture that is comfortable with change. Since new technologies and tools are routinely becoming more integrated into life, maintaining a digital mindset must be an ongoing priority.  

Leadership is at the helm of championing the adoption of a digital mindset embracing our increasingly digital culture. By creating compelling and consistent messaging and relieving internal- and external-facing pain points, CEOs and managers can encourage their teams to not only accept but actively endorse transformation.  

Common Challenges and Strategic Responses for Digital Growth

According to Dave Rogers, a Columbia University professor and DX author, 70 percent of digital transformation efforts fail. Some of the most common digital transformation challenges are resistance to change, deficiencies in expertise, gaps in strategic planning, and budgetary limitations. As digital leaders, it’s important to recognize these potential issues and find mitigation strategies for them before launch.  

Naturally, those hearing about changes rather than deciding to make them may initially react nervously. People may fear personal failure or worry they are at risk of losing their positions due to increases in automation.  

By anticipating such responses, CEOs can address these and similar concerns head-on. While doing so, they must also face their own fears, understanding, for example, that any short-term revenue hits are in service of meeting long-term objectives.  

Strategies to Break Through Roadblocks and Empower Teams  

By expecting a certain amount of turbulence and taking the long view, digital leaders are better positioned to focus on acting as role models. Seek to inspire and motivate others by creating a culture of continuous learning and ongoing change. Invest in skill development, recognize and reward effort and early adoption, and celebrate achieving milestones as you go.

1. Tear down roadblocks: DX is full of challenges that must be overcome. By adopting a change culture and using effective communication, you can clear a path to transformational success.  

2. Create a clear vision: Don’t underestimate how powerful it is to share how transformation efforts fit into the company’s larger strategic context of value creation, competitiveness, and growth. By telling a compelling story that creates a vision, you bring your employees along on your journey. Be sure to illustrate both the potential wins of transformation as well as the costs of taking no action within the competitive digital landscape.  

3. Get team-wide and leadership buy-in: Remember, your employees already have full-time jobs. To help with adoption and ensure consistent progress, give people the opportunity to work on digital transformation projects outside their regular routines. If they are expected to fold learning new systems and tools into their day-to-day workload, you’ll likely see that DX efforts struggle to progress.  

Change management is critical to successful digital transformation. Consider that people may have personal fears around change, and it’s your job to help dissuade those. Recognize those who champion change as your teammates in accelerating adoption. To achieve digital growth, you must look beyond specific technology solutions and create a company culture that embraces change and innovation.

Ensuring Organizational Alignment and Buy-In  

Navigating change has its challenges. To overcome them, managers must understand their teams’ level of buy-in and individuals’ capacity to learn. They must nurture and develop both aspects to ensure optimal adoption. Only when people are bought in and given the tools to succeed can their efforts align with organizational goals.

Understanding the Adoption Matrix and How to Engage Employees

In DX, an employee’s degree of buy-in plus their capacity to learn combine to produce what’s known as the Adoption Matrix. The Adoption Matrix consists of four quadrants: oppressed, frustrated, indifferent, and inspired. Employees who believe in both change and their capacity to learn are in the ‘inspired’ category. Those who don’t see the benefits of digitalization or think they can learn its tools are in the ‘oppressed’ category.  

Frustrated team members are high in buy-in but low in confidence, and indifferent ones are low in buy-in but high in confidence. Managers must understand where their employees sit within the matrix and work to address lacking beliefs as needed.

Though it may be contrary to initial thought, making your upskilling program voluntary can be a powerful way to increase buy-in, as it helps people internalize their efforts. Also, since most groups will have individuals in all four quadrants, peer mentoring can be a useful tool for moving more employees toward inspiration. External motivators like rewards for early adopters and celebrations for achieving benchmarks can also help engage employees in learning new digital skills.  

Maintaining a Digital-First Culture and Mindset  

As discussed, cultural change is key to all current and future transformation goals. To help curate innovative change, leadership must establish a digital-first culture and mindset. This means championing individuals' and organizations' adoption of new attitudes and behaviors regarding new technologies as opportunities for success.

How easy it will be to develop and maintain this cultural shift depends on the extent to which employees internalize the endeavor. By communicating clearly how the employee experience will improve, leading to greater job success and satisfaction, you’ll help your teams adopt the mindset essential to a successful transformation.

The Necessity of a Digital Mindset Beyond Just Technological Skills  

While learning new skills is part of both optimization and transformation, embracing a digital-first culture requires a new mindset. Skill development is certainly worthwhile on its own; however, those who develop a digital mindset will likely be more successful and satisfied in their current roles as well as more desirable regarding future roles.  

Leaders with a digital mindset will enjoy these same benefits, setting their companies up for success and building more personal and company-wide resilience. By harnessing a digital mindset throughout the org, businesses can react more quickly to market shifts and take advantage of new opportunities.  

Best Practices in Executing DX  

Beyond identifying pain points, creating an action plan, and championing change, there are a few best practices to consider when executing a new digital strategy.  

Focus Initial Efforts on Areas With Significant Impact

To create quick wins and build momentum, it helps to seek digital optimization and transformation in parallel. This allows business units to pursue near-term benefits while simultaneously undertaking more comprehensive initiatives in a small number of high-potential areas.

The degree to which organizations should prioritize one aspect over the other depends on aspects like the state of disruption in their industry and their organization’s digital readiness and culture. If your industry is stable, it may make sense to prioritize optimization to avoid digital transformation initiatives that overly impact the customer experience. However, if your company operates in a disrupted sector, you’ll want to focus on transforming key areas lest you risk losing market share and becoming obsolete.  

Align Incentives With DX Goals to Address Internal Weaknesses  

Since maximizing buy-in and capacity to learn are integral to successful transformation, using incentives tied to transformational goals to address uncovered weaknesses can be useful. Consider whether using bonuses, stock options, and equity ownership as motivators makes financial sense. Remember also that some employees may be driven by opportunities to publicly make their mark on the endeavor and the overall business.  

As you address internal challenges, remember that transformational goals are most likely to be achieved when your strategy remains somewhat flexible. Strategic flexibility also helps reinforce an agile culture, which will serve you well when pursuing DX possibilities in the future.  

Align Digital Systems and Leveraging Technology Ecosystems for Innovation  

As your company forges ahead with current and future transformational goals, strong leadership teams must remain focused on how and why employees will deploy digital tools. Keeping these core tenants at the forefront will help businesses build the processes and technological ecosystems that foster a digital mindset and accelerate transformation.

The Continuous Nature of Digital Change

Digital change today means being in a state of constant transition. The competitive landscape and ever-increasing availability of digital tools require those in leadership to be adaptive while cultivating a culture comfortable with change. Only with this understanding and acceptance can companies realize the innovation necessary for market growth.  

There’s no need to feel you must do all this alone. To get help embracing ongoing, dynamic change, tell us about your organization’s DX initiatives today.