As much as some of us might hate to acknowledge it, the digital age can be excessively confusing. I understand the hesitation to admit it, especially when you’re a leader. After all, you’ve probably worked really hard to get to the position you’re at, and all of a sudden, there are all these new technologies you have to figure out. It can feel unfair, but it isn’t hopeless. There are many ways you can succeed as a leader in the digital age, and I’m sharing five basic rules with you.
1) Make Data-Based Decisions
I’m sure most of us have gone through frustrating periods where we desired to make something happen in the workplace, but were shot down due to either a lack of experience or a lack of trust from the elders. Thankfully, in the digital age, long gone are the days where leadership involved a strong ability to make decisions based purely on experience and intuition. Now, you can prove that the choices you want to make are the best choices, and more importantly, you can see what those choices are for yourself.
Data exists for a reason. They’re not hokey analytics that make life less boring – they’re tangible representations of trends you need to target in order to maximise what’s good about your business. Contrary to what people might think, data actually paints a more colourful picture of how things can improve based on how things actually are right now.
As a leader, you need to be able to develop the skill of analysing data and using it to come up with your company’s moves. When you do this, you’ll be able to make scientifically sound choices that probably won’t disappoint.
2) Stock Up on Data
Of course, when you commit yourself to leading in the digital age and making data-driven decisions, you’ll need the infrastructure to do it. Leaders in the digital age need to have the proper tools to properly store and index terabytes upon terabytes of data. Will this extra storage space cost you a little bit? Definitely. But it’s an investment worth making when you consider the benefits it brings to advance your business.
But more than just acquiring the tools to help you store data, you also need to make sure that the data you have is clean and organised. Invest in a system that can help you properly index and access files at will. That clean data will be imperative to you being able to make sound data-driven decisions.
Now while these two things might seem like purely tangible pieces of advice, they’re also worth noting on a leadership level. Good leaders are those that take time to make things organised and easier for everyone under them to follow, which brings me to the next point:
3) Simplify Things for Users
The goal of technology should always be to make things easier. And as a leader in your field, your goal is to offer that to the people you provide your services to. Always make sure that you, as a company, can offer services that are simpler and easier than what your competition offers. People appreciate convenience, and a company that’s able to use data to reduce the time and friction it takes to consume something will always be in the good graces of its target market.
This is what makes services like Siri and Cortana so effective, they’ve allowed consumers to engage with the product as fast as possible
The same is true for discussing data with your team. Not everybody is data-minded, but data is useful for everybody. As a leader, it is your job to properly communicate what you find, so that everybody’s on the same page and works towards the same goals.
4) Actively Research New Technologies
With the recent boom in cryptocurrency, I’ll bet you that thousands of people have kicked themselves for refusing to believe in its power. Someone who took the risk and invested in Bitcoin five years ago would’ve made a decision worth millions of dollars now.
Of course, hindsight is 20/20, and there’s no sense feeling bad about missing out on the curve. But what those experiences do show are that sometimes, being proactive and taking the risk on new technology is absolutely the step to go.
This definitely isn’t true all the time. There are a lot of experiences where someone bit on snake oil technologies that didn’t amount to anything. But all that says is you need to be discerning when looking at new technologies, because there are infinitely more examples of companies taking risks with new technologies and it working out.
For instance, think of the first time Facebook changed its layout. It was initially panned by users, as they were more comfortable with the “wall” format, since that’s what social media sites looked like at the time. But when Facebook changed to the timeline, every other social media site followed suit. Often it takes a little bit of risk to accept new technologies and the guts to do so in order to succeed in the digital space.
5) Consider Your Improvement Points
One of the most famous diagrams in the world is a picture of a World War II plane with bullet marks. Plenty of these diagrams were used by statistician Abraham Wald and a team of statisticians from Columbia University to assess how to make planes more bulletproof amid being shot at during the war.
Initially, the team thought they had to cover the parts of the plane with the most bullet marks, because clearly those were the parts most vulnerable. But Halm had a different idea – the team had to cover up the parts without bullet marks, because it meant that the planes that were hit in those areas failed to return home at all, meaning those were the most vulnerable parts.
Leading in the digital world is the same, because sometimes the answers aren’t so obvious. Take Netflix, for instance. They were close to bankruptcy, as they couldn’t compete with movie rental service Blockbuster. Intuitively, you’d think the answer would be to be more like Blockbuster and offer better third-party content, but Netflix decided to go in the completely opposite direction and offer original content like House of Cards. Now, Blockbuster is dead, and Netflix dominates the market share of entertainment streaming services.
This is why when it comes to leading in the digital age, you don’t only need to collect data and interpret it, you also have to be able to come up with solutions and see your points for improvement less as flaws and more as opportunities. This way, you can keep up with the changing times and adapt before anyone else can catch you.
To your success,
Mario
[Visit www.mariosingh.com now to enjoy a FREE e-book of my latest “37 Essential Principles for Massive Success” when you subscribe!]
