Excellent Technical Leaders
12 Vital Roles & Responsibilities in Digital Transformation Initiatives
Based on my ongoing leadership research, in this article, I want to introduce my key findings on vital roles and responsibilities of technical and technology leaders particularly in complex and complicated digital transformation ecosystems in large business organizations. Some of these roles and responsibilities are traditional, however some are emerging with recognizable trends in the industry.
Let’s start with technical eminence which is a core requirement for technical and technology leaders in the industry.
1. Technical Eminence
Technical eminence refers to outstanding technical expertise recognized internally and externally to the organization of a technical leader who is influential and high impact in the industry well known to both technical and business communities.
Technical eminence requires not only expertise in technical areas but also all associated and related domains in a broader scope. Eminent leaders have strong industry skills, thought leadership, and multiple domain expertise. They are highly regarded and sought after for their views and contributions.
Excellent technical leaders referred in this article need to demonstrate technical eminence covering both breadth and depth. Leading and motivating talented technical team members for successful digital transformation initiatives require to become an eminent leader in multiple technology domains with deep and broad understanding of impact and implications across the industry. Technical eminence is a prerequisite role for excellent technical leaders.
2. Innovators and Inventors
Excellent technical and technology leaders are innovators. They are original thinkers. These leaders continuously combine and contrast things to create new meanings, new understandings, new use cases, and new values.
To some extent, these leaders are also inventors. They look at the things from a novelty perspective. These leaders create new values for old concepts, terms or ideas. They look at things from different angles.
These leaders understand the value of innovation, they can become a catalyst for innovation, and they keep innovating relentlessly. Excellent technical leaders create an innovation culture and embed it to the organizations’ ecosystem.
3. Exceptional Communicators
Exceptional communication skills are essential for excellent technical leaders. Their communication skills are well respected and sought after by their followers, peers, superiors, and all other stakeholders. Excellent technical leaders can communicate at all levels with confidence and ease.
They also encourage other people to communicate clearly and effectively to share their knowledge in their team or outside of the immediate teams. These leaders are recognized as communication mentors and coaches. They observe their team members and provide constructive feedback for their growth.
Excellent technical leaders can articulate complex and complicated technology issues to both technical people in necessary details and succinctly to the business-people using the right terms and references for clarity.
4. Mentors and Coaches
Excellent technical and technology leaders mentor their team members, other team members, people from partnering organizations, students from universities, and even external people in other organizations.
These leaders are also good at coaching their peers, subordinates, and cross-team members by being a soundboard to them. They are excellent listeners and even contribute to well being of their team members providing coaching sessions resulting in therapeutic outcomes.
They also provide technical mentorship to other executives who are not as technologically savvy. Their mentoring and coaching capabilities help their team members to stretch themselves to bigger and better roles. They can coach team members as one on one basis or in groups.
5. Change Catalysts
Change is critical for digital transformation. Everything changes continuously and rapidly. Effective change management is a vital function. Dealing with this rapid change is not an easy task, and indeed require delicate skills, experience, and insights from technical and technology leaders.
These excellent leaders are catalysts for change in business organisations. With their catalytical contributions, they refresh the culture to a more agile, collaborative, and innovative landscape.
These leaders create new sets of practices in the ecosystem. Their attributes, such as being responsive, sharing and learning mutually, and having fun with joy in a pleasant team environment, can have a tremendous impact on improving the culture for transformation.
6. Active & Fast Learners
Learning is a never-ending process in transformational environments. Due to changing technology stacks, process and tools, excellent technical leaders and their followers need to learn rapidly and efficiently.
Excellent technical leaders can have a wide variety of learning styles. Based on situations and conditions, they can learn formally and informally. They turn every possible interaction to a potential learning opportunity.
These leaders can create learning opportunities for themselves and their team members. They can also teach other people actively and on-demand. By teaching their team members, they even learn more and better.
7. Talent Keepers
Talent is essential capability proposition in digital transformation solutions. No talent, no transformation: it is this simple. Therefore, excellent technical leaders understand the value proposition and importance of talent for digital transformations.
These leaders are very cautious to keep talent in their business organizations. They make every creative effort not to lose any talent from their teams. Talent is one of the critical enablers of core products and services of transforming organizations. Without talent, an organization cannot thrive and be competitive in digital transformation offerings.
As a new trend, excellent technical leaders also perform talent management and facilitation roles. They encourage the employees to perform optimally and turn them into talented team players. These leaders can also pick up poor performance in the team and help remove poorly performing employees and replace them with talented team members.
8. High-Performance Team Builders
Digital transformations require team members who can perform at the highest possible level. We can call this phenomena as optimally performing teams in the industry. These are selected employees due to their utmost contributions to the end goals. Their skills and capabilities are tested and validated to suit the type of work they are performing.
Building high-performance teams are critical for technical leadership. Excellent technical leaders create collaborative, well functioning, and high performing teams to run successful digital transformation initiatives.
These leaders create proactive and engaged local technical teams and community of practices. These high-quality teams and community of practices generate innovative, high-quality solutions in agility. They are ideal contributors to digital transformation using fusion principles.
9. Blind Spot Recognizers
Inevitably, everyone can have blind spots. It is a natural and well recognized situation. Blind spots can be hazardous in certain circumstances. The owner of the blind spot cannot see his or her blind spot unless using specific tools or assistance from someone else.
Excellent technical leaders are astute and professional observers. They look for big pictures from multiple angles and can deep dive when needed hence can quickly identify blind spots and weaknesses.
These leaders also articulate situations with constructive feedback and help people to see their blind spots and understand their weaknesses and turn them to strengths and opportunities.
10. Meticulous Measurers
Taking necessary measures are essential success factors for digital transformation outcomes. Excellent technical leaders focus on both qualitative and quantitative measures for team success.
These excellent leaders manage across complex matrix structures in their organizations. They use KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for their initiatives. They use creative team dashboard to see the trends. They can qualify and quantify progress in visual formats for the team members and the business stakeholders.
These leaders also encourage other team members to create their dashboard and shared dashboard for the team. They turn the company to a data-driven organization to measure the progress methodically and innovatively.
Two of the key measures are customer orientation and support mechanisms. These leaders ensure a customer-centric outlook is provided at all times, focusing on continually improving client experience with measurable results.
11. Thought Leaders
Thought leadership is a critical requirement and demand in digital transformation environments, changing cultures, and transforming ecosystems. The primary thought leaders are excellent technical leaders in these transforming environments.
These leaders can think both physically and digitally bridging the business services for transformation. They are known as digital thought leaders in the industry. In the past, we used to call them technology-minded leaders. We now use the term of digital thinkers and thought leaders. Some also call them digital opinion leaders.
Excellent technical leaders are drivers of ubiquitous digital transformations at a personal and organizational level. As almost every business has some digital transformation project to some extent nowadays, technical leaders leading these businesses must think digitally. They are thought leaders and at the forefront of digital transformations.
12. Tangible Outcome Creators
Tangible outcomes are essential for the success of digital transformations. Digital transformation requires tangible outcomes iteratively rather than monolithic basis. For example, some tangible outcomes can be a virtualization of platforms, creating containers, creating reusable shared resources, reviewed products, and agreed services.
Excellent technical leaders pay special attention to providing tangible outcomes with the support of their team members. The transformation environment presents a constant and rapid change and any change leading to a tangible outcome matters in the transforming ecosystem.
These small and rapid changes lead to more significant tangible outcomes at later stages of the transformation lifecycle; for example, the systems may need to be fully automated, loosely coupled, service-oriented, software-defined, self-learning, self-managing, and self-healing are a few to mention.
Conclusion
These 12 roles and responsibilities have established recognizable patterns in many digital transformation initiatives that I worked for many years in the IT and business services industry.
I observed that the technical and technology leaders who come from deep technical backgrounds and specialist level experience starting as a technical junior can be much different from technology leaders coming from a management background with limited technical knowledge, skills, and experience.
While both types of leaders (coming from technical and non-technical backgrounds) depict considerable value propositions for the business organizations, the dynamics can be very different from innovation, agility, collaboration, and technical excellence perspectives in the digital transformation initiatives.
My observations reveal that selected technology leaders from extensive technical background coupled with excellent people skills can be more productive and effective in complex IT and digital transformation environments. These are exceptional hands-on leaders starting from the very bottom climbed the ladder to the highest level. They can deep dive when required in critical situations.
Ironically, not every technical person can be an excellent technical leader. Therefore, we need to explore the attributes that make a technical person an excellent technical or technology leader as I covered in another article on Medium titled “How to be an excellent technical leader”.
With all due respect to the leaders coming from the advanced management and leadership schools or other academic environments with years of experience, my observations revealed that most of these skillful people are true leaders, however, in general, they are not necessarily ideal candidates to be technical or technology leaders to make a substantial difference for emerging digital transformation initiatives.
Of course, there are several self-taught management and consulting professionals with extraordinary passion for technology and digital trends who constitute the exceptions in some cases for leading complex digital transformation initiatives for super success. I’d appreciate your views on these characteristics based on your experience in your industry and line of work.
