What are Key Differentiators between Top Performers and the Rest in the Digital Organization?

Top performers are perceived as modern, open-minded, informative, creative digital leaders and professionals.

People are always the most invaluable assets in organizations but often the weakest link as well. Due to the fast update of technology and the accelerating speed of business changes, among the most pervasive and persistent concerns from organizational leaders are talent gaps. The true value of people, especially today’s knowledge workforce includes many tangible and intangible factors, It's a total of what the employee brings to a business (quality, creativity, and productivity), Either individually or collectively, what are the key differentiators between top performers and the rest? And how to unleash collective human potential to unlock business performance?

Strategic thinking: ”Strategic Thinking is about getting the best information you could and continuously update, uncovering options, thinking long term, not just immediate goals. To put simply, Strategic Thinking is about “keeping the end in mind. Top performers today are usually great strategic thinkers because strategic thinking means change. While most people don’t like change, but top performers often have high adaptability to thrive in the digital dynamic. Either individually or at the organizational level, the biggest mind-shift in moving from operation-driven to strategic-oriented is to switch from focusing on activities to thinking about outcomes. Top performers with strategic thinking are able to gain an understanding of the past and the perception of the future. They are able to view the complete business as an ecosystem with all its dependencies and interconnections. They are also able to tie all important things together in order to develop actionable plans and sustain actions over an extended period of time.

Digital literacy: Digital is fluid and also complex. It becomes complex if things do interact, particularly in the case of "nonlinear" interaction, you can't separate things properly, and you cannot predict the actual effect of interaction straightforwardly. The top performers present multidimensional intelligence, interdisciplinary knowledge and show the digital literacy to understand business context, read between the lines, and demonstrate the ability to effectively navigate, evaluate, and create information using a range of digital technologies and abundant information. At an enterprise level, the linear business perception needs to be replaced by the adaptive digital system viewpoint. Digital literacy requires cross-functional communication, collaboration and interdisciplinary knowledge sharing. It requires information management capabilities, business learning, growth, and innovation competencies, etc, of the company to manage their strategy smoothly.

Collaborative problem-solving and team-working: Many of today’s business problems are complex, and solving complex business problems requires deep thinking, multidisciplinary knowledge, and collaborating. Top performers have both open and growth mindset, enjoy both independent thinking and teamwork, keep updating their knowledge, have intellectual curiosity to dig into the root cause, also show the flexibility to pursue alternative solutions. Complex problem-solving requires collaboration. Collaboration is at its essence, the intellectual harmony between humans. Collaboration is a fundamental part of what ultimately fuels inspiration, imagination, and innovation, and create a sense of belonging enjoys understanding the complexity and guides people through it. Top performers have a collaborative spirit to initiate digital dialogues, brainstorm ideas, turn around the tough situations, and skillfully assign their talent, resource and time carefully to solve problems really matter.

Entrepreneurship: Top performers demonstrate entrepreneurial traits such as open-mindedness, creativity, self-adaptation, flexibility, and resilience, etc.They can break down outdated rules, present accountability which is a type of cognitive fitness to show the ownership mentality, deploy new ideas, new processes, new adventures to adapt to change, doing things innovatively and wish to make great achievement as well. Top performers with entrepreneurial traits can bring optimism to influence the organization’s culture, break down the negative thinking box, linear knowledge, and mono-color culture. At the organizational level, entrepreneurship has been recognized as a potentially viable means for promoting and sustaining organizational performance, renewal and corporate competitiveness. Corporate Entrepreneurship is embodying risk taking, proactiveness and radical changes.

Customer-centricity: Top performers won’t just wait for the customers’ requests to solve their issues; but work closely and proactively with users and customers, to identify the real problems and solve them effectively. They are willing to listen, ask questions, and probe to identify the goal of the customer experience improvement, constantly looking at the business through the lens of a target customers. At the business level, it is very easy for an organization to become inwardly focused and fall into an operational mindset, get so focused on internal components and forget about the very reason a business exists in the first place. Top performers sincerely care about customers, and keep building differentiated business competencies to create value for them and build a customer-centric business.

Top performers are perceived as modern, open-minded, informative, creative digital leaders and professionals. They can broaden their outlook, envision the bigger picture, build differentiated professional competencies, inspire creativity, improve professionalism, and unleash their full talent potential.

Posted in: Digital Master,Performance Master,Talent Master