Assessing the Impact of Digitalisation on Leadership
Developing a common understanding of what digital leadership means and looks to inform development programmes
This well-known global bank engaged us to investigate the impact of digitalisation on leadership at various levels – and what this meant for clients, managers and other stakeholders – against the backdrop of momentous changes both within the Group and the sector.
We were tasked with identifying the digital leadership skills, capabilities and new ways of working needed to support the multiple digital transformation initiatives taking place across their organisation, many of which were already gaining traction externally, but had failed to impact the firm’s conservative internal culture.
Working with a very senior digital group, we helped define ‘digital leadership’ in their specific context, and used our online Digital Maturity Diagnostic tool to establish a baseline. This enabled us to achieve remarkably accurate results within 4 weeks.
We enriched our data with a series of 1:1 structured interviews with senior ‘digital’ people across the bank, enabling us to identify capability gaps. This informed recommendations to enable more adaptive, digital and agile ways of working and support digital executive development. Our client used the final report as a key input to evolve their digital leadership model.
Activities
- HR-led exploration of what it means to be a digital leader
- Analysis of the market dynamics and internal forces driving change
- Diagnostic to measure current state of agility across the organisation
- Granular recommendations & change backlog for continuous improvement
Results
- Definition of leadership in the digital age
- Measurement tool for showing progress against future of digital leadership attributes
- Recommendations to create an emerging digital leaders formal programme
Key Learnings
- Variable maturity across the leadership group demanded a flexible learning programme
- Delivering an initial overview after only four weeks, then adding more data allowed the leadership to begin to discuss capability gaps sooner than previously thought possible
- Combining the capability gaps with an agile change action backlog allowed us to present a more manageable approach to transformation