Regardless of what types of products or services you provide, if your employees are not fully engaged across your end-to-end value chain, it is likely your customers are not either. Now here’s the rub…
In Jim Collins’ seminal book, Good to Great, he makes a very compelling case that getting the right people in the right seats on the bus is more important than your business growth strategy. While that may seem counterintuitive, in the new digital world I think it makes perfect sense. Why? Because with the level of unprecedented disruption businesses across all industries are facing, companies need leaders who:
This is never more true than for the CIO and the senior IT leadership team. Any company trying to transform itself into a digital enterprise must be able to leverage new technologies (Social, Mobile, Cloud, Data Analytics, IoT) as an integral part of this effort. In fact, the CIO will often need to take the lead in communicating the company’s “digital value proposition” to internal stakeholders (business unit heads, product development, sales, marketing, finance, compliance and HR) and external stakeholders as well.
“Houston we have a problem”
For many companies, the current makeup of their technology resources are not aligned with the new skills and capabilities necessary to successfully drive digital transformation. As the chart below illustrates, the vast majority of current IT resources are allocated to supporting the legacy functions in the left-hand column. While those systems of record still need to be maintained, it’s the new systems of engagement and systems of intelligence in the right-hand column that will drive digital transformation.
In the new digital world, to address this problem, companies need to recruit, develop and retain a whole new set of skills and capabilities that don’t currently exist within the IT organization. For example, companies must embrace an outside-in design thinking approach in order to deliver compelling and enduring customer experiences. That is very different from the traditional inside-out user interface design approach being deployed across most companies today. Don’t get me wrong, this is not an either-or problem it’s a both-and problem. There just has to be a major reweighting of resources to the right-hand side of the aisle.
Achieving Technology Leadership Competency
The other point to make here is that this is not exclusively an IT problem, this is a company-wide problem. IT cannot shoulder the full burden of digital transformation but rather must do it in collaboration with all the other key stakeholders across the enterprise and external partners if necessary. I wrote about this in an earlier blog and made the point that companies have to make all their senior leaders technology savvy and technology conversant.
As such, the CEO needs to take the lead and talk with the CIO and Head of HR about clearly defining the relevant skills and capabilities needed and then how to leverage workforce analytics to improve candidate quality and accelerate their recruitment. In some cases, this will entail identifying current employees who have the desire and aptitude to move into these new roles and with the proper training and development can succeed in them.
As a recent Forrester brief stated, “Access to talent and the ability to hire the right people at the right place will become a huge competitive differentiator.”
Where should we start?
Here are some ideas for how you can start getting your technology resources realigned to support your transformation to a digital enterprise:
For example, companies who want to move to the forefront as a digital enterprise will need:
The path forward is pretty clear. CIOs and senior IT leaders who develop a comprehensive workforce plan will find, develop and keep the critical new skills needed to drive digital transformation. For those who don’t, they and their teams will be relegated to a caretaker role with little or no influence on the future competitive performance of their organizations.
As always, I am interested in your comments, feedback and perspectives on the ideas put forth in this blog. Please e-mail them to me at pdmoore@woellc.com
Talk to anyone working today, be it in a startup or a well-established Fortune 500 company, and they will tell you the same thing – “I’m working so hard but there aren’t enough hours in the day for me to do my job.” It’s not just that they are spending more hours working, but it’s also that they are trying to do two, three or four things at once. Simply put, American workers have lost all control over setting reasonable boundaries for how they spend their time and energy. Most agree that they are not delivering optimal performance at work, nor do they take the time to stop and rethink their priorities and work structure.
Recent studies have documented that the average employee switches tasks every three minutes, is interrupted every two minutes and has a maximum focus stretch of 12 minutes. Rather than making things better, this multi-tasking behavior actually makes things worse. Another study showed that when a person switches away from their primary task to do something else, they increase the time it takes to do the original task by 25%.
So why are so many people engaged in such unproductive behavior? Because they think it’s expected of them even though they know this behavior results in sub-optimal performance. Here are some recent quotes from employees interviewed by The New York Times:
Companies, for their part, are doing everything they can to squeeze more revenue out of fewer employees as they seek to bolster their bottom lines. In fact, since 2007 revenue per employee for those companies in the S&P 500 has increased 11.4%. The irony is that better overall productivity for the company may not translate to increased productivity for the individual worker.
“Think Weeks” a la Gates
So what can be done to help individuals from CEO’s to mid-level managers to front line workers regain some measure of control over what they do and how they do it? For CEO’s and other C-Level executives, they may want to try a steal a page from Bill Gates old playbook. When Bill was CEO of Microsoft, he would schedule periodic “think weeks” where he would literally go off to his cabin in the woods for a week and do nothing but read and think about the big changes that could impact Microsoft’s future success. It was on one of these think weeks that he finally came to the conclusion that Microsoft’s closed architecture business model was no match for the emerging open architecture model of the Internet. As such, he helped engineer a major corporate pivot for the company.
Try “Block Days”
I have worked with C-Level executives and other senior leaders to create “block days” which are full calendar days where the individual comes into the office but has nothing scheduled on their calendar for that day. How they have used these days has varied, but for the most part it gave them large chunks of uninterrupted time to think about major issues and events that had the potential to fundamentally change the desired outcomes for their organization or business unit.
Core & Context Assessment
Another tool I have found to be very effective is to ask the individual to go through his or her calendar for the preceding month and put everything they did into one of two columns. Column one was Core Activities that is any activity that directly contributes to improving the business growth and financial performance of the company. Column two is Context Activities which are all the other things that have to get done that do not directly contribute to improving the revenue and profits of the company. We then added up the time in each respective column that gave the individual their core & context ratio. Much to their chagrin, most individuals saw first-hand that 75% – 80% of their time was spent on context activities that had no direct impact on the performance of their company. The next step was to make significant changes in how they allocated their time in order to drive that ratio toward over 50% on core activities.
Lastly, I just recently came across a very interesting article in The Wall Street Journal entitled “Employees, Measure Yourselves”. It identified six different tools that individuals can use to track and measure how they spend their time and energy and what they can do to improve their performance at work and find a better balance on a personal level. Here is the list of six:
So while there are lots of tools and processes an individual can access and use, at the end of the day, I think it comes down to each person finally saying “Enough is Enough — today is the day I start to set reasonable boundaries on how I am going to spend my time and energy.” Resetting those boundaries should go a long way to regaining control over how you deliver optimal performance at work and still have a life outside of work that is worth living.
~ Peter
