Stop working in silos and start driving a true digital transformation agenda

If you’re part of a leadership team, you’ll recognize how unusual it is to have a highly productive, collaborative, and forward-looking group. But today’s success requires our leadership teams to lead — and perform, and transform the organization toward a meaningful purpose.

For starters, most companies will experience a high level of competition within their top ranks. While this quest for power and individualistic thinking will encourage responsibility, it generally won’t transform the company. But leadership teams need to do more than just work better together — they need to recognize the incredible responsibility they have to redirect their efforts from responding to the needs of the organization to directing and shaping its future. In Beyond digitalwe interviewed and surveyed the leaders of today’s top companies, such as Microsoft and Hitachi, to discover exactly how they lead companies through change.

Here are three actions you can take to reposition leadership to drive growth, success, and digital transformation within your organization.

Bring the right mix of skills together

The first step to enabling transformation within your company is creating the right roles in your leadership team. This will determine which primary areas need representation, what skills are required, and what type of leaders you want to help lead the company. Just as an organization makes a strategic plan based on its ability to differentiate itself from competitors, your leaders need new skills, mindsets, and capabilities to shape the company’s future.

In fact, the past few years have seen an explosion of new C-suite titles and roles, such as Chief Quality Officers, Chief Analytics Officers, Chief Behavioral Officers, and Chief Customer Officers, to focus on critical capabilities for the future of an organisation . You must choose the areas that represent your strategy, your purpose, and the capabilities your organization must build to deliver incredible results. For example, Apple created a chief design officer position in 2015 to signal the importance of design to Apple. This helped Apple attract the best designers and emphasize the company’s distinctiveness.

Your leadership team must balance some of these critical capabilities with traditional P&L and functional roles that help you shift organizational focus. As you build your team, pay attention to ensuring the diversity of experience, background and mindset, which is essential to ensure that the team brings unique skills to shape the future, and to hold each other accountable.

Focus on driving digital transformation in addition to responding to today’s demands

The past few years have certainly produced an endless series of “fires” to manage, in addition to the company’s ever-challenging performance, which can require significant effort. But it’s critical for your leadership team to really think about how it sets its agenda to ensure it drives the type of transformation you need to stay relevant in today’s incredibly competitive marketplace.

Your leadership team will always have to manage two different agendas: running the business day-to-day and quarter-to-quarter and building the future of your business. The team must perform and transform at the same time. If you’re only transforming but not performing, you may not have the freedom or investment to build the future (or, as some leaders say, you may not be around long enough to have that opportunity). But if you’re only performing but not transforming, your business has no future.

Therefore, leaders must pay attention to both goals and ensure that the long-term goals do not falter because they are regularly engaged in putting out fires.

Some companies do this by separating agendas so that enough time is spent on both topics. Others build in different management mechanisms to separate business operations from strategy and transformation. Beware of false attempts to really focus on transformation.

When we write about in Beyond digital, launching dozens of digital initiatives is not the same as a meaningful business transformation that addresses a major societal or customer challenge, then plans and invests in the kind of people, processes and technological changes needed. Real transformations have a clear destiny and a leadership team engaged in designing how to get there.

Taking ownership of collaboration

The massive transformations ahead will be inherently complex and multi-functional, likely requiring investments that truly scale across most or all of the business. That means your leaders—the ones you’ve selected to drive the company’s agenda—must work together to solve these big challenges. That may sound obvious, but leaders often fall into the trap of coming to leadership team meetings ready to defend their territory, or trying to minimize their involvement in real cross-functional or business unit topics. You will need to get the team to understand that working the traditional way is likely to be a path to irrelevance. They will greatly benefit from the kind of collaboration that is ahead of them, but this may not be easy for some.

You can help facilitate this culture by embracing your role as a change agent and behavioral influencer of your company. And you need to work with your leadership to determine how they should behave for everyone to be effective, solve problems together, make decisions quickly, and help each other and the organization thrive. Like many of the leaders in our research, you may want to assign difficult tasks and significant efforts to different members of your team so that they can provide a powerful solution, as well as experience the benefits of working together in this way.

It’s important that you spend time with your team to come to a common understanding of why your organization needs to transform, how to see your company’s place in the world, and the opportunities that differentiate your company and help you achieve this transformation. to achieve. All members of your leadership team must have full ownership of the transformation program and understand that their personal goals and agendas are related to its success.

Paul Canvas is director at PwC en Mahadeva Matt Manic is a partner at PwC.