Tuesday, April 30, 2019

The Corporate Board Director’s Digital profile III

The path to leadership mastery is something that unfolds day by day, it takes mental tenacity, innate strength, fair temperament, in-depth business understanding, and solid expertise to develop strong digital leadership profiles.

Leadership is about the future and direction. The corporate board as one of the most critical top leadership pillars needs to be future-oriented, able to steer the organization in the right direction. It’s difficult challenges because there are uncharted water and blurred digital territories on the journey of going digital. The board directors should convey their “outlier’s vision and have to leverage the different points of views to truly become the strategic advisor of the business, conduct changes, monitor business performance and maximize business potential. Here is a set of board director’s digital profiles to bridge the multitude of leadership gaps and develop a high-effective and high-performance corporate board.



Business critic: Leadership is the state of the mind. Constructive critics are like a mirror; it not only shows lacuna but also gives an alert of forthcoming challenges the business management is facing. Many organizations are still run as a sum of pieces, not a holistic whole due to the tunnel vision or silo mentalities of business management. Thus, true critical thinking and constructive criticism are very important for the business’s improvement continuum. Criticism comes from a well-wisher to be construed as "constructive." The excellent feedback and constructive criticism from the board offers management the clue to see things they might ignore; provides keen insight to close strategic blind spots; gives them invaluable information to improve, triggers great questions to check the health status of business; also provides them good intention to understand varying shareholders’ interest with empathy. Many board directors are independent “outlier”; constructive skepticism at the board level often challenges the conventional thinking of management as a sole path; adds the new perspective via intuition; removes reactive thinking and negative self-talk, and adds proactive interactions no matter what is the situation. To put simply, criticism is like medicine, tastes bitter, but good for leadership wellness. The wise business leaders look at criticism as a way to eliminate stereotypical thinking and unconscious bias, lead to creative problem-solving and innovative solutions for improving their leadership maturity.

Policy-maker: Policies are communication from the top. The board of directors plays a critical role in setting policies and principles for changes and digital transformation. Often, large corporations have varying levels of maturity. Some of the mixed levels of maturity are the result of acquiring and merging organizations and cultures. The policy and principles as a compass will guide all levels of the organization to operate more as the human body operates with the cells and organs in a cohesive way. The organization is able to make decisions in a very organic relationship with its environment, to run in the same direction for meeting the same objectives in a rapid manner and achieving common business goals collaboratively. Policies and principles provide a robust foundation that makes it possible to straightforwardly derive solution-level governance and ensure the effectiveness of business management practices. There are some organizations out there that have a plethora of policies and many of them are nothing more than that, just a policy. Policies need to serve a purpose. The good policies make the right things easy to do by everyone and the wrong things hard to do by everyone because everyone is on the same playing field despite differences in roles/job titles and such. In the end, policy-making is not about models and theories, slogans or the business cliche. It’s about people being willing to be held accountable, following the good policies voluntarily for their own benefit, and making the workplace highly productive, autonomous, innovative, and delightful.


Digital conductor: As we all know the only "constant" now is "change." The rate of change has accelerated, The digital transformation is now spreading rapidly to enable organizations of all shapes and sizes to reinvent themselves. Don’t embrace every trend or fad though. Sound judgment is a hardcore leadership competency which often does not just come from “gut feeling,” but based on updated information, solid knowledge, decision wisdom, as well as the humble attitude. The corporate board as a digital conductor should harmonize the business symphony by taking effective governing approaches. Learning the business is a must for the BoD leaders to come up with experiential knowledge coupled with information for enabling and empowering the enterprise. Due to the complexity, uncertainty, interdependence, and ever-changing business dynamic, it’s a collective responsibility for both the senior leadership team and BoDs to lead business transformation and orchestrate a harmonious digital symphony. You need to have a holistic view of the organization because dealing with the significant challenge of digital transformation requires accelerated mindsets, leveraging multidisciplinary knowledge and insight, taking an end-to-end response and a structural approach.

The modern digital board has many responsibilities such as leadership advising, strategy oversight, governance practices, performance monitoring, and resource provision. Top directorship roles such as board directors are supposed to be the guiding force in the enterprise, envision and steer the business towards its future, strike a balance between dealing with complex issues today and forecasting the uncertain issues of tomorrow. The path to leadership mastery is something that unfolds day by day, it takes mental tenacity, innate strength, fair temperament, in-depth business understanding, and solid expertise to develop strong digital leadership profiles, in order to lead changes and digital transformation confidently and effortlessly.

The Corporate Board Director's Digital Profile Blog Series

The Corporate Board Director’s Digital Profiles 

The Corporate Board Director’s Digital Profile II

The Corporate Board Director’s Digital profile III 

The Corporate Board Director’s Digital Profile IV

The Corporate Board Director’s Digital Profile V

1 comments:

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