How to Run a Digital Organization with Autonomy

High level of autonomy is the symbol of digital maturity.

The business world is moving from a static, siloed, and mechanic industrial mood to the dynamic, fluid, and innovative digital mentality. Because the speed of change is accelerating, so the attempts to solve the existing challenges through the lens of the old paradigm continue failing. The new paradigm that is emerging is a digital organization that is more responsive, holistic, vibrant, self-driving, and above all enhances and supports the living organization and the dignity of the creative human spirit. More specifically, what is the digital way of running an energetic and autonomous digital IT organization?

Self-aware leadership: Leadership is the state of the mind, and leadership is all about change. Digital leaders are change agents who present authenticity, creativity, and wisdom at the core of leadership principles. It is important that leaders first know themselves before leading others. If you know yourself, you are also better suited to tackle different challenges that will come your way as a leader; to make you think about what truly drives you as leaders and why. To run a self-autonomous business, self-leadership is the first step, that means leaders need to lead themselves first, define leadership strength, exemplify leadership quality, amplify leadership influence, and practice leadership disciplines. Knowing who you are or being self-awareness, allows you to become better leaders. Knowing who you are and how you react and respond in different situations can help you understand and improve cognitive, relational and assertive actions you take on a day to day basis. Digital leaders and professionals with self-awareness mind help you build on your strengths and improve on your weaknesses. It allows you to leverage that knowledge to increase the influential outreach for the betterment of others. It provides clarity, versatility, gives you directional opportunities for personal growth and helps you avoid blind spots and lead digital transformation seamlessly.

A self-adaptive digital business ecosystem: With rapid changes and continuous disruptions, a self-adaptive capability or functionality is generally a requirement within digital business systems. The business agility based on self-adaptation is the capability to adapt to the change and make "conscious" business choices seamlessly. Self-adaptation is a phenomenon strictly linked to see learning and knowledge increases if shared and consumed. A key element in self-adaptive organisms is people. Organizations are made by people and run for people. Consider nature and culture as to self-organized but interlaced environments, and humans are vehicles of natural and cultural solutions. From the economic and organizational point of view, people are able to adapt themselves and their organization through a collaborative and peer to peer approach better adapt to changes and build a fluid digital ecosystem with autonomy.

Self-disciplined teams filled with self-motivated digital professionals: Discipline means embracing certain values and principles. Based on these values and principles, develop some guidelines and policies and then take a structural approach to manage the business in an autonomous way. Many organizations adopt agile as a management philosophy to run a self-disciplined and highly autonomous digital business. Discipline doesn’t mean overly prescriptive, it is critical to follow "people over process" principle. A self-disciplined team is often composed of many self-motivated people who can adopt personal drive and focus on performing well in new and changing context (self-motivation), as well as motivational leaders who are both self-motivated, and can motivate people moving more into the area of coaching or mentoring because you are motivating people by allowing them to learn by giving them the time and the confidence to work out for themselves what needs to be done in certain situations. Self-motivation is to get yourself doing things with discipline, practice and achieve the ultimate goals. A self-motivated person is more driven and adapts to changes, a motivated leader with the right approach can drive the team to become self-disciplined and achieve better business results.

High level of autonomy is the symbol of digital maturity. Running a self-autonomous organization is to improve business efficiency, effectiveness, and agility. Highly mature digital organizations have the high-level digital capability not only to build a digital business with people-centricity, but also to catalyzing enterprise-wide transformation via self-aware leadership, self-adaptive systems, and self-disciplined and self-motivated people. They have to stretch out in every business dimension for driving the full-fledged digital transformation.

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