Running High-Performance Digital Organization with High Accountability

A hyperconnected organization can approach the flow zone when the positions in its hierarchy have clear and accountable tasks.

The digital transformation is now spreading rapidly to enable organizations of all shapes and sizes to reinvent themselves. It blurs the geographical, functional, organizational, and even industrial borders nowadays. Traditional hierarchical lines will phase out and a collective of business partners will emerge working collaboratively to set digital strategy and achieve organizational goals collaboratively. Digital organizations inspire learning and encourage autonomy. It is important to run a high-performance business with shared accountability or collective accountability that involves shared ownership, empathetic communication, and continuous improvement.

Digital leaders with accountability will ask big “WHY” to clarify vision and strategic goals: Due to the complexity of today’s business, faster-paced changes, and continuous disruptions and distractions, it is important to articulate the strategic rationale behind the business venture, make leaders accountable of implementing the strategy. Digital leaders with the ownership mentality are more comfortable to ask tough questions, to ensure that every process, expenditure of time, money, energy, and every assignment of resources should directly relate back to the “WHY,” with a clear strategy-execution mapping. The big “WHY” should not only precede “HOW,” but needs to be reaffirmed at each step in the “HOW.” When digital leaders are equipped with the ownership mentality, they have better self-awareness, not afraid to know the “actual state” of the business, and get a holistic understanding of the business. From the business management perspective, true accountability focuses on learning to do things differently. Accountability is a part of the personal integrity, it goes hand in hand with the delegation of authority or power, to advocate the digital style of autonomy and self-management. If you ensure the individuals have the autonomy within their tasks for co-solving business problems, you will be able to address performance on an equal partnership base.

Digital leaders need to own the problems: Fundamentally, running a business is an iterative problem-solving continuum. Either individually or collectively, the difference between the leader and the laggard is about their problem-solving capability. Most problems are complex and systematic today, it requires systemic solutions where people take accountability for their part in perceiving and solving problems. Often, the best thing a team player can do is to provide a clear description of the problem, the best solution is based on the seamless alignment of leadership sponsorship, the IT-enabled process, and frictionless cross-functional communication an collaboration. In reality, though, there are too many excuses on why work and stress loads are at their current levels, stressing out employees is not helpful to the company or its stakeholders in the long-run. It is important to have leaders own the problem, and thus, be accountable for figuring out the premium solution. They need to fully understand the issue and decide how to remedy it. There is the multitude of organizational gaps existing in today’s organization. It is imperative to close communication and accountability gaps through open door listening, transparency and mutual sharing in the success. Accountability needs a safe environment. That starts with leaders at the top. Behaving accountable is the result of a culture with values that need to be organized and nurtured.

Digital leaders with ownership mentality are systematic and good at calculating the risk: The true measure of accountability is about resilience, consistency, and autonomy. It is not determined by whether someone or a team makes a mistake or not, but on how quickly they can recover so that customers, teammates, or others, and the organization as the whole aren’t negatively affected by the breakdown. Digital leaders with accountability have the right dose of risk appetite and the good attitude to manage risks in a structural way - make a shift from risk avoidance to risk mitigation to risk intelligence. Regardless of what methods or indicators are used, the key is to express risks in business terms that can really make a business impact. To improve accountability, it’s the management ability to communicate the extent to which it wants to take on risk relative to a specific objective. Beside calculating and managing risks, accountability can be harnessed by motivating employees to achieve high than expected results and build the culture of learning, trust, and risk-taking. With strong digital leadership, accountability can be well embedded in the organizational culture, encourage responsible communication, decision-making, behaviors, and actions.

A hyperconnected organization can approach the flow zone when the positions in its hierarchy have clear and accountable tasks. When digital leaders are equipped with the ownership mentality, they can run business boldly and provide the digital leadership style to inject enthusiasm, which is infectious and spurs the concept forward. The better the digital leader assigns accountability and empowers the individuals and teams, the better chance the organization can achieve their strategic goals and reach high-performance business results.

Posted in: Digital Master,Digitalization,IT Performance Management