I’ve written a couple of blogs earlier about the strategic considerations for prioritisation of your technology transformation and how to make it a reality. Today I want to conclude this series of blog with a last blog text focusing on people, leadership and culture and their role in technology transformations.

Rashmi Kasat leads Equipment Performance for Metso’s Mining customer segment, and she is a Boardman Member.

I have seen successes and failures both thankfully in my career and that is honestly humbling. I cannot claim either of these successes or failures to myself alone. And that is the point of this blog. As doers and leaders we don’t succeed or fail alone but there is a lot of accountabilities of course when leading such transformations. Here are my few cents on this key topic which can make or break your transformation initiative.

Choosing the right leader for technology transformations

I have seen quite interesting choices of leaders made throughout my career when companies start their technology transformations. The most successful transformations I have seen are where the chosen leader is a human-centric, compassionate leader even if the transformation is technical or technological.

Transformations require adaption to change, be it new tools, new ways of working, new processes, or even new people, roles & responsibilities. Change is never too comfortable for the vast majority and can be overwhelming for most people. During this phase, it is necessary to ensure business continuity and customer service continuity else it’s easy to fall into a culture dip and deliver poor business results in the transition phase.

From my experience, what you need on such change journeys is a seasoned people leader who brings people together, provides psychological safety, celebrates small wins, provides a platform for open discussions and feedback. Such a leader is compassionate and has empathy for people. They lead with candour and authenticity by recognizing both the positive and negative emotions related to the change, but they also have strong reasoning skills. As the author and inspirational speaker Simon Sinek says: “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.”

Experienced people leaders also dissolve team differences, conflicts, political games in an effective way on these change journeys. Very often this requires close observation of the situation, gathering a lot of data points and finding a balance between personal and organizational ambitions of different stakeholders involved in the transformation journey.

Good and inspirational change leaders create a win win for everyone, this is far from easy but those with experience leading people in uncertain, complex or a crisis situation do this with much ease than many others. Such a leadership role often is a matrix role, in which one has to lead with authority on the content, without solid reporting lines to all stakeholders involved. The political complexity of such roles is immense and good execution requires solid emotional intelligence and tons of commons sense and street smartness.

Technology transformation leader needs to be patient, calm and humble

One key success trait I have seen of such leaders is patience and calm conduct even in the most dire situations. This one trait makes all the difference between winning and losing. Inner calmness and discipline allows to focus on the most essential priorities, provides clarity and consistency of communication and proactive actions. Lack of this patience and maturity results in unstructured, reactive, inconsistent and random actions and communication that confuses people at all levels and delays the results from such transformations. Patience is a key trait of a change leader in the context of an established, large, complex organisation on the path of transformation.

Another important value to look for in a change leader is humility. Change requires internalization and it’s a process that takes time. It can be intimidating for people if the change leader thinks or gives an impression that they know the best. When people are trying to make sense of the change and impact to their work, the role of the change leader is to coach, help and support by asking the right questions in a human-centric way.

People typically mean good, its just that everyone internalises change at a different speed. Experienced transformation leaders know that this is no drama, they win people over with sound reasoning, logic, and respect for other people’s work. It’s good to consider choosing a leader with a high EQ (emotional quotient) for leading your transformation initiative.

As an expert on the subject of leading large-scale transformations in large complex organizations, I could not emphasize more the importance of choosing your transformation leader on the basis of their soft skills. As they say, soft skills are the hard skills. Smart and clever people with the right background learn the content pretty fast but their soft skills determine the speed and quality of success.

Putting the right people in the right place

Not just the leader, but also the key positions in the changed operating model should be filled with passionate, positive people with high integrity. Putting the right people in the right place will determine the true success of any transformation. Technology can only help that much, the real results come from adoption.

Adoption is facilitated with belief, optimism, enthusiasm and by leading by example. Identify people with these traits in addition to their subject matter expertise to facilitate a relatively smooth change adoption process in your organisation. Strategically, choose open-minded people in key positions and do a good mix of long-term employees and newly hired ones, young and the more experienced ones, as well as diversity of backgrounds to ensure that the organisation does not fall back to its old ways of working.

Remember, old habits die hard and it takes a lot of discipline to break the old mold. Reward and promote people demonstrating exceptional collaboration in matrix organization; breaking down siloes and consistently showing results through active collaboration are key success factors in any transformation. Most technology transformations I have worked on, are all about data-enabled internal or customer-facing operating model transformations which requires employees to use these data tools to serve customers or internal businesses better. Collaboration therefore becomes central.

At the end of the day the true success of your technology transformation depends on the people you have on the bus and the “bus driver” you choose.

One last hot tip in that context: when looking for best people on the bus and the leader, look beyond the obvious choices at least 2 levels below where you sit, you will be surprised positively to find up and coming leaders ready to take the next challenge. I have been there before and am amazed of the talent we easily tend to overlook because those are buried deep in an organisation’s hierarchies.

Wish you success with your transformation initiatives and feel free to reach out if you need sparring or just want to exchange notes.

Read Rashmi Kasat’s previous blog texts

• Read the first part of Kasat’ blog series, ‘What Strategic Ingredients to Consider in Your Technology Transformation Recipe?'” here.
• Read the second part of Kasat’s blog series, “How to Make Your Technology Transformation A Reality?” here.

Author

Rashmi Kasat has a long background leading IT and Digital transformations in B2B global Industrial companies. She currently leads Equipment Performance for Metso’s Mining customer segment. Her daily work is about making minerals processing equipment more intelligent & sustainable with use of sensors, data, AI, cloud and other digital technologies. Kasat is a Boardman Member and a Member of the Boardman International Working Group.

Read about Boardman’s English-language membership