The Covid-19 pandemic has given time to leaders to spot where they have gone wrong

Digital leaders act as guides who drive companies towards transformation. When an organisation changes its policies and the way of work, the first heatwave is faced by the leader who is expected to turn every thorn into a rose.

Digital transformation conversations depend on who talks about it. They can either evoke a riveting discussion or end up sounding like an overused jargon. However, CIOs and IT leaders have seen their way of transformation in the past decade. For the last ten years, companies have shifted from table, chair and clerk to communicate concept to digital communication between employees. The best example for that is Alphabet. The company was a mere block of office in the 1990s and superpower in the tech industry now.

The reason behind every company's growth is a transformational leader who is ready to accept challenges and failures. However, the pandemic has made a pause in their normal cycle. What it gave them was some resumption time to think if the decisions they took for years were correct. They were forced to evaluate if the company is going through the right path while adopting digital transformation. No one can assure that everything works right. Of course, one in ten might hit rock bottom. But what if only one in ten of the transformational ideas is working for the company, leaving the remaining nine at a downfall? That means the company is in trouble without its own realisation.

Ultimately, it is not too late to change. Leaders need to spot where things have gone wrong. They should be ready to accept if it is totally wrong from the very beginning. The rethinking could bring unprecedented changes like accumulating a number of lessons, ways to boost ROI, and even an answer to why some efforts still fail.

Here are some transformational decisions that will give leaders a hint where on rethinking and reformation is necessary.

Revisiting the business mindset

Covid-19 has made a major change in the working environment. To be clear, it has tested the credentials of an organisation in adopting digital transformation. Most of the companies struggled at their attempt to change the working system. That is when leaders were put on a situation to rethink if what they did so far regarding automation was right.

Precisely, businesses that had digital capability managed to survive this sudden change. They were having less trouble to automate the functions and switch online. The companies and their employees were quite used to working on cloud platforms and exchanging files through the drive. However, it was not the same for the rest of the companies. They had to run instead of taking baby steps which brought a lot of chaos. So it is advisable to stay ahead in the race when it comes to digitising a company.

Evaluating IT service provider

Remote working has revealed the far forgotten and hidden problems in the companies IT wing. It was in March 2020, that most of the organisations realised that they might be incapable of holding work remotely as their IT system has a lot of loose ends. Henceforth, leaders should always stay up to date in guiding the IT team to new technologies. The supply chain was another mess. Now is not a bad time to accept what works and what doesn't. The weighing in the business case will have changed to include disaster recovery or business continuity planning element, which means business can now get closer to a champagne solution instead of a cheap solution.

Segregating promotion statistics

Assumptions are in the past. Recently, we have data analysis and predictive analysis techniques which could fuse the company on where to concentrate. Promoting channels based on blunder assumptions is something that a leader should never side with. He/she should use the data stored in form f big data and utilise it from time-to-time before taking any major decisions in the product campaign.

The predictive analysis gives a view on the product that is highly attracting customers. It segregates the community of customers based on their product pick. Henceforth, it will be easy for organisations to focus on the set of people and promote products.

Moving from project to product mindset

Leaders are now mostly focused on products neglecting the project outcomes. They want things now with deadlines measured in weeks, not months. The issue is that being a breakthrough and just using time-to-live as the metric decision-making behaviour that feels good but leads to customer and employee outcomes longer terms. Working in service of outcomes, a product mindset, and customer focus are more important than ever to focus effort on the most valuable activities.

Analysing the time and credibility of decision-making

Affirming real-time decision-making is totally a transformational leader's thing. He/she should be sure of the choice while keeping in mind the future outcomes. A leader's decision directly impacts the people working on the office front-line. If the team is executing against the strategic direction set by executives, they must be empowered to make decisions around investments, processes and policies that will enable the success without having to wait for executive committee approval.