Post 1: Fostering Trust in Digital Leadership — Addressing Culture, Change Leadership, & AI Anxiety
In today's public sector, the term "digital transformation" is everywhere, but what does it really mean for leaders on the ground? It's more than just a technology upgrade; it’s a fundamental shift in how we serve citizens, and it starts with a deep understanding of people.
Your first and most critical challenge as a digital transformation leader isn’t a technical one—it's about establishing a common ground of understanding and fostering trust. In a landscape where the workforce may be dealing with "AI anxiety" and skepticism about change, your role is to create a sense of psychological safety that enables people to embrace new ways of working.
Start with a Shared Purpose, Not a Tech Solution
The initial challenge is to move the conversation beyond the hype. A digital transformation is a type of organizational change that will impact your organization's culture, workforce, data, and technology—and technology should be the enabler, not the starting point.
To build trust, your team must be aligned on a clear vision for change. This means:
- Define Your Terms: Don't assume everyone shares the same definition of "digital." Develop a simple glossary of key terms and concepts.
- Acknowledge the Risks: Discuss the common risks of a digital initiative upfront. By identifying and talking about potential pitfalls, you signal that you are realistic and prepared, not just focused on a shiny new tool.
- Assess Your Readiness: Perform a preliminary readiness self-assessment with your leadership team. This isn't a rigid audit; it's a tool to encourage open, honest dialogue about where your organization stands today. It helps you uncover hidden opportunities and gaps in your current approach to planning.
This approach aligns with the common leadership message of focus, simplification, and accountability. By focusing on a shared understanding and simplifying complex concepts, you can hold everyone accountable to the vision.
How to Cultivate Trust and Address Anxiety
The success of your digital journey hinges on your ability to lead people through change. The leadership style you model sets the stage for the entire organizational culture. You must nurture an environment where people are encouraged to explore new ideas and challenge the status quo. If the workforce does not feel empowered and entrusted to take responsible risks, then a culture of experimentation leading to innovation will be difficult to achieve.
Take a moment and think how you can build trust if you were to make a commitment to:
- Model Accountability: Take personal ownership of the change process. This means being transparent about what you know and, more importantly, what you don't.
- Prioritize Communication: Communicate clearly and consistently. For example, when introducing new technologies like AI, be transparent about their purpose—automating routine tasks to free up staff for more complex, critical work. This directly addresses the fear of job loss and highlights the value to the individual.
- Show, Don't Just Tell: Use demos, prototypes, and stories to illustrate the value of change. Show how a new process can save time or improve service delivery, rather than just talking about the technology behind it. The goal is to focus on value, not technology.
By taking a people-first approach, you can create a foundation of trust that will allow your team to move beyond fear and toward collaborative innovation.
Behaviors to Cultivate in a Digital Transformation
A Digital Transformation is often driven by a desire to improve organizational agility, meaning the ability to move and adapt quickly, easily, and decisively in response to the need for change. An organization that desires to become more digital may tend to encourage a workforce strategy that emphasizes five key behavior changes.
First, the workforce must accept ambiguity and uncertainty by practicing resiliency in the face of change and practice collaboration to solve problems. Secondly, the workforce must trust and be trusted so that higher levels of autonomy and accountability empower the workforce, thereby requiring the shared organizational objectives and guiding principles for decision making to be broadly understood. Thirdly, a mindset to continually challenge the status quo will equip the workforce to be ready to face new objectives and to have the ability to work proactively in an ever-changing environment with new risks and opportunities. Fourthly, the need to get prioritized work done requires the workforce to focus on value by constantly understanding the changing stakeholder needs and expectations. Lastly, a mindset of continuous learning will provide the workforce with the necessary knowledge and information in order to act in facing uncertainty, problems, and opportunities.
Achieving the behavior changes for a digital transformation can be further nurtured by cultivating the skills to develop increased resiliency amongst the workforce and to support the workforce through the period of change with the discipline of change management. That is why the Digital Transformation Workplan includes a cross-cutting phase called De-Risk which is focused on apply change management practices in each of the Discover, Define, and Deliver Phases. Agile governance practices can keep up with the momentum of a workforce that is working in new collaborative ways to make recommendations in solving priority problems at a new velocity. Adopting a lifecycle approach to the investments that generate value may be further cultivated by adopting product management practices.
An additional behavior to change through the digital transformation initiative is to change Leadership teams from only planning for digital transformation as a one-time event. Since transformation is a mindset shift to continually improve there is no definitive end to a digital transformation, instead the focus continually remains on illustrating what the desired future state looks like as a target and then as aspects of transformation successfully occur, identify the shift into optimization of the current portfolio investments and the modernization of resources that will occur.
Leadership must understand that transformation is cyclical in nature and that the cycle starts by aspiring to implement a new target operating model as the transformed future state, after implementing transformation investments further fine-tuning of portfolio investments occurs as an optimization state, and then a shift to maximize the full potential value of resources occurs through a modernization state while the resources follow a lifecycle iteration awaiting to be either replaced, further modernized, or eliminated from the portfolio. The goal should be to enter a state of continuous improvement thereby avoiding a stabilization state that is driven by resolving high risks associated to unsupported investments, redundant and non-strategic technology choices, and misaligned operational processes which may increase the potential to negatively impact the reputation and integrity of the organization.
The original formation of a transformation team as a temporary organizational structure may be eliminated or reduced in size as the complex changes are implemented, however the applied transformation management capabilities must persist in some form within the organization.
Preliminary Digital Transformation Readiness Self-Assessment
In the initial post A Practical Guide to Leading Digital Transformation in the Public Sector, a proposed Digital Transformation Workplan and its encompassing Discover, Define, and Deliver phases were briefly introduced. A key activity to complete within the Discover phase with key stakeholders is a preliminary readiness self-assessment and having an open discussion on the results is your first step in addressing any culture, change leadership, or general anxiety concerns related to change in general and the digital transformation initiative that you are leading.
Public sector organizations aiming to generate new user value propositions or transform their operating models need to develop a new portfolio of capabilities for flexibility and responsiveness to fast-changing requirements. Many organizations have commenced digital transformation initiatives without knowing whether they had the appropriate capabilities and practices in place to be successful.
Unfortunately, few organizations know where to begin or what it takes to prepare for digital transformation; which often leads to failed attempts. The preliminary digital transformation readiness self-assessment tool enables you as a leader of transformation to conduct a general self-assessment concerning the organizational readiness to do a digital transformation initiative. Each of the questions in the table are intended to stimulate discussion amongst the Leadership team to identify glaring weaknesses and also strengths. The resulting insight can help you to formulate an action plan to mitigate gaps or risks that may impede your progress and success.
During later stages of the digital transformation framework, a secondary self-assessment tool is used to ensure that the intended investments and actions from the digital strategy and roadmap have the necessary Leadership, Culture, Strategy, Workforce, and Organization conditions to increase the chance of success. The preliminary assessment score is not a prediction of the success of your digital transformation initiative, rather the score offers visibility and insight toward your current knowledge and organizational strengths to lead a digital transformation effort and gain buy-in to the approach that you will take.
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A work environment that encourages open dialogue will result in collaborative problem solving for the areas of concern or deficiencies from the readiness assessment. As you make a personal investment to improve your competencies and organizational readiness to apply the transformation management capabilities encompassing Experience Capabilities to align user needs and strategy, Operational Capabilities to provide leadership and management, and Foundational Capabilities to mobilize resources to deliver then you will increase the value that you can provide to help organizations achieve their digital vision.
Call to action:
If you are motivated to apply what was discussed in this post into action, then get started by :
- Developing a simple glossary of key digital transformation terms for your organization.
- Discussing common risks with your leadership team and identify mitigation strategies.
- Performing a preliminary Digital Transformation Readiness Self-Assessment and use the findings to start an open dialogue on how to improve readiness for change.
In an upcoming post the Digital Transformation Workplan's Discover Phase tasks, including the preliminary assessment, will be outlined in more detail however the following public sector references are a good starting point to help you reflect on your organization's readiness to discuss digital transformation.
U.S. General Services Administration
United Kingdom
World Bank
You can read each of the articles in the series A Practical Guide to Leading Digital Transformation in the Public Sector.
3. Making Decisions on What to Transform First — A Roadmap of Change and Enablers
4. Leading People Toward Change — Digital Skills, Roles, and Operating Models
5. From Ideas to Impact — Scaling Innovation Beyond Experiments