Digital transformation involves integrating technology at various levels of your organization and moving away from dated systems. The aim is to establish an innovative, competitive business, optimizing processes and delivering high value to customers and stakeholders. A critical factor of digital development is equipping your managers to lead your team through the transformation.
What Is Digital Transformation?
Technology may be essential to digital transformation, but it is more than adopting new tech. Digital transformation is about ridding your business of dated processes and enabling innovation.
Digital transformation is vital regardless of the size of your organization and is different for each. Beyond adopting technology and streamlining processes, digital transformation is a cultural shift. Your leaders and individual contributors should be rewired to challenge existing practices and experiment often.
The shift should be seen as an opportunity rather than an obstacle. The focus should be on what your specific reason is for digital transformation, whether it may be customer-centric, operational, profitable or employee-based.
How to Lead Your Team Through Digital Transformation
Change causes anxiety and uncertainty in the workforce. Your leaders are your best assets to help guide your organization through transformation, and communication is critical to inspire innovation and lasting change.
Skilled and empowered leaders must enable a cultural shift and lead the change you want to see through:
- A vision: Your employees need an image and narrative of a successful transformation. Vision gives meaning and purpose to the change and encourages a mindset adjustment
- Communication: Open discussion about organizational culture and change reinforces innovative thinking and prevents teams from reverting to the dated status quo
- A growth mindset: Change requires experimentation. Embrace learning, growth and failure over perfectionism. Authenticity and acknowledgment of shortcomings will encourage employee investment
- Leadership training: You should equip and empower your leaders to help navigate your business through the complexities of transformation. Supporting your leaders requires leadership development solutions and training
- Broken barriers: Ask your teams what obstacles they face and eliminate or address them quickly. Communicate the importance and urgency of change, and encourage the workforce to share innovative solutions
Partner With CLS to Digitally Transform Your Organization
The Center for Leadership Studies (CLS) has pioneered leadership training and organizational development for over 50 years. We have a global footprint of training individuals in 35 countries, and our Situational Leadership® methodology has been deployed in more than 70% of Fortune 500 companies.
Contact us to learn about training and empowering your team to lead others through digital transformation.
