As a business leader who is leading an organziation who is going through digital transformation, you will face numerous challenges. Some of them include remote team management, sustainability, getting buy-ins from key stakeholders and keeping the target audience engaged with disruptive innovation.
Add to that the inconclusive organizational culture, budget constraints, lack of clarity on how to spend that budget, finding the right balance between agility and security. This can quickly become overwhelming which is why most businesses fail to implement digital transformation. If you want to succeed with digital transformation initiatives, you need a leader that can take on all these challenges and come out on top. How could you find such a leader? That is the question we will try to answer in this article.
In this article, AntiDos will highlight reasons why agile leaders are crucial for the success of your digital transformation initiatives and how to find one in your organization.
Why Do You Need Agile Leaders?
Do you want to put your digital transformation initiatives in top gear and want to sustain it at the same time? If yes, you need agile leaders.
1. Change Agents
One of the biggest reasons why agile leaders and scrum masters are an ideal choice for accelerating the pace of digital transformation is because they are change agents. They are quite used to helping other people in making changes but also sustaining those changes for long term results. Not only that, they always strive to stay ahead of the curve, which is why they always attend conferences and workshops not only to hone their skills but also to get better at playing the role of change agents.
2. Trust
Communication and collaboration is an integral part of agile methodology. That is why agile leaders usually have the trust of their team. With trust being a vital component for digital transformation success, it can make a huge impact on your progress towards your digital transformation goal. On the flipside, lack of trust by team members on leaders can negatively impact team cohesion as well as their productivity.
3. Vision
What really differentiates a leader from subordinates is that leaders have a vision. They can see into the future and provide insights into what the future would look like. What’s more, they are great at identifying who is struggling and why. With useful insights, agile leaders can help your organziation overcome barriers and speed up the change.
4. Value Delivery
Another common characteristic that differentiates agile leaders from others is that they focus on delivering value for the organziation. Their primary focus is on products and delivering value. What really makes leaders stand out from the crowd is their capability to accept complexity and take on challenges.
How To Find Agile Leaders That Can Digitally Transform Your Business?
Let’s assume that you don’t have an agile leader in your organization but you want to digitally transform your business. How would you go about it? You will have to look for agile leaders that possess all the skills and experience to digitally transform a company.
Here are some of the ways you can use to identify agile leaders.
1. Discover Thought Leaders
Conduct a survey of your product team to identify thought leaders. Only ask relevant questions and avoid lengthy forms that ask for too much information from the employee. This will help you find thought leaders in your company. When finding thought leaders, ask yourself who do you turn to for agile related challenges.
Even if you are bringing someone from outside your team, think who you can trust with agile related issues. This will help you find the right agile leader who can help your organziation succeed with digital transformation. Instead of designating someone who stays behind the scenes mostly, choose someone whose names pop up more often. They could be your next agile leaders.
2. Learn, Learn, Learn
Once you have found an agile leader, now it is time to create a team to help him achieve his goals. Agile leaders need to understand the cultural implications of digital transformation. Encourage team members to collaborate with each other so they can not only learn new things but develop a sense of community.
This allows your team to gel together. More importantly, it will help both the agile leaders and team members to learn a lot and expand their horizons. They will have the experience of what it is like to be at the forefront of digital transformation. This will be a huge learning curve that will help them throughout their lives. Focus on challenges and hurdles that are stopping your business from implementing change. Identify changes that are hardest to make and go at it first.
3. Seek Help
Being an agile leader means that your team always looks up to you for directions and guidance. Share your knowledge, experience, expertise and insights with your team so they can benefit from them. You can also encourage team members to share their feedback with you. You never know where your next big idea might come from. Agile leaders can also designate a manager to manage a team who can serve as a middleman between both the leader and team members.
4. Create a Change Team
Whether it is digital transformation or implementing change, you can not do it alone. You need a team to support you and buy into your vision so they can translate it into reality. If you want your digital transformation initiatives to succeed, you need to create a dedicated team for it.
The core responsibility of this team should be to ensure all the digital transformation initiatives are moving according to the plan. They should also take steps to ensure sustainability and speed up the progress. Involve them when you are creating your digital transformation strategy and provide them with all the resources they need to drive change.
Do you have agile leaders that can drive your digital transformation initiatives to success? If not, how do you find one? Share it with us in the comments section below.