IT execs’ doctorate research helps drive digital success

When it comes to the digital table, I think the C-suite is fully engaged now. They see the threats, and they’re gaining awareness about the technology opportunity related to it. They’re also realizing that their strategies are so dependent upon technology that you can’t separate the two. The top-level leadership team must be part of that conversation.

Roberts: I’ve observed that the best leaders embody what I call the 7Cs of great leaders: They have the Customer at the center, they build great Culture, they Cultivate their people, they lead with Courage, they don’t manage Change but bring people along the journey, and they’re Collaborators and Communicators. Susan, can you speak to this and what stands out for you?

Susan Nakashima: I absolutely agree with the 7 Cs. The job is getting more complex, but I also believe it’s becoming an even more exciting time to be a leader in IT. We talk about the three-legged stool — people, process, and technology — and while I believe all three are critical, my heart’s really focused on the people component.

I think it’s important to get to know each member of our team, personally and professionally, understand what motivates them, and channel that energy for their success as well as the organization’s. I believe leveraging employees’ abilities and preparing them for the next step up the career ladder is really a privilege and something I find intrinsically rewarding.

Roberts: Turning to metrics, Mike, performance management is a key component of your framework. What are successful digital leaders measuring that others are not, and what’s the result?

Seals: Digital transformation is unique compared to other major enterprise-level initiatives like TQM and Lean Management. In those previous waves of management theory, there was always a single kind of purpose around them. Digital transformation is contextual. It’s tied to customer value and competitive advantage. Like a fingerprint, it’s unique to each organization. I spent a lot of time talking to a lot of really smart people on this topic, and nobody can say there is a single measure digital transformation success.

My research settled on a two-part measurement: One, is it making the company stronger versus the competition — that’s your competitive advantage — and secondly, are we creating more customer value? Those are the two outcome variables that were built into my research. Ultimately, though, each organization is going to have a different metric that they measure. What’s most important, from what my research identified, is that the organization is measuring it and articulating it. Then the organization can rally behind it.

Roberts: John, let’s talk about metrics in terms of speed, which is another component of your ODA framework. Why is speed so hard to measure and what can leaders do to get their arms around it?

Hill: Given the rate of innovation and change in technology, speed is so important for organizations to be able to get that competitive advantage faster than their peers. Yet finding a proxy for organizational speed is difficult. In my research, I couldn’t really find it. Still, we intuitively know that the longer a project takes, the more chances it’s going to go off the rails. To study this phenomenon a little better, I used the size of project as a proxy.  

What I found is, the organizations that are better at chunking down their projects into smaller pieces have a better likelihood of beating any environmental factors that might impact their execution. Leaders will then ask me, ‘Well, what can I do besides Agile?’ One, put processes in place that will address the speed at which decisions need to be made on issues that affect digitization efforts. Two, track the time it takes to make decisions. If a team says they have to go through three steering committees in order to get something resolved, that’s probably not the definition of speed. Third, going back to my other point about alignment, there are inevitably going to still be conflicts that come up that aren’t resolved in terms of just a pure alignment. My suggestion is to put in an organization-wide cross-functional steering committee that is set up to resolve those conflicts immediately.

Roberts: Susan, your research focused on psychological safety and its impact on winning the hearts and minds of our teams. What is the definition of psychological safety and how does that contribute to driving speed and agility in our teams?

Nakashima: Amy Edmondson, who developed the concept of team psychological safety, described it as a shared belief by team members that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. She went on to say that when individual contributors are selected to be team leaders based on their technical proficiency, they may not have the interpersonal skills they need to foster these open dialogues that are just so important.

That’s certainly what I’ve seen and continue to see, which is first-level technical leaders struggling with the human side of their leadership role. What I found is that, without establishing a psychological safety net, leaders are creating environments where employees are unwilling or afraid to share their ideas and expertise. Certainly, that’s what came about as part of my research. But with effective transformational leadership training, leaders are creating a safe environment, allowing their staff to truly bring forth their best thinking in our fast-paced and competitive industry.

Robert: How are each of you leveraging your dissertation research in your day jobs?

Hill: At MSC, my peers and I took our list of strategic projects and made an ordinal list so we could give clarity to associates. Within the teams, we’re trying to drive people to understand that portfolio-based approach to sprints — you can’t compare a new feature against other things. That then helps drive the slack conversation. It’s much easier for me to get people to think about that portfolio and the assigning different pieces to sprints versus saying, reserve time for slack.

The last thing is trying to create those end-to-end pods for the product teams. I’ve got a number of product teams directly in my organization, so we’re incubating it there first. Those teams will have everything they need to deliver — from business analyst, engineers, data analysts, data engineers, QA — so ultimately, there’s not a multi-step approach where we’re ready to go but the data team or the security team is not ready to go. These pods will have everything they need to be able to execute at a speed we expect.

Nakashima: I was privileged to be asked to present my research to the members of Innovate at UCLA at the fall CXO Exchange in December. Teaching a digital innovation class at Pepperdine University has also been an honor, as well as mentoring some of my students. I’m also pursuing opportunities to share my research as part of technical leadership training programs, so it’s a very exciting time.

Seals: To me, the research is interesting, but the real value for the audience is in the discussion about intellectual curiosity and intentional learning. The success of the CIO role is as much about understanding organizational theory as it is about technology. You have said it many times — the CIO role is unique in that it has a complete view of the enterprise. Understanding how organizations work is necessary; understanding why they work in the way they do is a differentiator for a CIO. That is the common theme across all our research — trying to understand the ‘why.’

Tune in to the Tech Whisperers podcast for more insights from these technology executives and takeaways from their doctoral research.