Leadership for Digital Transformation

Look at leadership to drive digital transformation    

Successful digital transformation depends on engaged leadership which has the power to influence the people who must adapt to changes and how they perform their jobs. With at least 70% of digital transformation projects failing due to employee resistance, the key to improving project outcomes lies in equipping leaders with the skills and mindset to lead their organisations through uncertain, ambiguous, and sometimes volatile changes.

Operationally focused leaders should start putting people first to achieve the efficiencies and productivity improvements promised by digital transformation. Importantly, leaders need to understand their influence and how they can contribute to the project’s success.

Self-aware leaders are better at leading

Self-awareness has become a critical characteristic and a foundational requirement for effective leaders. It is this which is often lacking in leaders that are ineffective at steering their organisations through transformational changes.

Self-awareness in leadership means understanding your strengths and weaknesses, character, behaviours, and motives, and how these impact your leadership abilities. It also helps you to see what type of leader you are, what leadership and communication styles your employees respond to, and how to adapt these to get employees to embrace the changes that need to happen.

Self-aware leaders are better at understanding their emotions and motives and how their conduct affects the people around them. This allows them to tap into their personal strengths and better manage relationships to support and guide teams through changes.

Isabel Adams, People Enablement Director, at AVeS Cyber Security.

Capitalising on strengths improves outcomes

Finding out how your leadership team is enabling or thwarting digital transformation efforts and how they can use their strengths to motivate and support their people will help to improve digital transformation outcomes.

Everyone has strengths, and everyone has weaknesses. By participating in a Leadership programme that includes an Enneagram profiling assessment (a world-leading archetypal framework in personal development), leaders can identify the strengths and weaknesses of their personalities and through the exploration of their basic fears, motivators, passions, and temperaments can align their core strengths to business strategies and better lead their people through digital change.

The Enneagram is a system of personality typing that describes patterns in how people interpret the world and manage their emotions. The Enneagram describes nine personality types and maps each of these types on a nine-pointed diagramme which helps to illustrate how the types relate to one another.

Enneagram can be used to maximise collaboration and engagement so that leaders can nurture the strengths of each personality type. This helps to limit the behaviours that may derail projects while improving organisational performance, increasing project success rates and speed of adoption with healthier morale.