Bruno Guicardi is President of CI&T, the digital solutions partner driving lean digital transformation for the world’s biggest brands.
Businesses are transforming today faster than they ever have. They're shifting the tools they use, where their teams work, how they partner and even the products and services they dare to develop. Through all of these changes, it's becoming clear that traditional ways of leading just don't cut it anymore. To keep your company from faltering, you need to acknowledge this reality and adapt your style.
Effective Leadership Through Employee Empowerment
The need for a new leadership style has emerged in today's business climate. In particular, digital businesses have a front seat to a more uncertain and unpredictable business environment than has been the case in the past. Lessons learned in the digital space have clear applications throughout all businesses, as each industry becomes more susceptive to disruption due to an increasingly uncertain and unpredictable environment.
In a traditional business, you, as an employee, may be somewhat removed from your outcomes or product/service influence because you're organized functionally in silos. Everybody has their core competencies. You do your individual part — such as tightening a screw — and then pass it along to the next person, so they can do their part. You may never actually see the completed end product or service you're building, and you're segregated from the customers' thoughts and reactions. Being alienated from the people you're working for keeps you focused on yourself and internal politics.
In a digital business, the pace is faster. People are usually organized in smaller, more customer-facing teams instead of big silos. As a result, they tend to see themselves as in more or less direct contact with their customers. Although they don't completely disregard structure or the authority of higher-ups, they're willing to assert their own authority and jump in to have a positive influence. They don't wait around for someone else to tell them what they should do because they're empowered as primarily responsible to the customers rather than to the boss.
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Pandora is a fantastic example of this. Several years ago, I moderated a panel that featured their chief growth officer. She told our audience that she didn't report to her CEO — she reported to Pandora's 80 million listeners. From her perspective, the CEO's job was to make sure she understood that she was serving and reporting to the listeners. She didn't believe she had to commit to what other people in the organization thought was right or even to what they thought of her.
Another key distinguishing feature of a digital organization is that its teams are more multidisciplinary, even though employees may have individual areas of expertise. They don't pretend to know everything, attempt to be flawless or try to protect their reputations to advance their own careers. Instead, they accept that they don't have all the answers and that they must depend on others to achieve the desired outcome for the customer. This attitude creates an environment in which people feel comfortable being vulnerable, which makes it easier to reach out, share ideas and thoughts and collaborate to achieve something bigger and better.
How To Embrace The New Style Of Leadership
The new style of leadership means you must lead with consideration for the human side of things. Using digital businesses as a guide, every type of business can benefit from the lessons they've learned as frontrunners in this new frontier. For example, I was talking to a friend of mine at Google recently who told me of several employees being headhunted by another large company that offered to effectively double their salaries if they'd leave their current positions. Unsurprisingly, none of them accepted the offer because they're satisfied with their positions due to how empowered they are by their current leadership. Nobody wants to feel like an unseen cog in a complex machine, and employees are increasingly placing more value on trust, autonomy and job satisfaction than they are on their paychecks alone.
The first part of committing to this new leadership style is to go ahead and admit when you don't know something and to encourage other people to do the same. Demonstrate that it's okay not to be perfect or have all the answers. Be clear that you don't expect your people to perfect what they're working on before bringing it to you or sharing it with everyone else.
This connects to the second strategy, which is to build multidisciplinary teams. A critical challenge here is that many people external to your organization will tell you to assign your best people to those teams all the time. They may be scared that if you don't put experts or senior people in front of them, they won't get the results they want. Remind those people that a multidisciplinary approach leads to faster learning. At such speed, even junior people can quickly reach or even exceed the level of expertise partners need.
Last, whether you're working with one employee or your entire multidisciplinary team, be tolerant of small mistakes. Allowing people to fail early takes a lot of pressure off because they know there's room to correct and try again. Knowing they have this space in which they can explore and fix, they'll take more chances for you. As a bonus, this approach usually ends up being cheaper for your organization because instead of waiting until you've invested millions to scrap something, you can cut projects off early as people test things out.
The End Of Bureaucracy Means Success Can Start
As Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini point out in their book, Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them, people are adaptable, creative and passionate. Organizations, however, are generally not. By rejecting the bureaucracy that characterizes most traditional companies and changing how you organize and think, you'll position your team to thrive and keep your business competitive. Let people be imperfect, lean on each other across disciplines to learn and fail early to get them to the top.
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