When I was responsible for Leadership & Culture at Publicis Sapient, I was asked to speak about how to think about leadership in the Digital Age. Digital Age in that context meant market and social forces stemming from technological change in which people have a new level of autonomy in everything from choosing their airline seat, getting real-time advice from friends on what to buy, or choosing their electricity provider. Industries that have been relatively stable for decades are now being disintermediated by companies that didn’t exist a few years ago. And the gap between what customers expect and what traditional businesses deliver has never been wider.
To understand the implications for leaders at Publicis Sapient, we started by looking at the implications for clients so we can understand what they need from a transformation partner. Many companies face existential threats that raise the stakes of the work they’re doing with partners. As a global company providing digital transformation, consulting, technology and marketing services, PS’s clients had often carved off problems and asked us to work on them. But the consequences of failing on a digital transformation effort could easily be going out of business. This leads to clients now wanting to partner very closely, exploring the risks and rewards together, and working side by side. That means leaders need to think of themselves as mutual partners, not as experts telling clients what to do, or at the other end of the spectrum, as order takers executing a client’s requests.
The accelerating rate of technology and market change is also driving the need for Agile, an iterative approach to working that assumes a changing environment. In Agile, we work in short bursts and assess where we are, learning from our mistakes. That means leaders have to think differently about the idea of failure — instead of punishing failure, celebrating what we have learned from it.
Companies are experiencing changes stemming not only from technology and ways of working, but also who we work with. Boundaries between companies, suppliers, partners, competitors, customers, crowds are blurring. Leaders now often have to work across internal and external organizational boundaries, meaning they no longer have clear reporting lines. This requires an ability to influence without authority and requires leaders to extend the meaning of “we”.
The level of complexity caused by so many organizations working together under changing demands and capabilities means there is no time for decisions to move up and down the hierarchy. As General Stanley McChrystal described so well in Team of Teams, when the situation is changing rapidly, you need to move decision rights closest to the action. And that means leaders need to think differently about authority, and who has it. And because we often need people on the ground to respond to their current reality without guidance from above, it’s even more important that we are all aligned. In this setting, telling people what to do often results in unintended consequences; the leaders’ ability to build commitment through inclusion and listening becomes more important.
And we know that complexity takes an emotional toll. For a lot of us, our brains aren’t really wired for this kind of environment. When leaders understand the fear and anxiety that accompany the excitement of what’s next, they can empathize with both the users of technology and the companies who need to serve them. We find that empathy and emotional intelligence are increasingly important for our leaders as they work with teams and clients under these conditions. Listening for the unstated and reading between the lines becomes critical since people have been conditioned to suppress emotions at work, even though emotions drive our decision-making and much of our behavior. When our leaders name what someone else is feeling in an empathetic way, they build the deep connections needed for such high stakes work.
Probably the greatest paradox I experience at PS was the sense of urgency we all feel and how it drives us into action. We feel like we “have to do something” and our effort becomes dispersed, sometimes cancelling itself out as people move in opposite directions. Or we say “we have to innovate” without being aligned on to what end. This means we need to slow down to go fast. Internal and external research has shown that our best outcomes are the result of pausing to first agree on the impact we want to have, and the work we need to do to get that impact. And only then do we start moving with urgency. In some places, this may be the most important form of influence we need from our leaders – insisting that we agree on purpose before action.
I’ve described a number of changes we needed to see in our leaders in the Digital context, and there’s one more change worth introducing here, which is a change in the method of learning itself. Many leadership programs describe behaviors that will lead to better performance and encourage leaders to change their behavior, offering experiences and tools for doing so. While this works to some degree, I’ve been disappointed in the results overall because we see the majority of leaders revert over time to their natural way of being. And our internal research at PS found as many as 31 behaviors that predicted for superior performing leaders. How could we teach 31 behaviors? So instead of focusing on behaviors, we looked at the underlying mindsets that generate those behaviors. By now, many of us are familiar with “growth mindset”; and there are literally hundreds of other mindsets that drive our behavior. By helping our leaders identify their own mindsets and compare them to a few mindsets found in our “superior” leaders, they are in a position to change their mindsets in a lasting way.
Some teams we were able to study and measure have responded in incredible ways, ultimately reflected in outsized performance. Others need more support than we’ve been able to give them and their performance is less consistent. And we continue to look for more ways to help our leaders to identify and change their mindsets so they can become the leaders they want to be, and we need them to be, to help our clients thrive in the Digital Age.