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We know that when it comes to implementing new technology, good leadership is essential to organizational change management success. A leader who knows the business, understands the new tools and their value, can see the full picture, and can effectively direct, correct, delegate, iterate, and evaluate naturally puts a project on a better course.
The emotional intelligence traits, too, that can define good leadership, like empathy and fairness in decision-making, are always useful amid the complex and constantly moving process of implementing new technology and organizational change management. One leadership characteristic, though, is particularly important for seeing through implementations successfully.
Leadership visibility is the top predictor of change management success.
Which is to say, those businesses whose leaders are visible are much more likely to successfully implement new technology, in a world where most strategic initiatives that businesses undertake don’t get off the ground.
If you’re wondering how we developed this insight, keep reading, because you’ll see how Guidewise’s data-driven methodology for understanding workplace dynamics amid change reveals incredible insights about what works to get implementations past the finish line, and why you need our Execution Intelligence platform specifically for your digital transformation.
But first, let’s look at why leadership visibility plays such an important role in making implementations come to fruition. This will give you a view into the skillful harnessing of emotional intelligence that lets great leaders guide their businesses into vibrant new technological territory.
When something is changing in the workplace, employees’ minds fill in the gaps about what they don’t know. A stressed out imagination can run wild, and a room full of stressed out imaginations can work together to create all sorts of contagious, pathological mindsets that can throw up roadblocks to a tech implementation and to regular daily operations.
You might see, for instance:
Uncommunicative, absent leadership creates a vacuum that these strains of negativity (and many more) fill. However that doesn’t mean that leadership visibility is about “cracking down” on critical sentiment. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Much of the negativity surrounding implementations is born from fears of insecurity and change aversion.
These are natural reactions, and ones that a visible, present leader with true emotional intelligence can ameliorate, identifying and smoothing over the misconceptions about the implementation.
What those misconceptions are may vary based on role, proximity to the implementation, and so on. But a visible leader can observe and assess them, providing clarity and reassurance, guiding staff to understand the coming changes and appreciate the need for them, winning their trust and loyalty.
Visibility, however, does more than just reduce negative sentiments through increased transparency. Visible leadership can also generate a boost of enthusiasm that implementations need to succeed.
Sometimes employees read about coming implementations in internal communications and basically block them out, not necessarily out of negativity, but from a sense that the implementation is not that big of a priority for the organization, and thus shouldn’t be much of a personal concern. Maybe they’ve “heard it all before” and seen similar projects fail; maybe they don’t see the advantage of the solution being implemented.
Visible leadership shifts this mood. Leaders who are there, demonstrating a real, authentic faith in the project, can set the tone and make skeptics change their tune. When leaders are present, explaining the virtues of the new tools, how they will improve employees’ working lives and improve the business outlook, employees will see something they can get behind.
For employees, seeing is believing. Leaders who are there for the trainings, not just the higher-level meetings, demonstrate their commitment; it’s one that employees don’t just see, but feel. It can turn temperamental skeptics into implementation advocates.
At Guidewise, we know this for a fact.
You might be asking yourself, how is Guidewise so sure that leadership visibility is so significant for implementations?
It’s one of many observations we’ve arrived at through our deep experience in guiding tech implementations, and it’s not just a hunch. At Guidewise, our insight into what personal characteristics drive implementation success, overall and in each specific case, is based on real-time data.
When good leaders are visible, they can leverage their emotional intelligence in workplace interactions; reading the room, understanding, empathizing, easing worries, and enhancing enthusiasm with their words and their presence. But the most talented leaders can’t know everything about how staff within a business are thinking, feeling, and behaving toward an implementation.
To truly be able to leverage the gift of emotional intelligence and see an implementation through, you need the real-time data to guide you.
Guidewise’s Execution Intelligence Index lets you understand and gauge how people within an enterprise undergoing change are thinking and feeling. It captures proprietary metrics such as adoption confidence, resistance risk, and many others that let leadership observe, from a user-friendly dashboard, where the entire organization stands on the project.
Execution Intelligence provides an emotional and behavioral map of your enterprise at any given moment, and furnishes you with strategic recommendations, showing you potential routes through the emotional terrain of your business to the destination of successfully implemented technology. Based on that, leaders can leverage their emotional intelligence in a way that works, allaying fears, addressing skepticism, and cultivating enthusiasm.
Execution Intelligence is the science on which leaders can ground the art of leadership, giving a reliable, measureable, data-backed foundation, and active, real-time intelligent guidance, to their intuitions.
Technological change is hard. With AI tools rapidly becoming a necessary part of doing business, workplaces are facing change on an unprecedented scale. Guidewise is here to help you manage it.
Schedule a consultation today to see how Guidewise’s expertise and innovative Execution Intelligence platform can guide you through the coming wave of digital transformation, making sure your business leaders always move in the right direction to make your technological implementation a stand-out success.
