If You Want Digital Transformation You Need To Change Your Culture First

Digital transformation. You knew it was coming but it came at you quicker than you could ever have imagined. As you’ve probably already discovered simply having the technology in place isn’t enough to achieve digital transformation… you also need to have a culture that is capable of adopting technology.

In this article, we show you how to cultivate a culture which enables you to successfully operate in a digital-first world.

Unless you’re fully entrenched in the digital world, you’re probably finding it hard to pinpoint exactly what is digital transformation. What does it mean for your business? To what extent have you already achieved it, and how far have you got to go?

Woohoo, you’ve smashed it – you’ve already got an internet explorer, you use excel spreadsheets for everything, you’ve even got a project management tool, and since the pandemic, boy are you familiar with zoom!

Woah, slow down. It’s not quite that easy…

Digital transformation is about far more than adding a few pieces of software to your toolkit; it requires you to re-examine everything you do and find the right digital solutions that will benefit your team, your clients or customers and help you to drive the growth of your business in a highly complex and turbulent and ever-changing environment. If your technology doesn’t help you to keep on the right side of change, you have yet to reach digital enlightenment.

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On a scale of 1-10, to what extent do you think you have achieved digital transformation, where 1 = you’re still in analogue mode, and where 10 = you’re utilising technology to its full potential? 

How far you think you are along this spectrum right now?

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Now think about where you should be given all you have already invested. 

You may be somewhere in the middle and still have more to do to achieve true digital transformation. Wherever you are on the line, ask yourself these questions:

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If there’s a gap between where you are and where you think you should be, it’s time to start paying serious attention to what’s holding you back because you can’t afford to wait – we’re in a digital world now and if you can’t keep up, you’ll reap the consequences of falling behind.

The rate at which life around us is changing is quite incredible.

We need technology to keep up but that’s not enough – we need to change too.

To hammer the point home, in 2011 Professor Reg Revans said that, “in order for organisations to survive in the face of change, the rate of learning must be equal to or more than the rate and pace of change.” 

If you want to achieve digital transformation you need to be operating in an environment which enables people to learn at pace and this requires cultural change, new leadership and management practices and new ways of learning that accelerate human change. 

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Shortcomings in your company culture will be exposed and leave you vulnerable in a digital world, so it’s imperative that you cultivate the type of culture in which digital transformation can take place.

  • Agility, speed and adaptability
  • Creativity and innovation
  • Ideas and invention
  • Curiosity and enquiry
  • Communication and collaboration
  • Listening and learning
  • Ownership and accountability
  • Enablement and empowerment
  • Customer orientation
  • Reflection and feedback

These features will fail to take hold if your company culture is entrenched in old and unhelpful management practices. Instead, your leaders and managers need to possess the skills and behaviours to enable these strengths to rise to the surface.

A proven way to achieve this is through Operational CoachingTM. Operational CoachingTM is a style of leadership that uses enquiry to stimulate change and enables the workforce in a way that delivers positive outcomes for individuals and organisations.

Unlike 1-to-1 coaching, Operational CoachingTM is fully integrated into a manager’s everyday operational interactions and is the key to manifesting behaviour change on a wide scale, which is essential for digital transformation to take place.

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When your managers adopt an Operational CoachingTM approach they can change the course of events in a moment, and on the fly, simply by changing the way they interact with their colleagues and team members.

What’s more, you can use your technology to help develop your leaders and managers to become stand-out Operational Coaches with the 100% virtual, fully blended and award-winning STAR® Manager programme that has been acclaimed for its robust instructional design and its strong technology platform that work together to bring a high-quality learning solution to the digital world.

Designed with change in mind, the STAR® Manager programme can be accessed anytime, anywhere and on any device so it can be integrated seamlessly into your digital learning strategy.

You’ll be astonished at how quickly situations change when your managers dump outmoded leadership habits and replace them with Operational CoachingTM behaviours that release the potential in your teams and ready them for change – digital or otherwise.

Yes, cultural change takes time but we’ve seen incredible uplifts in a wide range of organisational measures after just a few short months of leaders and managers using an Operational CoachingTM approach and the best part is when Operational CoachingTM is acquired by your organisation the outcomes you can achieve are unbounded and won’t be overcome by change.

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We partner with organisations all over the world, combining our unique experiences to create mutually beneficial and collaborative relationships. If you’d like to explore teaming up with us on this journey please do say hello and we’ll schedule an informal call.