Digital Transformation Executive
It is all about strategy, organizational culture/competencies and active yet engaging leadership.
I have had the privilege as a senior executive of leading such transformational processes at Hasbro, EMI Music, Ask Jeeves, eMusic and guided leadership at MTV/Viacom, and USNews & World Report.
In each case there was a rich and successful history and brand recognition bumping up against new and unforgiving consumer and market force changes. Yet prior skills and culture, which had once projected success both personally and for the company, were now a trap to the prior era and those needs.
I have learned that there is a required sequential process for a transformational leader to follow towards success:
Step 1:
Starting by understanding and building a consensus around the true source of the problems now at hand, not just the manifestations of losing market share or key staff, is essential or everyone is solving for a different perceived pressure on the company.
Step 2:
Then, building a consensus around the vision and strategic steps to be taken.
Step 3:
Only then, identifying the leadership and staff competencies required to deliver the strategy can be both identified and developed/acquired.
Step 4:
As there are very few silver bullets of ‘one size fits all’ solutions, multiple initiatives towards the strategic goals need to be tried – as some succeed learn and celebrate the insights, as others fail learn from and end the effort.
Failure to achieve strategic change follows wherever and whenever the first two steps have been ignored. Not developing unambiguous consensus around the root causes of pressure demanding change, or an unambiguous consensus around the strategic priorities for getting out and ahead again is far too common as these insights are too easily ‘presumed.’ Most failures can be traced to these misses and a change process that jumps straight into ‘organizational’ rearrangements around people, who reports to who and the like.
Sequenced and additive steps undertaken with authenticity and integrity are essential to winning.
Digital Transformation Leadership Team Development
Media Leader is able to plan, develop, and lead multiple bespoke programs to meet the needs of each unique situation.
Built around the realities of the circumstances and perceived issues, the focus is on practical outcomes versus ‘good-for-you’ experiences.
Digital Transformation Consultant
Effective leadership has changed to meet the dramatically increased complexity of managing a digital company.
Media Leader has had the privilege to work with CEOs and Executive Leadership Teams where, despite detailed strategic plans and full commitment to becoming a digital media company, the reality of achieving their full potential of these intentions has simply not been met.
Of course, in each case the reasons for sub-optimizing are different – technology, internal culture. skill sets, rebranding for new demographic markets, struggling with social media, leadership styles and more.
This means that any work starts with a quick deep-dive of listening and learning from multiple perspectives – internal and external to the company.
- Internally the C Suite, product development, revenue owners, competitor scanners, platform enhancement and those closest to customers are a starting pointy;
- Externally it is key users consumers, advertisers or data partners as the starti8ng pint, and then key vendors.
Primary competitors need to be understood, even if the temptation is to dismiss them as they ‘make no money.’
The strategy development process is always inclusive of the key internal leadership of the company – perhaps starting at the center and then expanding to concentric circles of leaders – both formal and informal. Reaching a shared understanding as to ‘what’ has gone wrong or needs to change in response to market force demands, is essential and achieved through a structured analysis that leverages internal and external data and perspectives. Committing to a pathway of actions requires equally demands sincere buy-in or everyone runs off to their comfort zone and historic solutions.
It is only with these two steps completed that changes to the required capabilities can be addressed. This is often a strain to control everyone’s urge to hire/fire/reorganize/amend compensation and more, all before really knowing why.
A series of projects will rapidly produce winners and losers – the quickest and most certain way to learn quickly. Build on the winners, support those on the ‘losing’ projects so that no one pays a price for participating In creating the next iteration of the company.
Effective leadership has changed to meet the dramatically increased complexity of managing a digital company – from command-and-control hierarchies to empowering autonomous self-managed teams with and end-to-end accountability for their product development and services.
It is wholly counterproductive to try and control complexity with more rules, processes and inflexible guidelines. (Yves Morieux: Bringing Managers Back to Work – 10-2018)
Leadership, Power and Authority comes from their judgement and abilities to provide total clarity of the outcomes goals – they need to be able to induce people to accept adjustments to their individual goals to the greater good of the team.