July DLT Monthly Meeting Summary - "Upskilling and Driving Digital Transformation"
For the July monthly meeting of the Digital Leadership Trust, we had a wide-ranging conversation about driving transformation and developing teams and cultures to align to business objectives. Special thanks to three members (Kumud Kalia, Josh McLean, and Reena Tiwari) who helped to start several topics, and some of the key conversation points were as follows:
Enterprise and IT strategy alignment
IT strategy supporting business strategies - we had points made around better aligning IT activities with the outcomes of the business, and encouraging leaders to become equal stakeholders with the results of the business.
Understanding the business - becomes a requisite for driving the most successful projects. Significant work has been done by the members to reduce the distinctions between “IT” and “The Business” such that everyone is all in it together, and that “IT” is part and parcel of multi-disciplinary groups pursuing the same goals.
High-Performance Cultures
Clear Metrics and Goals - become critical for moving the organization to a new spot, and that leaders “cast long shadows” so their behavior and actions are just as important to manage and track as any. But some caveats:
Discussion about NPS scores can create two types of leaders: 1) popularity - those who let their teams do whatever makes them feel good, and 2) coaches - whose teams stretch beyond what is expected.
Be sure to balance efficiency (output) with real value being generated.
Regular Tracking and Reinforcement - was leveraged to drive behavior.
Frequent reviews - More frequent people/team reviews have been used to drive the right cadence and immediate changes expected with leaders and teams.
Some wondered about the administrative overhead over time; as transformation is underway, it’s possible to have less frequent reviews.
Graphic shared by Josh McLean:
Digital Transformation
Moving to a product vs project methodology - product orientation requires maintenance of the right team size, stable funding, and developing a more proactive/customer-focused mindset.
Org structure and roles - was mentioned as a critical element to get right. So defining who is the SCRUM master vs. product owner, etc.
Additional Resources
Also, given the comment about how important storytelling can be, we wanted to share a resource (Susan Lindner), that has engaged with the Catalyst Leadership Trust. We are also linking some of the summary notes from a session we had with the CLT on the topic of storytelling. Let us know if we can help make connections or support the interest in developing storytelling capabilities further.
In addition, Reena shared a book recommendation, “Transformed: Moving to a Product Operating Model” by Marty Cagan.
