Leadership buy-in is key to digital success

Teaching the leadership new tricks (Photo via Wikipedia)

Can company leadership be encouraged to change its mindset and embrace digital? Yes, it can, but there are some tough steps to be taken if change is to secure the leadership support that it needs to be successfully filtered throughout an organisation.

While hierarchical structures and seniority often present seemingly huge barriers to change, great leaders are never standing still. Strong leadership is characterised by a desire and drive to succeed, and it is this pursuit of success that can be harnessed to be the single most powerful agent of change within an organisation. It’s a fact that those businesses seen as the innovators and agents of change also have the great transformational leaders.

But, for many businesses, change is also seen through the prism of risk rather than the window of opportunity.  When it comes to trying something new the glass is often half empty, and the question: “What is the risk of doing this?” reverberates along company corridors.

Many leaders rely on character traits and leadership theories that they have developed and honed over many years. While it is certainly true that to get them to think differently has to be handled with tact and perseverance, there are other orthodoxies that also have to be challenged.

It may be impossible to get someone to change the football team they support, but it is not impossible to get leaders to change their attitudes to digital innovation if they are clearly  brought onside by painting a picture of opportunity and ensuring the glass is firmly half full: “What is the risk of not doing this?”

Determined senior opposition to digital change needs to be slowly challenged, undermined and ultimately eradicated. If top down gains no traction, maybe bottom up will? A guerrilla process to encourage localised adoption and then to evangelise the results through the organisation can add a viral element that ultimately becomes unstoppable.

At a recent conference on the B2B world the afternoon was rounded off with an excellent discussion on future trends and current challenges. On the stage, in addition to the host, there were a clutch of publishing leaders — three CEOs and an MD. So far, so normal.

But what was particularly interesting was that two of the CEOs, and to a lesser extent, the MD, were live Tweeting as they debated the burning issues of the day. And, arguably, what was just as interesting (beyond the great insights that came from the panel) was that no-one in the audience was in the least bit surprised. In fact many of them were combining listening with digital conversation as they had their heads buried in laptops, iPads and smart phones. But everyone was paying attention, honest.

The age of the great disrupters

The days when you sometime felt like a naughty schoolboy if you were caught taking a crafty peek at your BlackBerry in a meeting or at business event are over (as well as the days of BlackBerry dominance). Today, you can benefit from maximum participation across virtual and in-person platforms. Digital conversations can be held with other delegates,  with presenters or with people elsewhere in the world, and no-one thinks the worse of you.

This is a sight of the future, where we live in an interconnected digital world and are able to manage relationships, connections and interactions across multiple platforms and through numerous simultaneous channels. We observe, participate, have content pushed to us and push content back out.

It is the age of the great disrupters, the death of one set of orthodoxies and the emergence of a new set of rules. Changes in social behaviour need to be understood by businesses, and they need to facilitate and not legislate against. Facebook at work? Yes, absolutely. Work emails at home? Yes absolutely.

Senior leaders need to be convinced of the merging of personal and business behaviour into one set of rules where the terms of engagement remain constant. B2B publishers are beginning to get this. It is the concept of synchronous behaviour. Farewell linear activities, now it is about the synchronised mash-up of social and business engagement across multiple devices. What was known as multi-tasking, is now more likely just “tasking”.

Sounds a big ask, but the stakes are high.

Leaders need success, and to achieve that they need people willing to speak with them as equals. Ideas are the life blood of any business and the leaders cannot possibly have a monopoly over ideas. They need people to sell ideas, teach the benefits and drive adoption.

A recent report from Mckinsey & Co entitled  “Demystifying Social Media”  was unambiguous in its message:

Today’s chief executive can no longer treat social media as a side activity run solely by managers in marketing or public relations. It’s much more than simply another form of paid marketing, and it demands more too: a clear framework to help CEOs and other top executives evaluate investments in it, a plan for building support infrastructure, and performance-management systems to help leaders smartly scale their social presence. Companies that have these three elements in place can create critical new brand assets (such as content from customers or insights from their feedback), open up new channels for interactions (Twitter-based customer service, Facebook news feeds), and completely reposition a brand through the way its employees interact with customers or other parties.

Leaders need success, and to achieve that they need people willing to speak with them as equals. Ideas are the life blood of any business and the leaders cannot possibly have a monopoly over ideas. They need people to sell ideas, teach the benefits and drive adoption.

Those businesses that take a wait and see attitude will end up being disrupted by others. Those that take a lead will not only build competitive edge, but they will emerge as the agents of disruption that creates a winning proposition.

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