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By: Kathy Kent Toney, President and Founder of Kent Business Solutions  Image by Freepik As a business leader, it can be daunting to plan for and implement a digital transformation initiative. How do you ensure that you start off on the right foot? There is one essential thing to consider…ensuring your team has the right mindset. It’s a vital aspect for ensuring project success and keeping your ideology fit. It’s great to have a good plan, great people, processes, and execution, but if you don’t have the right mindset, successful digital transformation projects will only be a pipe dream. So, what are the qualities of a great mindset? It all starts with team members who:
These qualities are just the tip of the iceberg, so let’s take a deeper dive into some four key aspects of having a great mindset: 1. Honesty and Candor Creating a mindset of honesty and candor is essential to have successful teams. Honesty should never be devalued within your team. Candor involves talking about things in a real way, without negativity, towards other team members. It’s discussing the things that can be done better or how individuals can interact more effectively, without pointing fingers. This also includes Care, which means having an attitude that you are all in this together. It’s involves determining how to best look after team members and being aware of how individual members are doing. Care comes down to active concern for the total person. Case in point—everybody's got a life outside of work. Having an empathetic understanding of what things employees are balancing, to the point that they feel free to share about them, is the goal. Here’s an example. Bob has been working late every night and seems stressed, which is uncommon for him. As a leader, it would be helpful to ask Bob how he's really doing—to show true care to him, making sure he is doing alright. It may also involve “taking one for the team”—giving Bob permission to leave a couple hours earlier the next day, if that seems appropriate. And here’s a further illustration of how having the right collective mindset throughout your team might look like. Bob’s manager could ask someone to pick up the slack for him and a team member would most likely be glad to jump in and help. On the other hand, having negative team mindsets could result in many more problems on a project. Imagine this—team members with a fearful mindset aren’t going to be as forthcoming when something's a mess. And with that type of environment, you’re most likely not going to find individuals wanting to jump into to help when someone’s needs a break. They’ll perhaps be more concerned about not meeting their own work goals while caring less about the overall team goals. Bottom line—it comes down to working with your team to build the right mindset, which in turn, helps create a healthier team culture. 2. Endurance Endurance is one of the most important factors of continued success and is a large part of having a great mindset. This is true for anything, whether you are building a business, a team or your life. Successful teams complete projects over and over again. It has to do with their ability to endure. Every day they come to work and complete tasks, completing one more piece of the puzzle at a time. It involves team members keeping their mindsets positive and making a decision to endure. Of course, great leaders will use the “Care” approach to check on them, as well, to help them in the process if they’re getting stuck. In the end, endurance is the ability do what it takes over and over again with measurable, incremental and positive results, which move you towards a successful conclusion of a project. It’s also about making sure you do what you said you would do. 3. Visibility and Transparency This involves open communication with your stakeholders, whether external or internal. Essentially, it’s all about letting them know that you will have a mindset of honesty, candor and care with them and that you will escalate issues when required. By doing that, you show leadership how much you care about the project, which will pay dividends for you throughout the course of your work. For example, if you happen to miss a deadline, it may look less erratic when you're raising the issue with management. It really is going to make a difference in the way that they view you and how they view the project. But that’s not the only good outcome. Having visibility and transparency amongst all team members can positively affect the end users of the process, and eventually the business as a whole. 4. Change Management How you approach communication of planned changes has a powerful effect on mindset. That’s why a good change management approach is important—employees in an organization really need to understand what's changing. That way, they can prepare themselves for the changes, so that they can achieve the right mindset. This involves communicating the amount of effort required for a project to transition from where they’re at to where they have to be for the business to succeed. Then, it’s asking for their feedback along the way. This removes the outward perception of changing for change sake and casts a vision of the future to help ensure success for the organization. And it really becomes an organizational change/movement mindset. This is vital, because this can change the whole organization’s attitude and help create an environment that is more accepting of digital transformation. When you can do that, you’re well on your way to a more successful digital transformation journey for your organization! **** This newsletter is an example of the content Michael Cantu and I have included in our best-selling book on Amazon, No-Nonsense Digital Transformation. This book talks extensively about creating proper mindsets, building exceptional teams, and creating great cultures, so it isn't just for digital transformation fans. Are you interested in learning more? Then click the button below to get started!
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