Picture this: The senior leadership team members enter the room, chatting as they take their seats. The meeting starts on time, everyone shares and contributes actively to the agenda. Elsewhere, another leadership team enters the meeting room, silent and tense. As the meeting starts, individuals start pointing fingers at one another or remain silent throughout; there is no ownership of issues. The differences between the two groups are stark. The first group of leaders displays behaviours consistent with values of collaboration, accountability and trust. The second group exhibits silo-mentality, blame and caution.
Which group of Leadership Team would you trust to drive your Digital Agenda? Why?
Tanguy Catlin, a senior partner at McKinsey, likened corporate culture to an amplifier that enables other organisational pillars like digital strategy, corporate structure and digital capability building. With an enabling culture, organisations that have in place the other pillars typically outperform other companies 4 times in growth and 2 times in returns to shareholders.
On the other hand, if you have a dysfunctional culture, it does not matter if you have the same strategy, corporate structure and capabilities, the organisation just cannot propel forward. In other words……
Copying leading/best practices (i.e. strategy, structure and/or capabilities) from successful digital natives might not work for your company.
Going digital does not simply mean focusing on embracing digital technologies only. The success of any type of digitalisation or digital transformation hinges on the type of culture currently existing in an organisation. Building an enabling digital culture starts with the leaders. The way the leaders work together has a direct impact on employees’ beliefs on what or what not to do and eventually shape their behaviours.
What is your Leadership Team’s current “Way of Working”? Is it promoting or limiting the change efforts? How do your staff perceive this?
There is a way to measure and improve the culture of an organisation. aAdvantage Consulting Group partners Barrett Values Centre and leverages its suite of Culture Transformation Tools to help leaders measure and lead the cultures of their organisations. From our experience…
Most organisations need it, but avoid it, and struggle to achieve sustainable results.
Are you ready to embark on your digital transformation?
Vincent Ho, Director, aAdvantage Consulting
Vincent Ho is the Co-owner & Director of aAdvantage Consulting Group, a boutique firm "Partnering You in Organisational Growth through Culture Transformation".
He has 25 years of business advisory and coaching experience and focuses on organisation transformation, customer experience, leadership team and culture development, senior leadership team coaching and change management.
His motivations are driven by his core values of Respect, Humility and Collaboration.