Leading the digital charge: Inspiring innovation and fostering a culture of excellence

Organizations look at digital transformation as an opportunity to radically improve operations and increase the value of a product or service to the customer by embedding technology into the decision-making fabric and building automation into its functions. This involves the integration of digital technologies into its planning and operations like adopting cloud computing to sustain and scale infrastructure seamlessly, using AI to improve user experience through natural language communication, enhancing data analytics for data-driven decision making and building closed-loop automated systems using IoT. For the employees, this freed-up human capital helps to invest more time in activities that require human expertise, judgment and creativity, and obtain better work-life harmony.  

Leading any major change initiative is a daunting task, particularly the ones in which the result is unclear, the turnaround timelines are vague, and the value erosion rate with time is high. In almost all these transformations, one must prove the justification for change and navigate resistance to it, and go above and beyond to develop the business case. When talking about leading a digital change, the level of all the above is many degrees higher. So the question that plagues any professional entrusted with or motivated to drive a huge change initiative is how to inspire innovation and foster a culture of excellence.  

Acknowledging the challenges of digital transformation  

Lack of precedence or an absence of suitable benchmarks for results could be limiting factors for a digitalization exercise. Though there are some common goals every organization might want to achieve, there is a unique benefit or advantage each organization will seek to differentiate them from competitors. The unavailability of such a precedent could pose difficulties in allocating resources to the initiative, predicting the outcome of the initiative and stating a timeline upfront for realization of the objectives.  

Measurement of value and focus on short-term ROI could be another deterrent factor for a successful digitalization initiative. These projects have significant upfront costs and may take substantial time to deliver results. Digitalization projects yield many intangible benefits like improved customer experience, increased brand loyalty, etc. Quantification of these in traditional ROI terms could be challenging    

The role played by big-picture thinking in the success of a project cannot be overstated — this is especially true for the success of a digitalization project where outcomes may be unclear or the method of achievement changes as new learnings are acquired. Team members should understand the overall goals and objectives of the mission and should be able to align their individual tasks and contributions to the broader vision.  A good understanding of the goals enables them to anticipate challenges proactively and avoid them with careful planning and creative workarounds. Apart from boosting engagement and motivation, this facilitates informed decision-making.  

Leadership commitment 

No digital transformation will be successful without leadership commitment and backing.  On top of setting clear expectations, providing necessary resources, and celebrating successes, leadership must stay engaged with the team to inspire, invoke energy and provide a vision of success in relatable ways. Activities and endeavors that promote a culture of excellence should not only be rewarded but also be implanted as a standard practice for the team.  

Examples abound of impossible projects made successful due to the unwavering commitment of the leaders and the team spirit that they brought in. Whether it was executing the Apollo mission or building the Burj Khalifa the common thread that runs through it is the role leaders play in supporting the team, encouraging experimentation and risk-taking and promoting idea meritocracy and inclusion.  

The Apollo 13 mission would not have been successful — in fact it would have turned out to be a horror story but for the leadership shown by Flight Director Gene Kranz. When a crisis in the form of an explosion of an oxygen tank in the spacecraft happened, leaving the astronauts with limited oxygen to breathe, Kranz asked for innovative ideas within the team to stem the danger with the usage of materials available for the astronauts. Staging an environment where the merit of an idea prevailed over positional power enabled team members to pitch in without fear or ridicule. The innovative idea that saved the situation, which was to create a CO2 filter using available materials came from a junior team member and Kranz not only welcomed and implemented the idea promptly to success, but he also rewarded him.  

Personal growth of employees 

Many business leaders have time and time again stated that employees are the first customers that need to be satisfied since engaged employees drive customer satisfaction.  As engaged employees are more productive, creative, and loyal, their work results will be of superior quality and the commitment will be unparalleled. One of the ways to raise employee engagement is to focus on their personal growth — it goes beyond making a person better at work and helps them grow to be more resilient, flexible and creative in life.  

Raising employee engagement could be through providing opportunities for growth, creating a positive work environment, and involving employees in decision-making. Encouraging them and envisioning their ability to visualize the impact of their work on the long-term objective of the initiative is a sure way to keep them motivated and engaged.   

Experts at the Harvard Graduate School of Education have coined the term deliberately developmental organizations for companies that are committed to the development of their employees by weaving personal growth into daily work. Studies on their operations and organizational structure revealed that these organizations believed that the company profitability and individual development are interdependent, and people grow through the proper combination of challenge and support. These companies realize that they need to put in a structure that permits people to be comfortable and ready to transcend their limitations and blind spots, and that structure should support creating an environment in which people are comfortable sharing their inadequacies and working on improving it with the help of their peers and leaders.  

Encourage collaboration   

Digital transformation is naturally innovative and involves the usage of technologies, methodologies and processes with varying degrees of maturity, familiarity and skillset availability within the project team. The levels of complexity might not be evenly distributed within the sub-teams — meaning some areas might be more technologically challenging than others. Due to this, we cannot expect all the teams to keep the same rate of progress, deliver at the same levels and match the speeds of the other teams. This could lead to an adversarial mindset within the teams, characterized by finger-pointing and blaming, that would eventually erode team morale and derail the initiative.   

Leaders have a prominent role in not letting this happen. Leaders must constantly identify and articulate the superordinate goal of the initiative and stress the importance of working across teams to achieve overall success. Cultivating a culture in which collective pronouns are used (“we” instead of “I,” “me,” “us,” and “them”) and each team acting as a cheerleader for the other, several of the negative team behaviors can be stemmed. Sharing of resources, ideas and research between teams should not only be encouraged but should be bestowed with tangible rewards.    

Go for ‘small’ and ‘solid’ wins  

Technologies in the digital realm are evolving day by day, some of them incrementally but a lot of them exponentially. It is almost impossible to keep up with these evolving and improved versions without investing a good amount of financial and human capital. Rather than trying to keep up, the focus should be on delivering value at the earliest by delivering small but value-adding use cases more frequently and putting them out for operations in the real world. In addition to boosting team morale and allowing visibility to the realized product, this will also help with improving the quality and endurance of the product based on real operations feedback.   

A caution against early adoption: Sometimes early adoptions of an advanced version might not always be good as these versions would not be rid of technical deficiencies and vulnerabilities. Vendors in their rush to put it in the market might not have time to deal with all the technical issues. So it is prudent to wait until sufficient performance feedback is received from the market, before implementing them.  

Support and encourage experimentation 

A culture of innovation cannot be built with an attitude of antagonism or aversion towards experimentation. Controlled, coordinated and value-added experiments on modern technologies must be allowed for the teams to learn and gain knowledge from these findings. Balancing cost, value, risk and timelines is important and a constant check of the overall timelines is imperative for achieving project success. On top of that, a detailed analysis of the experiment, irrespective of its results (success, failure or neutral), should be conducted and documented for future use. This will be a huge time saver as the acquired learning and available documentation could come in handy for a different use case in the future.   

Studies have shown that allowing experimentation enhances motivation levels within employees as they look forward to a realization of their efforts and the serendipity of seeing unintended but beneficial results. Progress, not perfection should be the experimentation goal and hence the scale of the ideas does not matter if learning can be attained. If an approach or a guideline were able to be drawn from the experiment and a hypothesis could be created from it, the experiment should be seen as a success — it has served the purpose of providing a direction for investing your resources.  

From a leadership perspective, setting the guidelines and guardrails for experimentation is as important as providing a conducive environment for it. Conditions that clearly specify the limits for the resources to be used, the costs that could be invested and the feasible timelines will ensure that the overall program is not at risk and the resources are conserved.    

Getting on with the drive to digitalization  

Whether averse or addicted to it, every company in its journey to be relevant and competitive in the market will need to do some level of digital transformation.  Though the challenges and upfront resource investments are significant, the beneficial results achieved outweigh these obstacles. So, we should all be prepared to buckle up and have a firm hand on the steering wheel as we prepare for the digitalization drive. 

Ajith Chandrasekharan serves as the Director of Enterprise Architecture at Keurig Dr Pepper focused on developing and maintaining the enterprise architecture roadmap and plays a crucial role in aligning the IT strategy to the business objectives. He has more than 30 years of experience in driving business growth and success through technology and has been part of multiple business transformation projects helping organizations reach their business goals. 

This article was made possible by our partnership with the IASA Chief Architect Forum. The CAF’s purpose is to test, challenge and support the art and science of Business Technology Architecture and its evolution over time as well as grow the influence and leadership of chief architects both inside and outside the profession. The CAF is a leadership community of the IASA, the leading non-profit professional association for business technology architects.