The New Mandate: Tech Leaders Must Be Transformation Leaders

Business CEO’s have always needed a “partner” to lead the technology function. Previously the technology leader role was only to fill a role of enabler, enforcer, maintainer and protector of the business. Today business leaders expect technology leaders to be drivers of change who engage in large-scale, strategic projects that fundamentally alter the way the company operates and does business. According to the “The Kinetic Leader: Boldly Reinventing the Enterprise,” Deloitte LLP’s 2020 global technology leadership study, organizations seek CIOs and CTOs who are change-oriented and visionary, with an emphasis on transformation rather than incremental change.

They key word is transformation. CIOs and CTOs are in a unique position to be the chief transformation leader. Transformation is not incremental change. It is a fundamental rethink of how business is done to meet internal and customer needs. Transformation primarily stems from strategy, innovation, and facilitation.

According to author Daniel Burress, the technology leader must recognize that it is “….. imperative that someone both drive and oversee internal as well as external, transformation in order to stay ahead of the curve and become an Anticipatory Organization®.”

Strategy

Transformational strategy for the technology leader requires commitment to 3 key elements:

Listening – involves the commitment to knowing the business and industry and competitive landscape. The leader must listen to customers, fellow executives, front line workers and technology sources. Active listening means knowing how to ask questions, identify root issues, sifting through noise and the ability to synthesize the key themes. Sometimes, listening comes from data and can identify trends, insights and accurate predictions will ahead of other indicators.
Speed – means that strategy and solutions must be designed to be conceptualized quickly, visualized for viability almost immediately, and delivered to provide value as soon as possible to matter.
Agility – is the ability to be flexible and pivot. Business conditions are changing at a pace that none of us can foresee accurately (i.e., world wide pandemic). Tech strategy needs to inherently be ready to shift to changing needs, transformational process change, and megatrend movement in technologies.

In other words, the old philosophy of a monolithic, annual process starting in August or September for a final strategy and budget to start January is over. You may have a budget and a core set of initiatives to execute, but you need to be able to pivot. The tech leader should always have as part of their strategy a constant suite of innovation and transformational solutions as part of the plan and ready to execute as the need is identified and the plan is accepted.

Innovation

The tech leader needs to be in the vanguard of what technology can deliver. This can take the form of identifying new 3rd party solutions, doing brainstorming and ideation with leaders, workers and customers, or simply prototyping a solution that could be beneficial to the company or customer. Regardless of how to the leader gets to the innovation idea, it needs to stem from strategy which should be gleaned from listening. The best ideas in the world will not benefit the tech leader if they propose something that no one has any need for.

Innovation from technology leadership is important because the recipient of a solution cannot always begin to articulate what they want or need. This is highly frustrating to most business leaders and tech leaders alike. The business leader states some vague high level requirement and the tech leader says they cannot execute or states that if no more requirements come, the business will get what they are given. This is a never ending cycle of distrust that has to be broken.

The conceived innovation sometimes a big swing with risks. If the payoff is big enough, the leader needs to exhibit bravery and confidence in presenting the fundamental change. This philosophy flies in the face of the “nobody gets fired for buying IBM” mentality that has existed for decades. True innovation and transformation comes from taking calculated, responsible risks while looking at and solving a problem with completely different perspectives

The tech leader needs to be committed to sifting general knowledge with the general requirements (identification), mix in the knowledge of how to ask leading and qualifying questions (ideation), and then bake a sample working product or visualization to confirm assumptions (incubation). After adjusting to feedback (incorporation), a solution can be fully conceived and delivered(integration) through the organization.

Facilitation

Facilitation is an encompassing word that represent the change the thinking necessary to lead the transformation process. The technology leader must possess the ability to facilitate in 5 crucial roles:

Unification Agent – To be a unification agent, the leader must be a consensus builder, bridge builder and process builder. Consensus comes often when someone is in the room or in the presence of stakeholders who can draw people, ideas and requirements together when they cannot do it on their own. Bridge building is a true skill used in helping persons or groups overcome inherent distrust, skepticism or previous wrongs. Process building is many times a greenfield activity that means building a strawman proposal for a transformational technology/process to begin a discussion.
Facilitation Agent – Being a facilitation agent requires the tech leader to know how to ask questions, quell discord, show passion, encourage participation, sow seeds of new thinking, remind of requirements, and drive to conclusions. This can come in the innovation cycle, delivery cycle or the integration and adoption cycle.
Teaching Agent – The technology leader needs to be the consummate teacher. He/She needs to be able communicate vision, technology concepts, transformation solutions, process and technology solutions and adoption plans. Teaching is a commitment to transparent communication needed to accomplish true transformation.
Delivery Agent – The tech leader need to buy, build and resource transformation projects to get them done, done on time, delivered to the correct people, and delivered in the correct way. Without the ability to deliver, transformation will never happen.
Adoption Agent – Adoption is a process that starts almost at the beginning of every successful transformation project. To incorporate change, everyone involved needs to be able to envision how their world will change, how it will benefit them and the customer, what effort will be involved and what their contribution will do to make the effort successful. A commitment need to be made by the tech leader that transformation will not take place without proper followup, training and exposure prior and after delivery.

Conclusion

The technology leader needs to be the enabler of transformation in order to realize its benefits of being able to face today’s challenges and opportunities and plan for tomorrow’s. The business needs the tech leader to solve tough priorities like competitiveness, operational effectiveness, stability, efficiency, security and automation (Top Board Transformation Priorities, The Harvey Nash / KPMG CIO Survey 2019). A commitment to transformation instead of incremental change is enabled with Strategy, Innovation and Facilitation, not the adoption of a particular technology stack or development methodology. The leader can accomplish great things in any organization regardless of digital maturity levels with these principles.