Upheaval: An Executive’s Guide to Organizational Digital Leadership

By Patti Blackstaffe

In today's volatile business landscape, traditional leadership paradigms often fall short, leaving organizations vulnerable to digital upheaval. Enter Upheaval: An executive's guide to organizational digital leadership, a book tailored for executives and senior managers navigating the complexities of modern business. It is a groundbreaking approach that redefines digital leadership as a systemic imperative. 'Upheaval' equips leaders with practical strategies for defining, hiring and nurturing talent fit for the digital age. With pauses for reflection, tips and thoughtfulness, the examples serve as a compass for steering organizations through the turbulent waters of digital leadership in business today. Here is what others say:

"Upheaval demands a bold reevaluation of leadership development in our digitally evolving world. With keen insight, Blackstaffe identifies the failings in traditional approaches to leadership training and offers a robust blueprint for cultivating equipped digital leaders. Her book is a crucial resource for boards and executives who recognize the urgency of nurturing leadership that not only survives but thrives in today's digital landscape. Upheaval is a must-read for anyone committed to building resilient, future-ready organizations armed with collaborative, adaptable, and innovative teams." - Dr Marshall Goldsmith is the Thinkers50 #1 Executive Coach and New York Times best-selling author of The Earned Life, Triggers and What Got You Here Won't Get You There

"A compelling guide to reimagining leadership for the digital age." - Rebel Brown, CEO, Cognoscenti

"This is amazing, Patti Blackstaffe! This work is thoughtful, practical, and in-depth; a testament to your own qualities!" - Clemens Rettich, Partner, Beaton Rettich Waters

"Sculpting your organization for change requires executives to be curators of digital leadership. Read this." - Michael Gale, Wall Street best-selling author of The Digital Helix

"Upheaval brilliantly captures the essence of modern digital leadership, offering insightful strategies that resonate deeply with my experience in the technology and eCommerce sectors. Patti's guide is not just a roadmap for navigating the digital transformation but a beacon for fostering innovation, collaboration and resilience in the rapidly evolving business landscape. A must-read for any executive striving to lead effectively in today's interconnected digital world." - Shaun Guthrie, SVP of Peavey Technology & ECommerce

• Language: English
• Publisher: TSO
• Release date: Mar 4, 2024
• ISBN: 9780117094642

Book preview

PART I

A new leadership path

Business success through digital leadership

1

LEADERSHIP AND THE ESSENTIAL SWAY

In this chapter, I ask you to consider a modernized approach to leadership by understanding the essentials required in each area – business, you, team and system (shown in Figure 2) – and how they contribute to today’s interconnected digital environment. I present them in that order because when it comes to leadership, we need the business to set the stage for behavioural change before the individual (you) can make a cognitive shift in mindset about leadership. Only then can they build self-awareness in order to drive team cohesion. If we were implementing digital technology, the order in which we start would change to accommodate that kind of initiative.

As mentioned earlier, I will focus on the business and the conditions necessary to support the leadership essentials that I describe in Chapter 6 (where Figure 11 shows the Essential Sway leadership program broken down into essential modules). The modules (or essentials) provide a progressive, comprehensive approach to transforming leadership in the digital age.

This publication sets the stage for a leadership refresh, aligning with the many converging forces that are changing our business landscape. Individual leaders do not change until their companies put into place the conditions to support those changes. Ultimately, the goal is to build unified, cohesive and collaborative teams that will ensure high performance and innovation. But as part of those conditions, a company’s executives must invest in a systemic digital leadership model. Therefore the first stage in transforming an organization is to gain executive reinforcement for the adoption of this model.

Figure 4 lays out the recommended path to take to develop your leadership program by providing the basic skills at each level. By applying these skills across the system, the outputs from all four levels result in digital leadership transformation.

Figure 4 The Essential Sway leadership program

The four levels of the Essential Sway leadership program are:

•Upheaval Defining digital leadership and creating the conditions for it to thrive

•Evolving Helping leaders make a cognitive shift to digital leadership

•Unity Assisting leaders in developing adaptable and cohesive teams

•Engaging Building global affinity throughout an interconnected ecosystem

1.1 Upheaval: Supporting leadership in the digital age

Very few publications on leadership address core foundations for putting the conditions in place for a systemic leadership approach, yet many of today’s leadership problems persist because they are not addressed at the system level. Even fewer target executives specifically, and most speak of leadership changes at an individual rather than organizational level. Upheaval addresses the area trainers struggle with but have little control over – what needs to be in place for actionable, realistic results.

The executive and senior leaders are the guiding light for leadership in your company. I encourage you to take the Upheaval roadmap identified in Figure 5 seriously. Developing exceptional systemic leadership programs is a powerful business lever during this accelerated, interconnected time.

My inspiration for this publication came from working with more organizations than I’d like to admit, where it was painful to watch some bosses destroy their staff as they tried to lead without understanding adaptability, flexibility or innovation. Far too many consulting gigs introduced me to middle managers micro-managing or verbally beating up their teams. I witnessed knowledgeable specialists do their best to take on a significant transformation effort, only to have their input ignored, with decisions being made that were outside of the organization’s or the effort’s best interest. I sat with senior executives charmed by the control freak who knew how to manage upward but couldn’t build team cohesion if their life depended on it. Mostly, I witnessed isolated and spot-training efforts at the front-line team level, trying to fix leadership issues that were, quite frankly, systemic. Training failed because the company did not have the conditions to support what the training intended to solve.

Marshall Goldsmith said, ‘What got you here won’t get you there.’ ² These words define today’s convergence of change slamming into the organizational environment and causing upheaval.

There is immense value in investing in digital leadership as part of your long-term strategic plan.

Leadership is not about titles, positions or flowcharts. It is about one life influencing another.

JOHN MAXWELL

³

Every leader in your organization influences the people and business results; the best results happen when they have similar essential leadership skills and follow the organization’s leadership principles. Leadership foundational training cultivates essential skills for adaptable leaders to foster organizational cohesion, unity and affinity. It’s not about creating identical leaders, but equipping them with what they need in order to thrive.

Companies need leaders who can connect with their people. You can scarcely expect connection from technologies if companies are unwilling to foster it in their leaders.

Figure 5 outlines what you can expect in this publication’s journey of building capable digital leaders from a board and executive standpoint. I will outline these seven executive steps for cultivating leaders who understand the nuances of today’s digital environment, workers and technologies within our modern businesses. You will discover how to apply leadership principles, and why an investment is crucial for readying your company for the future.

Figure 5 The upheaval roadmap

1.2 Why the Essential Sway?

If you are curious about why GlobalSway calls the leadership core the ‘Essential Sway,’ it goes back to when we named the company. We thought about our focus on people before technology, and about the fact that the human challenges companies face are globally relatable. ‘Global’ stuck.

Why ‘Sway’?

Our interpretation of ‘Sway’ is ‘flexibility’ and ‘adaptability.’ Picture a surfer skilfully riding the waves, adjusting their stance and balance in sync with the ever-changing ocean. ‘Sway’ captures the ability to ride the ups and downs of business, modifying approaches to remain relevant and competitive.

Just as the surfer needs foundational skills and techniques to conquer the waves, leaders and teams need a set of essentials to navigate today’s digital environment and the ever-changing, sometimes chaotic complexity involved. At my company, we often call terrific leaders ‘sway leaders’!

Sway leaders cultivate a sense of balance and agility, adapting to shifting market trends, customer needs, employee sentiment and technological advancements, while remaining grounded in the organization’s core company values and purpose. The Essential Sway training essentials target the actions of the business, the individual, the team and the system.

Why bring up the essentials for all four areas now? Because executives need to see the bigger picture of leadership development as it applies to the entire system. Senior leaders must understand the systemic work involved and the investment and support needed for a transformation to succeed.

Exploring and developing action in a complex context is more manageable when seeing it as an interconnected, interdependent system rather than focusing on the separate parts. This approach is called systems thinking: tackling the leadership problem from a holistic, big-picture vantage point. A systems view is needed to help executives support and invest in their leaders.

What is systems thinking?

A system is a collection of interconnected and interdependent parts that work together to achieve a specific purpose or function. An organization is a system made up of smaller systems, such as teams. The organization also impacts broader systems beyond the company, such as customer groups, industries, communities or the environment, where any type of human, automation or dependency connection exists.

Systems are emergent, meaning the outputs of a system influence inputs or feedback. The things you do elicit a customer or social response. Those inputs and outputs lead to self-regulation and adaptation. In short, an organization becomes more adaptable when you look at the effects caused by the whole rather than just the parts. This systems approach recognizes the relationships between all the elements, not as the sum of their parts but as the effect of the parts working together.

Recognizing the interconnectedness of various components in an organization avoids segmenting or isolating issues or challenges. Systems thinking acknowledges that any change in one area impacts the entire system and changes the overall effect that all the parts working together produces. Taking a systems approach allows leaders to understand the bigger picture, empowering them to identify underlying patterns and anticipate potential consequences (good and bad) of their decisions.

Executives who take a systems view of leadership better navigate the complexities of today’s business environment. They achieve this by implementing mechanisms for gathering feedback and fostering growth because they consider the broader implications of their actions on the entire organization.

Systemic leadership

I introduce the idea of systemic leadership development as a concept worth adopting in our new digital environments. This is a comprehensive approach that cultivates the skills, behaviours and mindset necessary for effective leadership in an interconnected and rapidly evolving organizational environment. It enhances collaboration, adaptability, strategic thinking and team cohesion.

Systemic leadership development emphasizes aligning individual leadership capabilities with the organization’s values, goals and systemic dynamics, following guiding leadership principles. This approach brings a company’s leaders together to navigate complexity, drive innovation and foster a culture of continuous learning, ultimately contributing to the holistic growth and sustainability of the organization.

1.3 The changing business environment

When I entered the tech industry, IT was merely a business support function. Companies sold the software with the hardware, teams managed onsite servers, and people accessed applications through desktop clients connected to those internal servers. Compared with today, it sounds relatively simple.

Companies paid attention to their core competencies, such as products or services, and IT cared for desktops, applications, networks and servers somewhere in the building. The high-tech that people referred to was a mystery enjoyed and deployed by large multinationals, inaccessible beyond one’s desktop apps.

My first full-time job in tech was with an IT outsourcing firm where we techs travelled to the client site to do our work because we did not have remote access to the client servers. The second role was in an international technology and engineering firm where the IT department and the research and development (R&D) team battled over their differing best practices. The IT group was not part of operations, so it did not hold weight with the R&D programmers. IT remained separate because the client software did not interconnect with the business software and its use differed.

Today, all of that has changed. The IT department has evolved, and does much more than adding and maintaining servers and supporting desktop applications. Awkwardly, though, the distasteful, Hollywood-style generalization of geeked-out, socially awkward IT teams persists in executive offices worldwide. Please erase visions you may have of a small group of people with Coke cans stacked atop desks, sitting in an unappealing corner of the workplace