How Digital Transformation Disrupts Legacy Leaders

hello and welcome to today's webinar how digital transformation disrupts legacy leaders i'm allison ryder senior project editor at mit sloan management review and i'll be moderating today's session i'm joined today by michael schreig and ben prang who are co-authors of the recent mit smr cognizant big ideas research report leadership's digital transformation we're really excited to share with you some of the key findings from this report that launched just a few weeks back and encourage you to check that out if you'd like some further information about the study and some of our findings that were recently uncovered our speakers today as mentioned are michael schrag he's a research fellow at the mit sloan school of management's initiative on the digital economy and he's also the mitsm our guest editor for this future of leadership initiative that we have been conducting in partnership with cognizant ben pring is vice president of thought leadership at cognizant and he has co-founded and currently leads cognizant's center for the future of work he is a co-author of a number of best-selling and award-winning books on how new technologies are changing the future of work and as mentioned i'm the senior project editor here at mit smr and had the fortune of working with this team on the research so i'm happy to share some of the details behind it as well then let me hand things to you to get us started talking a little bit about the history and how we got here and our speakers may turn off their cameras but we'll be back for the q a for that more personal connection thank you allison and hi good morning good afternoon and good evening everybody wherever you may be around the world if you're joining us live thank you if you're watching uh on demand uh nice to have you along as well um yes as alison says this is the second year of the relationship of the the project-based relationship we've had with uh smr and it's been exciting to work on uh obviously a very very important theme a very important topic the future of leadership um as alison mentioned we we produced a report last year in 2020 the first um report that we've done together uh which we launched at davos uh in in person in january of last year shane we can't be doing that again this year um but that was an important piece of work which was well received in the marketplace um really kind of looking at the role of leadership in a world changing probably faster than ever driven by new technology but also driven by new cultural aspects um social aspects um morays of the modern world if you like and and and the report last year really sort of raised two very important uh findings to sort of very important perspective one was that um only 12 of the respondents in that work in that report felt that their leadership had the right mindset to drive their businesses forward in this you know rapidly changing world only 12 percent that was a bit of a a shocking statistic and then the other stat that really jumped out in that work was that less than half of the respondents felt that their organizations could actually compete in the digital economy um so pretty stark pretty blunt um pretty negative assessment of leadership's ability and capability to lead in this rapidly changing world and that's really what we wanted to further dig into in this new report that we were conducting through uh the majority of last year which says allison says we've just launched um but it's looking further into this tension around leadership's role uh at the moment um share some of the initial sort of uh key takeaways if you like from the report um that this perceived disconnect between the digital skills needed in the modern world and leaders digital fluency is a very very real phenomena uh and it's our contention uh that there's a new language of business not just the programming language but there's a new language period that people need to speak in this new world and simply put many leaders are not speaking that language they don't know that language they don't speak it and consequently they're struggling uh a lot of this disconnect and we're going to talk about this in some detail uh this disconnect is is now orientating around around itself around the notion of purpose a fashionable term perhaps but a term that is very real in the marketplace this purpose gap if you like between what employees want and what employers want um employees wanting perhaps more meaning in their work than just simply satisfying the shareholders and and the leadership in large organizations trying to balance the need to still continue to serve that constituency but uh a broader constituency and the terms i'm sure you're very familiar with the transition from shareholders stakeholder uh capitalism is a very very real phenomena and then of course what the research this year really surfaces again very starkly is that all of these underlying fundamental tensions which have been bubbling up for a long period of time clearly have all been exacerbated you know rocket fuel charged if you like by this existential moment we're going through uh something that we're all struggling with personally corporately societally this moment which is probably the biggest existential challenge since the second world war is just putting more pressure on leaders than ever before it's a tough time frankly to be a leader and uh that message really comes through very loud and clear in the report michael would you care to jump in and add some some context thoughts if you like i'm happy to add some context thoughts the most important thing for me has really been that um i'm not really a leadership person i'm more of a digital technology person a digital transformation person and so i was sort of curious as to see how the boundaries and the degrees of freedom changed for leaders as the technology changed and here here's really the key thing what we learned um that in a perverse sort of way i kind of feel that that a lot of the work that i've been involved with and mit has been involved with we've gotten digital transformation wrong we have focused on how can digital transformation make organizations more efficient and more effective and more productive and then we really listened to and looked at the survey results and the interviews what we really found more often than not is that as important as an effective and economically effective transformation was affective transformation mattered just as much or more and that leaders as you pointed out from that first study been leaders themselves leaders wanted their organizations to change more than they themselves were prepared to change we also saw that technology was fundamentally changing the contexts in which people and organizations communicated you were alluded to earlier uh you know what we're going to call context collapse and that the boundaries between work and home have been dissolved individual and institutional have been dissolved and and personal and professional have been dissolved you talked about shareholder versus stakeholder capital capitalism the distinctions between shareholders and stakeholders has been is dissolved social media has done that and the final point and it's not like it made me feel sorry for leaders but it made me feel more sensitive to some of the obstacles they face is that context collapse digital media digital transformation inside the firewall and out have made leaders more transparent visible and vulnerable and so here we are we you'll see in the interviews we've talked to these terrific people but one of the common themes is they all feel more exposed they all feel more vulnerable they don't feel more empowered they feel more accountable and that was a really interesting takeaway for me and i think for you as well ben yes absolutely yeah yes just to drive this home um again there are cynics out there skeptics out there clearly who look at this burgeoning sense of um this phrase of purpose perhaps you know with a jaundiced eye but it is very real for some of the reasons michael was just saying it is a very real phenomena anybody with an eye on the news at the moment seeing what's happening uh to kpmg um we'll have a a a reality check on how powerful these forces are and the role of leadership in in corralling them in in channeling them in in um in harnessing them is is a very very real one so purpose is more than lip service if you like it's it's a becoming a defining quality a defining mission statement i think for all forms of leadership at the moment um the point that michael just made again this notion that uh maybe digital is for other people but not for me um and we'll get into this a little bit more in some recommendations and thoughts about how leaders can become more digital more active socially perhaps um and and how to take that seriously and and be uh effective and create real results in using these channels and using these new modes of communication um and uh we'll talk a little bit more about what context collapse really is uh in this strange moment in which you know you can see inside my house and i can see inside your house and a very very different style of working that many people all around the world are getting used to at the moment if i could just quickly interject on that i think one of the things people looking at the slide should should come away with is there is still for all the discussion of affected versus effective there still is very much a data-driven and analytics component to this we see diversity equity and inclusion incorporated throughout this but not just necessarily from a do good perspective from an analytics perspective and the notion of how do we track leadership example set how do we measure these things how do we use digital technologies to visualize so i want to stress there really is a digital leadership digital data envisioning aspect of this transformation report and i think that's key and i hope you keep that in your mind as as as the rest of this rolls out yeah alison back to you wonderful thank you so i just wanted to share a little bit more context behind our research methodology for the study before we get into more of the detail of what we uncovered just to give you a sense of some of the executives we spoke to we spoke to nearly 20 executives about leaders academics in the space of leadership and we're expert in kind of dealing with the forces that are coming into play right now here's just a sampling of the people that we talked to on this and to give you a sense of the full scope of companies organizations and academic institutions that were profiled they're listed here and more detail and insights from all of these speakers and thinkers are available inside the report so i do encourage you to take a look at that if we don't touch on these specific companies or executive perspectives but they are of interest to you yes i think one of the purposes here is not just to recapitulate the report it's to tell you what we've learned and discussed since publishing the report one of our goals one of our kpis for this is we want you to download and read the report it's it's quite good we do but we're also recognized you know this is such a fast-changing environment and so as i speak about the survey that was conducted you know we want to make a point that we we started thinking about this line of inquiry in the spring of 2020 and we fielded our survey between june 20th and july 1st so you know people i think can maybe remember that time i know time tends to blend together in some strange ways for us all but you know imagine that whether you're in the u.s or abroad that you were experiencing you know some kind of restriction on typical life you probably were not commuting to your office um you know you may not have had access to the businesses and amenities that you were used to and particularly in the us and some other specific places you know thinking about the other factors at play um you know other elements of our lives that we wouldn't necessarily have talked about at work before or had impact our work as much as they did this summer so this is the context of when we gather these insights i think you know some of the the findings we have would be even more strong and some of these disconnects would be even more broad had we asked these same questions a month two months three months later i mean this is a constantly shifting environment that this moment in time i think captures a good benchmarking element for us as we think about what these key factors are that are have changed things and what the implications are just in general for organizations and their employees so to give you a sense of who was profiled for this nearly 4 300 global survey respondents three quarters of them came from outside the united states these are business to business and business to consumer organizations in over 25 industries representing various levels from individual contributors up to c-suite leaders so we did look at a very broad spectrum of people and organizations all completely anonymous but giving us some insight to really help us ground the studies we then went and talked to these specific experts leaders in the field to add some color to this to understand a little bit more about why we might be seeing something in these numbers and things of that nature so these studies really are qualitative and quantitative bringing those together to understand what's going on and what can we make of this and so much of today's talk is here's the grounding data that we have and what did we synthesize from that what takeaways and best practices can we share with you as you can take back into your organizations and continue to work and lead through this time that you know i can't say unprecedented or challenging or any of those buzzwords that you know are not changing as the environment continues to be fluctuating and very difficult michael did you want to share a little bit more context about some of our findings i i do but let me let me begin with with uh getting rid of me and stick with these movie stars let me begin with what i think is the fundamental disruption here almost 100 years ago you had the silent movies taken over by the talkies 1925 1926 1927. sound changed everything it changed everything it changed the ways actors acted directors directed it changed the way you shot the film the original vitaphone was was not sound on film but sound on a disc you had to re-retrofit all the theaters the orchestras were gone the sound systems were put in the whole notion of what a movie was fundamentally changed and everybody had to change along with it and some of those people didn't change the technology they weren't lesser artists but they couldn't adapt as well you know charlie chaplin and harold white are icons came from hungary she had a very very she was lovely she had a very very thick accent didn't translate well into sound she was great with rudy valentino silent not so good in in sound and i think we're in the exact same kind of situation today digital transformation has been as disruptive to traditional legacy notions of leadership as sound was to popular entertainment in the silent film era everything has to change the expectations of the customers audience supply chain everything has changed and that's the assumption that we we began with and it really it really stood out if you could move to the next slide the biggest impact that i see that is analogous to the arrival of sound to silent pictures as context collapse twitter facebook tick tock teams zoom the notion of your ability to communicate to targeted audiences you know that's been flattened digital media digital transformation creates a new world of context and something that you what what's it's like what ben was saying at the very beginning people are are you are you working from home or are you living at work something that you say in your personal life that gets shared with some of your customers going to get you fired that's not a hypothetical question anymore so context collapse has been looked at it was coined by a microsoft researcher dan a boyd over a decade ago uh mark zuckerberg has talked about the importance of uh context collapse facebook of course is one of the prime generators of it i think that every leader every employee everybody at work today lives in a context collapsed world and i think one of the great leadership struggles is how do you maintain your leadership effectiveness authenticity and credibility in a world where literally every digital message you put out there can appear in circumstances or in contexts you did not anticipate you did not create you did not anticipate i think that's a huge deal and we identified several ways that that has changed leadership behavior you want to do the next slide we have a series of leadership gaps that we uncovered i think we wanted to ask you all first to maybe give us a sense of how many of these statements you would say apply to you so you can check off all none one but please take a look at these and see what applies to you and your organization is it important to have a massive digitally savvy leaders are your project teams deliberately diverse in terms of digital savvy is your organization assessing if managers are improving their digital skills and do you have a reverse mentoring system in place and our poll tool doesn't allow for the full text of the question that was asked in our survey which is that you have a reverse mentoring system in place to improve the digital savviness of top management so is your organization placing concerted effort on having you know younger potentially or more digitally savvy workers mentoring other more tenured employees with the aim of improving their digital competencies i just want to stress that that these are these gaps were intensified and exacerbated uh both by the covid crisis and by by context collapse so this is terrific okay so this we can see this yeah you can see the data so this i think is not dissimilar from what we saw in our survey before i jump to that slide just give you a minute to digest that does this bring up any initial reactions ben or michael i'm just looking at the uh the uh the differential between this and then and the slide we're just about to show and they're they're actually pretty spot-on they're remarkably remarkably similar isn't aren't they nearly yeah maybe not even statistically different in some instances so i think you all can see on screen now what our survey showed so this is 4 300 folks and their responses mirror yours quite well and so what this means you know i think we saw this across our survey too that the majority of respondents said yes having a critical mass of digitally savvy leaders matters when it comes to our organization's ability to compete to win but then you see this drop-off of but are your project teams deliberately diverse in terms of that digital competency are you actively monitoring or assessing if managers improve those skills do you have a reverse mentoring system in place so it's kind of this walk the talk sort of thing where yes people say this matters but are the actions of the organization actually reflecting that these behaviors are leading to that outcome michael if you don't have any further comments on this one we can talk about the purpose disconnect as well i i think the only thing i want to say here is that it was a very interesting thing that that everybody digitalism has won everybody's digital what's intriguing is that and remember this is a perception this may not be reality but this is what people perceive that people really don't perceive that their organizations are as intent on cultivating the digital expertise of their managers and leaders as they are in the people themselves and these create gaps and disconnects and and i think that hurts the the credibility of of leaders who are championing digital transformation as essential for success i i think it's a big deal and i think it ties directly into the purpose point about to be presented so here's that point we didn't ask you all these questions uh we could have as well be curious to see if we'd get a similar response but we asked our our respondents how much these different uh statements about purpose how how much they agreed with those and you see a similar drop right that just shy of three quarters of of the respondents said that it's very important to them to work in an organization with a purpose they believe in but do they believe in their organization's purpose well slightly fewer than half do do they believe in their organization's ability to advance its purpose 36 and then a quarter believe that their organization is as purpose-driven as its leaders believe it to be so we see another drop-off here of those who strongly agree with this statement really changing from they care about having purpose in their organizational lives but then is that really enacted yeah and if we move into the next slide alison um this quote here from ed bastian of delta i think in a way really again exemplifies what we're what we're talking about this um this growing appreciation of how existential again taking purpose is seriously is um prior to kobet but now in the midst of covid um this is one of the quotes that really jumped out at us in real time uh chatting with ed and and uh is a central kind of theme of the overall report it's pretty remarkable for anyone who's been in business for any length of time to hear a very very senior very prominent uh leader say something as as strong as this um some somewhat contradict not contradictory but common counter to a lot of the messaging that typical ceos of big um institutions and organizations around the world would would how they would typically communicate so for him to sort of really call this out is a is a moment of sea change i think again in the analysis that we've done presented in a lot of detail in the report um you can begin to see the impact the purpose as a sorting mechanism between uh leaders and and folks who are uh you know perhaps again trying to struggling to change as effectively as that that they really hope and communicating to the street and to the market at large because look at these look at these deltas between um the organizations that really are acting on on making material the notion of of a purpose beyond just shareholder uh satisfaction and those that aren't i mean these are very very significant deltas i'm sure you're you're reading along as i'm talking but you know basically the takeaway 40 percent of the respondents believe um of the companies struggling believe they don't have the right management sixty percent believe that their organizations aren't building the the right talent pipeline seventy percent believe their organizations aren't monitoring whether or not leaders are becoming more digitally relevant and digitally seven savvy and more aligned with clearly where the market is going whereas uh the organizations that are making this central to what they're trying to do are having much greater success so again the the data to michael's point earlier on is telling a pretty clear story here this is beyond just theory at the moment this is becoming very very material and real in the world again this next quote that you're just about to see from kevin johnson um on really taking this seriously again this is the debate that's been going on uh for a while hasn't it i'm sure people saw the debate in the new york times in the autumn in the fall of last year between people on the on the friedman side of this discussion and not uh and for again a very very prominent high profile leader like kevin johnson to to say something as bluntly as this is very very significant again some of you have seen uh have seen the the letter signed by i think 180 ceos uh through the business roundtable recently again really supporting this perspective it is a significant sea change a significant moment of change but again as the data's suggesting uh there are gaps between what the top of the house is saying and what perhaps the the the troops and the trenches are really feeling sorry mikey you're going to jump in there i know now all i was going to say is we clustered the survey into organizations that were more purpose-driven or people described their organizations more purpose-driven or not and we found exactly as you've described tighter correlations between organizations that describe themselves as purpose-driven and organizations that really did care about making sure those gaps didn't exist or shrinking those gaps purpose seemed to be a very important organizing principle and and johnson and and bastian and all of the ceos brito all of the ceos we spoke with really made purpose an organizing principle for how they chose to lead and manage the way they invested in their digital talent and people this is a another quote that sir really drives us home from hewlett jockly from uh best buy pharmacy of uh best buy again these are very very powerful statements uh very senior people making very powerful statements i'm reminded the famous old quote that many of you all know that you know if you're not a socialist when you're 20 you don't have a heart and if you're not a capitalist when you're 40 you don't have a head but what should you be when you're 50 or 60. uh that sort of left hanging in that famous quote and somebody like jolly i think is saying here at 50 60 as a very senior leader you need to have a balance between the two being an extremist is not it's not the optimal mix you need to really uh be able to balance the needs of multiple constituencies and again that's i think what this moment of purpose is really speaking to um and then we're going to go into the the net purpose score which is one suggestion in the report uh michael that you you suggested that people might like to think about how they can introduce this into their the dashboards that you talked about earlier on this is one of those things that began as a joke that we took seriously everybody of the net promoter score became a very very interesting way of thinking about your customers your customers whether not just customer satisfaction but are they prepared to promote you and clearly as ben and allison have been stressing we found that purpose really stood out so we did a acronymic swap a net purpose score would you tell others this is for inside the organization would you tell organizations that others that this organization is well aligned around purpose indeed this is the the address directly addresses the gap it's a nice simple scalable cheap metric in fact why don't we try why don't we do a test of it right here allison i think there's a poll question associated so we're curious based on what you've heard from us here wouldn't that purpose score be helpful to your organization take a minute to think about that would that scale help you and help your company just give you a few seconds um advanced warning that we may pick on some of you to elaborate on your response after we see the distribution so it's not quite a cold call it's it's like a tepid call since you know it might be coming okay okay so that number i was watching the the ticker of the the yeses start a little bit higher and drop down but but first ben michael are you surprised by this um yes and no um i think most organizations and people in organizations are self-aware enough to know they need simple ways of of taking the temperature of how people think and how people feel uh the great thing about this the np one of the reasons why the nps and that promoter score succeed is not expensive or complicated to do similarly with this and i do wonder and i think this is clearly one of the important findings that we had most organizations really aren't aware of how aligned their people feel or are around articulated purpose so i think that's very interested in and in the spirit of intellectual property generosity feel free to use this in your in your own organization how's that free instruments for testing as a result of this webinar good luck with it wondering if anyone who said no could elaborate and just in the chat submit it in the questions module if you don't mind us um paraphrasing reading out your response why why do you think it would not be useful i think if you're not sure that could very well be you know we've given you all of a couple of minutes to digest this concept and maybe think about that and it couldn't be a tool to use and to michael's point pretty simple diagnostic from one to ten you could do the standard net purpose or sorry net promoter i'm already drinking my own promoter score uh analysis on that to get the values and look at it in the same way that an organization might look at a traditional score but for those who said no just curious if anybody has any immediate answers as to why why they don't think this would be helpful and if no one comes forward that's totally fine i don't understand it well i do think we uh sorry sure okay i would highlight this because it said this this person i won't expose name um says their leadership wouldn't care if the purpose score is low so it wouldn't be a useful metric there you go i am not if i may be permitted to be presumptuous my view if that's the perception then the organization may have bigger issues than purpose i think i think to be um again to be fair if you like again this notion of purpose and of this becoming centrally important is is a new phenomena let's be you know let's be open about that this is a new phenomena so in a way it's understandable that companies are still struggling really to build the undergirding if you like behind the phrase behind the the catchphrase behind the sort of messaging i think this is the work ahead for many organizations is conceptually they're aligned with this but how do we put in place um models uh metrics kpis data collection tools data analysis tool tools i think that's a lot of the work that we have to do so it's perhaps not a surprise that again there's still tension in figuring out how to optimize for this kind of new reality another aspect of that uh just moving forward with an eye on the clock allison um is uh again in this notion of leading by digital example of this gap between uh leaders ability to to lead in this new world is this whole notion of um you as an individual leader what's your attitude your personal attitude how do you demonstrate to your people uh that you're in tune with the times and you're you're fit to lead in this moment and i i think a lot of this it may sound uh reductiveness but i think a lot of it really does boil down to in this world of context collapse to communication style modes and whether you're comfortable in this new world of social media that we're living in i mean are you personally using social media did you like it you know what's your ratio um do you turn your nose up when people talk about social media and twitter do you do you um do you kind of uh say one thing but really acts in a different way and and are you engaged in the conversation or do you see social media it's just just a platform in which you complete but you're not really listening to anybody not really interested in what anybody else says i mean there are clearly some leaders very prominent leaders who who have a much more sophisticated model to using and and speaking to their clients to their employees through these channels i mean it's we don't mention any names here but it's not a surprise there are some people who are who are obviously uh optimizing this new channel very well but the vast majority of leaders stay away from this stuff are scared of this stuff for all the reasons michael just said it doesn't really jive with them it doesn't really feel good to them and the rhetorical question that we wanted to sort of understand in the research was based on a simple thought that um if you're leading a automobile company you know a car manufacturing company could you do that and not like cars i mean that sounds pretty unlikely really ridiculous but there are lots of people leading companies and we all know the phrase now that software is eating the world we all know that uh every company is a digital company now but there are lots of leaders of those types of companies who don't really like a lot of this digital stuff we're talking about and that's the disconnect that's the the the gap if you like that the the the research is really highlighting michael just uh quickly to be even more reductionist event that that when i say do you lead by example are you using digital media to express yourself do you comment on other people if you did a survey of your people how do they see how you lead by example because context collapse means more people have more visibility around the way you the choices you make and the communications you share so you need to boost if you're a leader you need to boost your level of self-awareness you need to be aware that whatever you do is sets an example and leading by example in a context collapsed world is a bigger challenge than one where you got to control things it's like the old joke that that 20 years ago you got to control the brand now because of digital media your customers and users control your brand it's the same thing with a leadership brand yeah ben sorry no i was just gonna again with the nine the clock i was just gonna suggest now as we go into the next slide because again this next quote that you see here from chip congley again i think is a key to a lot of the solutions that we we see uh bubbling up from from the research bubbling up from michael's work bubbling up from my travels as well it's this notion of mutual men mentorship reverse mentorship of uh more senior folks taking a lead from younger folks uh kind of reversing the way that that's typically worked in a large organization on the next slide alison the data really supports this notion that purpose-driven companies are getting this memo and acting on it in a more material way they're more likely seven times more likely to have reverse mentoring programs in place recognizing these new norms these new mores uh of the of the the next generation of workers different attitudes and skills very much in demand at the moment uh are need to be um they need to be pollinated around the business upwards and not just simply downwards and again this is a a dashboard uh michael do you want to pick up here but helps leading by example we have the excellent chip was a wonderful interview about reverse mentorship mutual mentorship um building an effective dashboard basically the idea there is you have a dashboard for fine for all of your key performance indicators around effectiveness what about affect what about affect this is what ed bastian talks about my example would be around things like sentiment analysis things around morale how would what what would your kpis be if you were concerned about morale the sentiment of your employees everybody literally everybody that i talk with is concerned about mental health and wellness and this kind of high stress environment how do we take the pulse of that how do we monitor that well maybe that was a traditional hr function pre-pandemic but now this is something that leaders project managers everyone needs to be aware of an affective kpi may be the key to effective kpis i think that's an important takeaway and that's something we develop at some length in the report do you want to do the next slide sure let's talk about leadership networks yeah i think we're going to play a a video here allison is that right from ray ray reagan's from uh from sloan uh he would you want to listen and you know instead of looking at culture of an organization you look at who is the leader networked with what is the social graph of the leader what are the social graphs of thought management very very revealing as to centers of power and privilege if we could see that tape that would be great of my project my project at the time was describing how people who were similar to each other how the way they interacted with each other very as a function of the number of people like them in a situation abstract as i one of the herds i heard as reused but it turned out that this very basic idea was useful for the manager and here's the idea i hope in a less abstract way imagine that you work in a job and imagine that i'm able to keep track of the number of people who share a demographic characteristic with you so if you're a senior manager in a firm i can measure the number for me it would be the number of african-american senior managers in the firm in particular the proportion of african-american senior managers in the firm or in a job doesn't really matter and i'm going to ask this question i'm going to ask how does the relationship between african americans vary as a function of their representation as they go from a small number to a relatively larger number and the basic idea was let's assume that there's some basic level of interpersonal attraction that two african americans have for each other it's constant across the situation and it's just some small positive affect but now let's imagine that there are two other pieces to this puzzle and the first piece is what if they're a closeness bonus meaning there's a bonus that i give to people like me when i feel like they enhance my setting in the situation when they enhance my standing in the situation and if i'm part of a numerical minority you can imagine that people worry they wonder if i belong and so when i'm part of the numerical minority this closeness bonus is high but as our numbers increase the magnitude of that bonus goes down can pause there and let folks if they're interested in seeing this uh summer series webinar from reagan's it's available on youtube and we'll share the link but just wanted to highlight that clip of basically talking about the bias of your network and how if it's not expansive and diverse in nature that could be limiting it's kind of the upshot of that and the and and social network analysis is a way to literally visualize and see the kind of network you have and this is true whether it's linkedin or facebook or or the slack channels that you have or the microsoft teams networks or outlook email networks that you have in your organizations visualizing your networks is a key insight for self-awareness and audrey bland who we who we was at atlassian and now is at culture amp again there's a data-driven aspect of this it's not just running a program it's what kind of data are you using so you can identify which individuals and which teams are most likely to benefit from dei interventions and then you run pilot you run experiments in this regard so you don't just do things in one fell swoop you use data to focus and target and prioritize what kind of interventions are going to work best leveraging off the kind of insights that you just heard from professor reagan's so these were our final recommendations i think we should go to questions ben but but we are happy to elaborate on any of these as you can tell at great length or as pithily as possible but but these are the recommendations these are actionable and they're not expensive the real cost is the cost of introspection the real cost is the cost of self-awareness so in the interest of time let's jump into questions we do have michael your statement here so the future of effective digital leadership requires that affective awareness i'm sure we'll talk more about that in the q a just to summarize for folks where they can find the report and other content that we have co-created on the future of leadership the links are here these will be shared in the slides and we'll be sharing specific links to content we referenced today in the follow-up email as well so in the interest of getting to our questions i will invite the speakers to come on camera and we can begin that portion so i wanted to ask uh one question and we talked about this but i think just to really bring it home it came in from an audience member a few minutes ago saying well right now work from home is what's happened but there's been a lot more technology change happening for years with ai other emerging technologies digital transformation so why is this relevant now and we've talked about that but i think if we could explicitly explain that you know i don't think that covet caused this and here we are you know so if you could speak a little bit more to how these ideas were exacerbated by certain forces but were already kind of in play i think that would be helpful well if i may be permitted to do the what is now a cliche quote from sacha nadella that basically said we had two years of digital transformation in six months now i'm hearing people saying we have five years of digital transformation in a year so so the the i do i believe that kovid was a a catalyst beyond a catalyst a a do i say a global impetus for absolutely absolutely because what's the old i'm my background is economics what's the alternative how would we have done things how would you shop how would you deliver things what how could you work without getting more value for more robust more resilient more adaptive technology but the idea that you're going to run your organization the same way in a covet environment as a non-covet environment is like saying really a sound movie is just like a silent movie but with sound what a naive truly reductionist argument that is and i would just add to that that um again with an economic lens on i mean people are becoming very familiar with the phrase the k-shape recovery uh or organizations with sophisticated digital channels to market to their to their employees of are faring quite well at the moment and alternatively companies that don't are struggling so that behooves everybody to take digitization more seriously and and consequently uh it behooves everyone to take the norms the mores the culture the expectations the motivations of digital talent which every business needs to be on the right shade right side of that k shape seriously and what the research is is highlighting and the question is quite right to suggest that this has all been bubbling up for a while what the research highlights is that this is mission critical now this isn't the sort of on the edge of the radar covid has put this bang in the middle of the radar um and you you take it seriously and hopefully uh you know positive things happen you continue to ignore this you continue to think this is kind of you know relevance uh i think it's pretty clear which way the wind is blowing now in terms of other things that are i think extremely relevant and need to be paid attention to the discussion about purpose sparked a lot of questions and one was this triangulation of purpose mission values and so from one member of the audience the question was well if we don't have a clearly articulated mission how do we figure out our purpose and and one question was more along the lines of well how do you even define purpose as it relates to those other elements of a strategy or an organizational vision so i wonder if you could comment on those three aspects and how do you start to think about even defining and articulating a purpose or enabling your leadership to do that if that's not clear to you as a worker an employee in an organization i came across an excellent disney document distinguishing between purpose and mission the purpose is the why the mission is the how the they're the deliverables against the y um carlo grito who we spoke with at abn bev was you know he was not a purpose-driven manager leader and he acquired a recognition that purpose was key for abi and bev you know that that beer is the ultimate social network and he talked about how this was socialized throughout the organization and how it changed the way they used digital media to build brand and digital and customer experience and support their stores their distribution channels so clearly one of the one of the messages and this has been said this from the beginning one of the messages is leaders have to own purpose they have to own purpose they have to articulate it and they need to be aware that the best channels for articulating and leading by example around purpose are digital channels you ain't got no choice it's not going to be a speech it's probably going to be a zoom yeah just a very specific comment or question around if you can would consider slack a social media channel and we have a lot of discussions amongst ourselves about teams and slack and different things to your point michael about those are avenues to lead by example so you know is there any distinction you would place on inter versus intra organizational communication or public versus private or anything that we should think about i will say i'm sorry ben i'm just only here 15 seconds i will say that the most powerful thing i have seen ceos do is choose to comment and promote other people's comments other people's slack channel insights that the ceo is thus shown to be both listening and paying attention and sharing things that he or she thinks are important that's a way of leading by example yes and that's the ratio of comments in a way that i sort of mentioned earlier on no and i think slack's a great example of it isn't it it's a perfect encapsulation of everything we're talking about that they the norm the style of our personal conversations is now in our work conversations this is content collapse writ large and and again the way that younger people digital talent is talking is communicating is working it's very different to what to how you know older generation actually yes and so again that brings absolutely into stark relief all of the things we're talking about so the senior people want to send an email to the junior people they don't want to go and talk to the junior people in in the channels that the junior people are talking that's the gap um so i think what we're going to see and then you know to give them credit microsoft with teams and the enormous success they're having with teams is an example of the of the this real change happening in real time before our very eyes i mean to again boil it down to simple phrases you've got to go with the flow here if you try to if you think that this is kind of still kind of crazy and stupid and not how a big business should work again that's the purpose gap that's the the digital gap in in reality and you're going to fall in the middle of that gap i don't think it's going to be brizzy my slight twist on what he's saying is if if we think things are going to go back to normal after everybody gets their vaccine i i think delusional that's not self-awareness that's self-delusion yeah exactly so our survey was extremely global our audience today is as well and some questions coming in about global differences so i was curious what sticks out to you and i'm thinking to some of the leaders we spoke with outside of the u.s maybe

dbs bank for example in singapore were there different approaches i guess starting from digital transformation and then that sort of translation to or growth into affective transformation did you see any differences uh that were more geographically dependent actually i oops again my apologies been but i want to point out we didn't pick people like hubert jolie from france carlo brito from brazil kevin johnson is all american as you can get but as global a company as global can be by accident the shocking thing to me shocking is an overstatement despite the variety of their backgrounds what we heard was a commonality around transparency vulnerability visibility i think that is a transcend i'll use the u word i thought that was a universal insight ben no i'd agree i i think the the the nature of the modern world the interconnected world is that ideas and attitudes and cultures are you know uh transmitted around the world much more quickly much more materially uh but but the there is a lot of differences at the same time and we we don't uh we don't overlook that uh um and probably don't have time to get into some of the detail uh of that now but but yes there are big differences around the world and again with subtlety and nuance around diversity and inclusion again it behooves global leaders to be sensitive to those regional differences not to imagine that a one a one-size-all kind of top-down philosophy can be imposed on people so again that's the tension that we're all living on uh the cusp of that tension uh in in lots of different aspects and lots of different kind of context if you like uh all around the world at the moment with just one minute left i want to ask for a kind of practical takeaway next step type insight from you both so obviously the report gives some great advice to leaders and organizations more broadly you could think about this at the board level if i'm a middle manager in an organization and these points are resonating with me but i'm not seeing them in practice what are some things i might think about doing be data driven get the network flow the slack flow the email flow the iterations get use of service like otter get transcripts of the meetings that you're a part of try to become more data driven in the way you understand yourself and your people yeah and i would just finally say on top of that that uh again if you're kind of standing on the edge of the pool you've got to jump in you simply got to jump in and um come on in the water's lovely you can't stand the edge of the pool and imagine you're going to win the race in the pool any time if you're on the sidelines you've got to jump in and participate be in the networks as michael's saying learn this new language learn these new approaches because they as again michael said that the genie isn't going back in the bottle and they're not going away this is the new reality that every organization around the world really faces michael ben thank you for sharing your insights and great research thank you to cognizant our sponsor for this this whole project really appreciate the collaboration there and just wish everyone a good rest of your day and thanks for joining us today you

2021-02-17 13:40

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