Quite a number of Australian businesses are somewhere along their digital transformation journey with the CEO an essential part of driving the digital strategy. It can be a daunting task for any CEO especially one who is not digitally savvy to understand digital development costs and timelines, ROI and the competitive digital environment.
This is where you as the experienced digital leader in the business can assist the CEO to better understand the digital landscape. Overtime the CEO will appreciate your effort to improve their digital knowledge and by working with them, you will also learn as they share their business knowledge. The CEO will become a good digital supporter and a tough but fair business mentor.
Here are 4 ideas to help build your relationship with the CEO and improve their digital knowledge:
• Understand the CEO’s digital knowledge – what is the CEO interested in digitally both professionally and personally? What do they want to learn about digital? How many digital devices do they own and what do they do online? All this information will help you understand the amount of information you need to assist the CEO improve their digital knowledge. (Also, expect the odd phone call to help use one of their digital devices.)
• Utilise the CEO’s network – the CEO receives countless invites and emails from consultants trying to sell digital services. Given the CEO’s busy schedule, offer to be the first point of contact to meet with the vendors and to filter out the noise and only recommend the most suitable vendors for the CEO to meet with. The upside of this for you is access to see a wide range of digital technologies and services, this will only improve your digital knowledge.
• Don’t just focus on the CEO – expand your assistance to all the C-Suite and meet with each of them to understand how you can assist with their digital discussions. For example, find interesting research, white papers, statistics etc. Each member of the C-Suite will be looking at digital from a slightly different perspective. This C-Suite engagement will broaden your view of digital on different business functions: Finance, Operations, Information Technology, Human Resources, Sales, etc; depending on the business structure.
• Find unique and interesting digital articles – spend some of your workday reading various blogs and industry newsletters and find interesting articles to forward to CEO and C-Suite to read. Be selective with the information you send through as it should be either relevant to an existing business issue or completely not related to the business, but a great example of how digital is helping a business in a different industry.
Other blogs from Jason Stidworthy can be found at http://www.jasonstidworthy.com.
