One of the unexpected joys of working from home during lockdown is seeing your talented family members working from home and hearing conversations that would never normally be heard in the domestic setting. Whether it is your 11-year-old learning physics, your 8-year-old ‘educating their teacher’ about the 12 tasks of Hercules or your partner being a high-profile business leader.
The other day – through the wall of my study – I could overhear the Capgemini graduate intake of 2020 on the receiving end of a rousing presentation and sage advice on how to get the most out of a successful career with Capgemini (via MS Teams).
The answer: ‘Be Curious… Challenge…Collaborate’.
These simple but wise words were the central thread of the engaging presentation delivered by my wife, Capgemini Vice President from the HMRC market unit, Adele Every.
The Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of business resilience and the criticality of digital capabilities such that, for the majority of business leaders, digital transformation (DX) is no longer considered a ‘nice to have’ but it’s an imperative to their sustained growth.
Adele’s advice is equally applicable for graduates as it is for established business leaders who recognise a need to re-invent themselves in the digital age so that they may effectively lead and champion the digital transformation of their organisations.
Whilst ‘People & Culture’ is one of the six digital transformation capability assessment factors assessed by Deltabase, it is factor often overlooked by many when thinking how to successfully transform.
1. Be curious
Digital transformation requires continual focus and it is enabled through a progressive culture of innovation that is driven by curiosity and where employees are empowered to suggest options to drive change.
Two fantastic game-changing solutions I have been investigating this month:
Firstly GainX. They provide a tech transformation management suite for executives. This involves blending AI with social network analysis, natural language processing, behavioural economics, portfolio, financial, and risk management analytics, to provide deep insights and prediction to support executive decision-making when managing complex strategic transformation programmes.
Secondly, r4apps. The r4apps platform, is a fast, data integration platform that can integrate company-specific and isolated ERP systems from different software providers. This allows companies to pull data, information and insights together across the disaggregated technical landscape without the need for costly systems re-platforming.
Ask yourself – what new transformative ideas have you, yourself, investigated in the last month and brought forward for consideration? There are so many fantastic technology transformative opportunities out there, exploring a few each month can help you to stay relevant and keep your knowledge fresh.
2. Challenge
We can all be guilty of too readily accepting the status quo but what we need to be doing is continually challenging how we can improve and asking questions to challenge conventional thinking.
No matter what grade you are, or background you have, a different perspective drives consideration and often sparks the idea for step-change transformation.
For anyone who has read Sam Conniff Allende’s fun and insightful management book, ‘Be More Pirate’, they will be familiar with the concept of “…Rebel – Draw strength from standing up to the status quo”. If you haven’t had the pleasure of channelling your inner pirate to affect change at work, this is well worth the read.
3. Collaborate
Effective collaboration makes the whole greater than the sum of the parts. Bouncing ideas around a diverse pool of talent is the best way to drive innovation and ensure collective buy-in. This is especially true where transformation transcends management units or even spans multiple businesses. To build on someone’s idea is to build a bond in trust and collective ownership that drives progressive change.
Effective leaders sometimes assemble specialist, cross-functional teams to solve or investigate a specific problem or critical issue as a great way to foster collaboration. These groups, often referred to as ‘Tiger Teams’ or ‘Pods’, rapidly coalesce to solve a problem and then disband once completed.
As Martin Wells, founder and managing director of experience-led transformation consultancy 6-PM and former KPMG partner puts it “…good ideas only turn into great transformations once we collaborate.”. He goes on to say “.…We find powerful experience design techniques to help focus companies’ collaboration efforts by viewing the world through the lens of customers and the workforce. When they take this approach, it becomes easier to leave behind old ways of working (often engrained into existing operating models) and to become a truly customer and employee centric company – things begin to work better for everyone.”
Armed with a curious mind and brave enough to challenge the status quo will help you identify transformation opportunities and initiatives. To deliver high performance and shape the ideas of tomorrow you need to collaborate for success.
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