Strategic Partners
Strategic Partners … SPEED UP … Digital Transformation
Digital Transformation is moving fast. Don’t we know it. And now Digital Transformation is happening where the rubber meets the road — literally! Goodyear is adding devices to the tires they supply to fleet vehicles used for last mile delivery of a myriad products transported by the burgeoning overnight services. Goodyear wants to seize more market share for those fleet vehicle tire sales. So, first we heard of smart phones. Now we’ll have smart tires of all things. In the face of the most rapid, lightning-fast-paced change of the way we do business in human history, leaders are wanting first to survive, and then to thrive. Being disrupted out of business by some competitor’s innovative technology is the ultimate worst case business scenario.
This Digital Transformation is more like a stampede than a track meet, and requires special knowledge, talent, and skills which many organizations don’t have. If it moved slower, many organizations would define key roles for carrying out the infusion of new thinking, new technology, and new workflows, and acquire the required talent. The pace of things is such that surviving and thriving in many cases will require blending external resources with existing internal talent.
Leadership Transformation Parallel
Let’s divert for a moment and talk about accelerating transformation in a non-technical domain. My own experience has taken me through the process industries as a plant manager for large facilities where leadership development was crucial for business success. It can be accelerated via strategic partnering, as I’ll explain later. Traditional talent progression involved starting in technical roles and then all of a sudden a bright and successful engineer would be put into a supervisory role with no formal leadership training. Leadership acumen includes skills in the categories of managing tasks and managing relationships. Neglecting one without the other won’t work. University education gives young engineers deep technical skills which enable them to excel in handling of tasks in their initial roles and specialty. Then they get promoted into leadership roles while their people skills in many cases are sorely lacking.
In my first role as an operations manager in the process industries, realizing the criticality of this dual skill competence, we required new engineer hires coming fresh out of college to spend their first six months working as a process technician on shift, operating equipment, and then the second six months as an assistant shift foreman. They would never have the opportunity to have that growth opportunity later in their career. After that first year, where those future plant managers learned the value of relationships, they were given a technical role to oversee the technology of a portion of the manufacturing operation. They had the benefit of knowing how the “real world” worked, and the respect of the factory technicians who they had worked alongside. They were ten times more effective than they would have been without that first year of working on shift in the “real world.” Their equipment and process improvement projects were “real world” workable and had buy-in from the workers in the field who would bring it to life or kill it. But the leadership learning doesn’t stop there. Complexities of large organizations and the unceasing demands for continual improvement and innovation stretches the best talent at higher levels in their organizations to dig deeper into their individual intellectual reserves and instincts to lead teams of people to achieve things never done before, to make a lasting difference, to leave a legacy of sustainable improvement. Many companies lack the internal resources for that kind of leadership development. They send people to attend outside training events and/or bring in external experts to assess and teach leadership. Many firms establish strategic partnerships with experts they came to know and trust.
Bringing In Leadership Expertise
Along the path of my business experiences I ran a consulting company that did just that — team up with companies in a multi-year strategic partnership to measure leadership and provide objective actionable data that created a roadmap for improvement of leadership teams. A proprietary and statistically validated instrument was the cornerstone of the value delivery, and it allowed teams to receive benchmarking for ten vital signs for leadership for a given leader’s team. Usually there were one or two of the ten dimensions we measured that ranked low, while the other eight or so were key strengths. Actions would be planned to improve the weak areas, things like goal focus, team cohesiveness, adaptation, and so forth, all of which had precise definitions and were measured with a statistically validated instrument that permitted benchmarking against all others across industry who had been respondents. This example of strategic partnership, with outside talent, allowed participating organizations to improve performance. Scores, as measured by this proprietary instrument which we used, were proven over and over again to be strongly correlated with output measures.
Need for Speed
All this to say that this Digital Transformation race challenges business leaders to adapt quickly. Internal talent may be lacking and the length of time it takes to find, recruit, and onboard the AI/ML and Data Analytics professionals makes that an impractical path, and exposes their organization to a high risk of being disrupted out of business. Seeking out and engaging in strategic partnerships with AI/ML/Data Analytics experts whose capabilities strongly align with a business leader’s strategically critical challenges offers the opportunity for speed to success. As said in Top Gun, “I feel the need for speed.” https://youtu.be/4PzpztFJZP8
