Digital Intelligence at Atos Part Three: Transformational Leadership

Dr. Thomas Götz

February 9, 2021

Many people have asked me what characteristics exemplify transformational leadership at Atos, and in particular for the development of our emerging young leaders. As an organization that provides digital transformation services to organizations across the world, helping our clients navigate through their own digital journeys, we have experience in role-modeling transformational leadership.

There are three “must-haves” which you may already know and follow:

1. Understand what digital transformation really means for YOU. To reflect on your transformational leadership, you are embarking on an unscripted future or career path—with new surprises and uncertain terrain. Check your own work habits, ask yourself whether you are fit enough across the spectrum of practical leadership styles, check your self-organization down to the basics of time management and dependency management, and take stock of what is in your general management method toolbox.
2. Become an authentic role model in open management and use it for your own improvement. Show empathy & appreciation for a rich spectrum of cultures and heritage, be open to new ideas, and also welcome challengers of your ideas—avoid biases. Establish a learning culture instead of a zero-defect or no-error culture, and share findings and content with your people thoroughly and pro-actively. Appreciate multiple viewpoints and ask for deviating viewpoints. Empower cross-team work wherever possible and ideate from passion—and show your own passion to your team.
3. Be always aware that continuous self-calibration is key. Challenge yourself to be even more clear on purpose, focus, and direction when leading your team into digital initiatives. Be courageous to lead and shape tangible strategies, so that others know why they see you as a leader and why they are willing to follow. Understand the shadow you are casting for your people—what is enabled by your leadership style and approach, and what is most likely not happening just because you are how you are. From there, establish strong feedback loops with your team for self-calibration. Be aware that people following you because they’ve been told to do so, are not true followers. This has plenty to do with your digital agility and eminence, as already discussed in my previous blog post.

Still something missing? Yes, there is one key element of a transformational leader that refers to a deeper level not often clearly visible—understand how your team culture impacts its digital problem-solving capability and proactively mitigate any risks.

As you probably have experienced, a strong team culture has a positive side. It allows for faster integration, better representation and reputation, enables increased productivity, and yields higher effectiveness and efficiency. There is a limiting side, however. This can be described by over-estimating one’s capabilities, reducing your sensitivity to environmental and ecosystem changes, cognitive filtering (yes, the famous “filter bubble/echo chamber” effect can happen to your team and you too), and becoming a barrier and de-accelerator for strategic change, structural change, innovation, and willingness to learn. Be aware not to transform a legacy organizational silo from the past into a digital organizational silo of tomorrow, without having improved your competitiveness and problem-solving capability. Digital teams can be vulnerable to the “not invented here” syndrome, too.

Besides digital agility, there is a strong need and value contribution from instruments that are not “digital by nature”, and which are not as impacted by strong self-cultures because of their effectiveness and robustness as strong standing, visible, and transparent management tools. As a transformational leader, you should have some of them in your toolbox; by combining these tools with the new digital intelligence and agility you and your team have achieved, you can make a significant difference.

From my personal experience, I have learned that portfolio management—as a principal approach to rethinking your existing management practice—provides excellent potential to help enable transformational leadership. By establishing portfolio thinking across your varied value propositions, initiatives, assets, and resources—including your talent—you can build a bridge between longer-term objectives and the shorter-term necessities. Multiple views and metrics can represent multiple, equally important perspectives. Micro performance considerations, as well as a macro view on technology and market dynamics, can help you understand go-to-market timing issues, which is essential in digital transformations.

Portfolio thinking can be easily visualized and explained with more passion than many other approaches. A properly set up and visualized portfolio, aligned across multiple dimensions, shows the correspondence of the “what” and “why” and “when” to multiple stakeholders, which can be highly motivating for your team if you embark on it with clear explanations of the concept behind it. When combined with a lightweight, agile innovation pipeline process, where each qualified idea and development initiative led by your talent is considered for your portfolio, portfolio management can become a very dynamic and strong instrument to involve all of your team and give your talent opportunities to contribute.

What advice might you give for leading through digital transformation?

Dr. Thomas Götz is Chief Innovation and Technology Officer at Atos, Central Europe and Germany. Email him at thomas.gotz@atos.net.

This is the third blog in a three-part series, to view the other blogs click below:

• Digital Intelligence at Atos Part Two: Developing and Sustaining Digital Agility and Eminence
• Digital Intelligence at Atos Part One: Successfully Leading Digitally Intelligent People

The post Digital Intelligence at Atos Part Three: Transformational Leadership appeared first on Harvard Business Impact.

Digital Intelligence at Atos Part Two: Developing and Sustaining Digital Agility and Eminence

Dr. Thomas Götz

February 2, 2021

Today’s digitally accelerated world is characterized by high market and business dynamics and high technology turbulence, accelerated further by the pandemic. In this environment, it is extremely difficult to lead as a manager-of-managers, navigating between strategic initiatives and decisions coming from the top-level boardroom and managing the KPI-based operational processes on the ground. In this tough sandwich position, leaders are expected to establish and shape digital initiatives in their area of responsibility, with team members looking for guidance on purpose, focus, and direction. But while it may be a tough position to lead, there are also lessons to be learned in regards to developing and sustaining digital agility and eminence.

As a leader in this position, you must first understand the shadow you are casting; you need to be aware of what you are enabling with your leadership style and approach, and what is likely not happening just because of the way you lead. You can do this by establishing strong feedback loops for self-calibration and sharing your findings with the team. This encourages others to do their own self-calibration and helps you and your team to uncover and utilize their respective strengths and capabilities to everyone’s advantage.

Next, be aware of styles and approaches that are significantly affecting your ability to be a transformational leader who has a sustained, high level of digital maturity. There are some easy to follow, typical patterns that will expose you to risks—and many may sound familiar to you:

• The Execution Robot: concentrating on the operational outcome only. You become a rigid execution machine without helping your teams to improve digital agility & eminence—as an example, you concentrate on quarter-by-quarter operational execution of quantified plans by enforced top-down governance. In a digital world with digitally transformed cultures, team members will not accept you as an authentic leader and their performance can be impacted, rendering you unable to leverage their talent appropriately. By doing so, you risk losing your ability to lead the team effectively and can reduce their willingness and energy to create digital value for your customers, ultimately undermining your acceptance and credibility as a digital leader.

• The Digital Evangelist: focusing exclusively on high-level digital storytelling. As an evangelist and explainer, you can become ineffective because you ignore or delegate the technology-rich detailed discussions to the teams and concentrate on abstract slideware with lots of digital buzzwords and hyped digital business topics. This lack of detailed understanding can soon convert into performance degradation of you and your team. In this scenario, you often feel optimistic until it is too late.

• The Model Perfectionist: being too narrowly focused on making your digitally enhanced internal operating model perfect. As a consequence, you will most likely lose your antennae for the market and lose traction with market needs and customers’ changing perception of value delivered. Because you have no real ideas for where to invest in new growth areas and opportunities beyond your actual digital horizon—even if you have the budget available—you can create an unsustainable business model.

There is a better approach to digital agility and eminence—I have personally experienced one approach which works quite well. In order to recreate room to maneuver with digital agility, bring yourself into an active mentorship and coaching role for initiatives that strongly combine self-organization, innovation, and talent management—rather than being a passive executive sponsor of a digital initiative.

As an example, encourage your employees to join in a cross-unit team of curious trend scouts, each of them close to a certain scope of the market, technology, and digitalization topics—and let them self-organize into a “radar team”. Expect them to elect a speaker every half year, identify and discuss upcoming trends, rank the topics for relevance and maturity for your business, and give their speaker a seat on your leadership board. Let them shine with their findings. Provide them a mandate to share and link to other communities inside and outside your organization. Let them challenge your plans, actions, and strategies based on their radar findings. Make sure that half of the team is rotated once a year, by an application process that honors your elected members of the team with high digital reputation and digital eminence.

Another approach is to Identify talent that is exceptionally strong in building cross-unit communities, and with high customer orientation (for example, from sales, consulting, professional services, etc.). Equip them with a small script for how to forge an “Innovation Community” as the smallest possible “minimum viable organization” and coach them to ramp up such an innovative community. The key purpose for their community is to create specific ideas for new customer value propositions, evaluate them in their team first, and establish a crowd voting mechanism in a much broader population within the organization. Then let them present the outcomes in your leadership board on a regular schedule. With you as coach and mentor, they will organize themselves, invent their own and new tools, and organize the process. The ideas could be seen as seed investments, and you can trigger a pipeline of further incubation and develop activities from there. If possible, make sure that the innovation community can establish some kind of own reputation and “logo” to be identified with, attracting further talent.

The combination of talent management, self-organization, and innovation is a very strong stimulator for stepping up in digital agility and eminence if actively coached and mentored by you.

What steps have you taken as a leader to ensure your digital agility?

Dr. Thomas Götz is Chief Innovation and Technology Officer at Atos, Central Europe and Germany. Email him at thomas.gotz@atos.net.

This is the second blog in a three-part series, to view the other blogs click below:

• Digital Intelligence at Atos Part Three: Transformational Leadership
• Digital Intelligence at Atos Part One: Successfully Leading Digitally Intelligent People

The post Digital Intelligence at Atos Part Two: Developing and Sustaining Digital Agility and Eminence appeared first on Harvard Business Impact.

Digital Intelligence at Atos Part One: Successfully Leading Digitally Intelligent People

Dr. Thomas Götz

January 26, 2021

Digital Intelligence not only describes a new set of skills and capabilities but also sheds light on the need to change behaviors and attitudes. From my experience, it is crucial to understand how both dimensions contribute to achieving this kind of new intelligence in order to excel in an environment undergoing substantial digital transformation—with established leaders willing to learn from emerging talent.

First of all, it is very important to understand that the distinct disciplines of business and technology we knew in the past, with their different approaches to way-of-working, mindsets, behaviors, and cultures, are now gone. This is difficult for many people to accept because most people have grown up in traditionally siloed cultures (of being a deep technologist, or a business-savvy person) and may have established a certain bias toward either of the disciplines. In the new world, successful teams with high digital intelligence have overcome that thinking to bring a deep integration of methodical navigation skills, architecting & digital solutioning capability, design creativity, and data science proficiency to the table, so that they may shape, lead, and deliver digital transformations successfully. Everybody on the team must have a sound understanding of how digital technology drives the convergence of business & operating models. With this understanding, teams can reimagine and reinvent customer experience and relationships, shape platform services for multisided businesses, and openly embark on partnering and also co-opetition models (i.e. working with competitors as partners)—all essential ingredients of digital success.

Why is this so important? Differentiation in the digitally transformed world strongly relies on the capability to step onto a learning curve, and then progress on this curve with speed, outpacing your competitors—all while pushing more and more accumulated intellectual property from the learnings into software-based capabilities. These new and innovative learnings cannot be imitated by your competitors as simply as they may have been in the past, giving you a competitive advantage. Digital intelligence is a key success factor to accelerating and keeping pace in this journey.

However, leading teams of strong digitally intelligent people is a big challenge. People with high digital intelligence are fast in problem-solving, organize themselves easily, prefer to choose their leaders themselves, and do not accept simple top-down hierarchies and rigid leadership styles. Leaders who want to be successful with such teams have to become a role model for nurturing the convergence of disciplines and cultures that were siloed in the past, by applying the virtues of open management. These virtues include empathy, openness, sharing content thoroughly, the appreciation of multiple viewpoints, a passionate approach to ideation—and designing almost everything for the inherent capability of continuous change. Very often, teams appreciate being challenged by being asked for diverse opinions and viewpoints regarding your measures and plans. By doing so you show recognition and appreciation for them while benefiting from hearing others’ perspectives. As an outcome, you will be able to play back a better and deeper understanding of the problem to be solved to all team members, allowing you to foster and increase the “digital reputation” of the team.

If you want to step up to become a successful leader in this environment, to harvest new talents and career opportunities, you also have to try your best to get a strong understanding of these digital technologies. By watching the young digital makers, listening, and trying things out for yourself, you’ll be in a great place to start. If you are asked to create a “hello world app” on a cloud-native stack by yourself, consider visiting the technologists on the ground, actively listening to their comments and concerns. As a more senior leader, you also could make use of reverse mentoring—just let one of your digital technologists be a mentor for YOU when it comes to reflections about digital technologies and their adoption.

In order to become a highly accepted leader with real followers among those digitally intelligent people, you should be both passionate and clear on purpose, focus, and direction when leading your team through digital transformation challenges. So be courageous to lead and shape digital initiatives of even small perimeter and be keen to focus on real transformational approaches with recognized lighthouse character, so that your people know why they trust in you. Also be willing, together with the team, to manage in uncertain terrain, and be ready for surprises. There is a significant likelihood that something will come around the corner with disruptive momentum which could shake your ecosystem. With your people and a high level of digital intelligence, you will be well prepared.

How intelligent is your organization when it comes to incorporating today’s technologies?

Dr. Thomas Götz is Chief Innovation and Technology Officer at Atos, Central Europe and Germany. Email him at thomas.gotz@atos.net.

This is the first blog in a three-part series, to view the other blogs click below:

• Digital Intelligence at Atos Part Two: Developing and Sustaining Digital Agility and Eminence
• Digital Intelligence at Atos Part Three: Transformational Leadership

The post Digital Intelligence at Atos Part One: Successfully Leading Digitally Intelligent People appeared first on Harvard Business Impact.