Pace and power go hand in hand with digital leaders. Digital leaders need to be agile, typically they run four times faster and pull critical strategic levers two times harder than other companies do.
Whilst many of us spent most of last year willing on the onset of 2021, with the hope that the world may look a little more ‘normal’, it’s clear that even with the rollout of effective vaccines that COVID-19 is going to continue to cause disruption for months and years to come.
For the enterprise, and digital leaders, there is much to reflect on. Uncertainty is set to continue for the foreseeable future and if 2020 was about remaining agile enough to ride the wave(s), 2021 is going to be about setting a clear agenda for success for the years to come.
In other words, it is likely hitting home now for companies that things won’t return to ‘normal’ anytime soon. Nor would that be a good thing, in many cases. With crisis comes opportunity and I think many have realised that COVID-19 has provided a chance to do things differently – better, even.
Things have changed and will continue to change
The pandemic has forced us all out of our comfort zone, especially digital leaders. Suddenly the digitization wave came crashing through and those who were able to ride the wave have a powerful, intuitive feel for the rhythm of their businesses.
They know how hard and fast to pull strategic levers, move their organization, and drive execution to achieve their objectives. Or at least they did.
Digitization has intensified the rhythm of competition in many industries, leaving executives adrift, with information-gathering systems that are too slow or disconnected, direction-setting approaches that are too timid, and talent-management norms that are misaligned and incremental.
Move Four Times Faster
One does not just quicken the pace of their organization by declaring it. You have to build it by accelerating the frequency of manageable practices that are integral to achieving key goals.
Here are some “light-touch” actions that are low risk and low investment, but they can provide high-yield returns.
Learn, engage, and share
Learning: From quarterly to monthly. Top-performing companies are voracious opportunists, and it starts at the top. Senior leaders take time to tune up their understanding of the digital tools and practices their businesses need to stay ahead.
Engaging with data: From monthly to weekly. Nearly half (44 percent) of digital leaders collect and analyze customer data weekly (or more frequently) compared to others who only do this monthly. The drive for urgency is omnipresent.
A company with a database of 2,000 customers, for example, decided to generate online sales by offering a discount code. Instead of simply sending a single email to its customers, it tested two different promotional offers, one demanding faster action from customers than the other. The more time-sensitive offer generated a 60 percent higher response rate, which became the standard for future promotional emails.
Sharing results: From quarterly to monthly—or even weekly. Top performers are committed to sharing with the broader organization what has been gleaned from any test-and-learn activities. They do this about three to four times faster than their peers do—at least monthly, rather than the quarterly frequency seen in other companies—with the very highest performers sharing knowledge weekly.
Adapt and deploy
The top-performing companies are just as opportunistic when it comes to redistributing talent.
Talent reallocation: From yearly to quarterly. On average, leading companies reallocate digital talent more than five times faster than their peers do, doing so on a quarterly or faster basis. Most companies wait a year or more to reallocate talent. Their work enables rapid, large-scale reprioritization of digital initiatives and has the added merit of lowering the risk on bold moves.
Agility in action: From every two months to every two weeks. An agile workplace will allow the company to reinvent the way it serves customers. People increasingly use a variety of channels for financial services: branches, smartphone apps, laptops. They want every one of those experiences to be seamless.
ALSO READ, NORMALISING DATA-DRIVEN MARKETING AS A DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION DRIVER IN THE POST-COVID WORLD
Aspiring to the speed and power of digital leaders may seem daunting. But doing this is an achievable goal; it just requires building out a set of clear, collaborative, and consistent practices for digital learning, engaging with data, sharing results, deploying talent, and reallocating resources.
The ‘evolution’ have taught us that adaptable species outlive those that are merely more powerful. By accelerating your digital pace, your company can transform itself from a powerful but slow target into a sleek and swift predator—the fastest and most agile fish that feasts on the slower ones that have failed to change.
Source: https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/the-drumbeat-of-digital-how-winning-teams-play?cid=app
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