How are you making sure that your organization is maturing while you deliver short term wins as part of your digital transformation initiative? How are you establishing benchmarks to evaluate the key elements, including your strategy effectiveness to ensure that your whole organization aligns around a vision truly? What about culture appropriateness, so it fosters the right mindset and behaviors and the organizational structure for best execution of projects? And last but not least, the capability levels, including systems, tools, and skills to properly support delivery? And, once defined, how are you using these benchmarks to stay focused on continually improving the organization’s maturity to exploit future opportunities?

Contributor

• • Helen Norris, Chief Information Officer, Chapman University

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Transcript

Helen Norris [00:00:00]:
Hello everyone.

Sanjog Aul [00:00:00]:
Hello and welcome to this segment on CTN. And to learn more, please visit ciotalknetwork.com and the topic for today is Benchmarking Organization’s Maturity for Digital Transformation. Whenever we talk about digital transformation, it almost has become a cliche, but the whole idea is not to just build a cool new approach to how to deal with customers or to just build an internal efficiency. It’s also an opportunity so that we could become better in the way as an organization. How mature do we become as an organization? So as digital transformation is not one shot type of an effort, it’s going to be an ongoing evolution. So what are we doing to make sure we are intentional about building this maturity? And we talk about maturity, how about looking at specific elements, which is how effective is our strategy, how appropriate is our culture, how good is our structure for the organization and what are our current capability levels so that anything is thrown at us or anything we choose to evolve or work on. We have the right type of systems, processes and tools and people. So let’s talk about the different aspects of the organizational’s maturity for digital transformation in this context.

Sanjog Aul [00:01:25]:
And now since we are discussing and dealing COVID 19 all the time, we are going to bring that context in as well. So to discuss all this, we have our guest today, Helen Norris, who’s the CIO with Chapman University. Hey Helen, how are you?

Helen Norris [00:01:42]:
I’m doing well, thank you Sanjog, how about yourself? Stay safe.

Sanjog Aul [00:01:46]:
Yeah, very good, very good. We are all supposed to be shelter in place, working from home and trying to keep moving along. So now in the context, like since last thing I mentioned was COVID 19 and all of that is something which we can see is beyond our control everybody’s working hard, but business should not stop. So when we are looking at digital transformation projects, they were underway for most companies and they are trying to do things with them. In your view, did it give a jolt to us? Did we pause to see what’s going on? How are we dealing with this in the context of digital transformation centric initiatives?

Helen Norris [00:02:33]:
It gives an earthquake side jolt to digital transformation, in my opinion. I think before the crisis when we were thinking of this digital transformation, we, the examples we use were industries that have been disrupted, often from outside the industry, like the taxi industry being disrupted by Uber or the hotel industry being disrupted, disrupt D&D and some of those disrupt disruptions, excuse me, really shook the very foundations of those industries and really called into question whether the taxi industry could survive. I think said unusual. A lot of industries, my own, I work in higher Ed have really been thinking in the past about disrupting from within, kind of thinking of ways to improve our foundation rather than really shape it and I think that’s true in IT and in a number of industries. So we all have been looking at it from an internal focus. We’re trying to disrupt from within and then all of a sudden this major district over that word today was major disruptor that we didn’t see coming and nobody could see coming, came in and really shook things up for us.

Helen Norris [00:03:49]:
So in my industry we have worked to have our faculty and our students really embrace technology and it’s been sometimes slow, a slower process, but in the context of COVID 19, where we all have to be not in the classroom, not on campus, we have no choice but to embrace the technologies and we’ve seen just a massive move toward taking on different ways of delivering education. It’s also in our industry, even from the point of view of some of the internal processes, and I’ll speak about my own organization and IT organization, we’ve had processes as to how we’ve done support for many years and we’ve adjusted them and we’ve improved them and we’ve shortened the time frame it’s taken us to deliver a laptop and believe me, we have made more progress in how we changed that paradigm in the last month than we’ve had before. Necessity is the mother of invention and we have had the necessity to change in the last month and we have risen to the occasion, I think in most cases really made changes to how we’re doing today. I hear people talk about we’re never going to go back. I’m not 100% in agreement with that.

Helen Norris [00:05:23]:
I do think that we, when this is over or after this apocalypse or whatever, I do think we won’t stay in the state that we’re in now. We won’t go back to what we were before. I feel that we’ll end up somewhere in the middle because there are things that we’ve done because of the speed with which we’ve had to do them, that perhaps we need to rethink them and redo them in order to have them be more sustainable for a long term approach rather than just something to get us through the crisis.

Sanjog Aul [00:05:59]:
Now let’s look at digital transformation as an initiative in itself. On the pre Covid or post or what we are doing today. It was always seen as something we have never been doing. There is a huge degree of innovation. Yes, the end goal could be that you want to increase internal, improve internal operation significantly to get some efficiency out of it or wow your customer based on the way you do things. Would you say that was primarily the driver or there is an undercurrent related to, you know what, while we do this, we could clean the house, we could rethink our processes, we could become more capable, nimble, agile, and even resilient because that sentiment looked like you’re talking continuous improvement, which nobody wants to fund.

Sanjog Aul [00:06:48]:
What do you think that, do you think that word digital, the phrase digital transformation, lend itself to that as stable stakes, or that’s more of an add on which people should do because that’s an opportunity they have?

Helen Norris [00:07:04]:
I think it depends on the industry and how people define digital transformation. Digital transformation is, in my opinion, a true digital transformation is really rethinking how you do your business, how do you deliver change because and in many cases, all because of external influences on your industry. A little bit, I think, like the Airbnb or the Uber example, responding a hotel, responding to an Airbnb by doing some incremental improvements in their internal processes, that’s not going to be effective, that’s not going to help them remain competitive, but responding to that threat by really fundamentally looking at your business model and seeing if there are different ways that you can deliver services that set you apart from that has disrupted your industry. I think that’s what digital transformation is. I think it makes a lot of sense for us to continue to improve our internal processes. And to be honest, that’s something we’ve been doing for years. I mean, we did it back in the 90s when we started putting enterprise systems in place.

Helen Norris [00:08:26]:
They were improving our internal and our administrative processes, but they didn’t fundamentally shake up our businesses. They helped us streamline and they were more about efficiency and cost savings. I think the difference with digital transformation is in many industries, the focus is not so much on cost containment, but on revenue driving revenue and that, I think, is one of the things that we have to think about that’s new for many of us as CIO, because our approach in the past has been on how can we take these processors and make them and automate them and streamline them and that’s still important and there’s still, it’s still critical for us to do that. And there are newer technologies like RTA and machine learning and AI that help us do that better but from the business perspective, I think digital transformation is really about driving new ways to bring revenue and bring customers and to enhance, to enhance customer satisfaction.

Sanjog Aul [00:09:30]:
So what you just mentioned definitely is a trend. Whether you talk about decades ago, the ERP that we were using, or we are talking about the newer cool digital technologies you’re trying to develop. See, as the topic was focused on benchmarking and organizational maturity for digital transformation, which is to say first let’s define the benchmarks, then measure against them at T0, strategy effectiveness, cultural appropriateness, organizational culture, the capabilities that we have and then as we go along these different projects, we stay intentional that we move a needle in each of these areas. And if we do that, then we would not just get a reward or an award for being the best digital company. We are actually becoming intentional about taking what would come after digital and taking it on with confidence because you’re focusing on the core fundamentals and the core what gives us the core strength as a company. But if there is no benchmark, what you don’t measure, you cannot improve.

Sanjog Aul [00:10:48]:
And not very many companies have even created such benchmarks or have made their respective benchmark for their own organizations, let alone measuring it and they’re chasing the next cool thing. So it doesn’t really move the organization forward besides that one feature or one approach, they improved in the business. That’s what we are fundamentally looking to dig deeper and see. Is that something viable or is it a pipe dream if it is being done to what degree it’s been done?

Helen Norris [00:11:21]:
Okay, Well, I think it’s very tough to think about the benchmark and I do agree that a lot of organizations, we get very focused on some cool technology and we want to implement it because we hear that’s the way to go and we don’t think about the measurements to see if it was truly effective. I think a good example of that, for example, are the use of chatbots in providing services to our customers. So a lot of I hear from a lot of people on my service desk, I’m going to use chat to give better service or. But what are we really trying to do? If we’re going to introduce chatbots, which is a great technology and artificial intelligence, into our service industry, how are we going to see if it’s really successful? Are we going to look at things like quicker closing of the ticket, providing the answer to the person who’s calling in a faster way? What about the experience of the end user? How do they feel when they get in and they’re getting achieving service by through the chatbot? I think a lot of times we’re still looking at it more from the perspective of efficiency and cost saving so we’ll introduce chatbots into the service desk. That means we need to have fewer staff on the service desk and we can have longer hours for less money but are we really meeting the goals that we set for ourselves, which should be to answer the end user’s question after the first time, get the information they need, and also to provide them with a delightful customer service experience? So when we think about measurements, we’re very good at measuring, I think on the cost containment side, but less on those areas that are more customer facing. Getting back to even thinking about the current climate and the current environment, one of the things that you need to do, I think it’s a good, just good practice when you’re introducing a new technology, is to really be clear upfront about what the expectation is and to set what you’re going to measure and how you’re going to measure it and when you’re going to measure it and what your measure of bookshelf is.

Helen Norris [00:13:47]:
One of the things that’s happened to us because of COVID 19 is we’ve introduced things fast and furious because we had to. We wanted to get things out there for our students to use in a university setting or for our staff to use and we have not thought about how to measure those. We just wanted to get those tools into the hands of people. I think we’re going to have to do when the time is less crazy than it is now, I think we have to go back and revisit some of the things that we’ve done, and we’ll be in a tougher place to measure the success of those tools we’ve introduced, because we haven’t set success criteria up front and that’s one of the things when I hear people say, oh, we’ve made this shift, we’re never going back, I think we’ll go and move this back because we’ll have to really measure whether or not the things we’ve put in place have been successful. And we haven’t defined what success really is, other than to kind of stay afloat. That in the long term, that’s not the thing that we want to measure.

Helen Norris [00:14:57]:
We want to measure how much it makes a difference to our businesses and to our customers and to our end users.

Sanjog Aul [00:15:02]:
So let’s pick up the first benchmark. A benchmark around strategy effectiveness. So which means that we will start and say, okay, this is our strategy and we might have.

Sanjog Aul [00:15:15]:
you may not be starting from, literally from scratch you may already come underway. So, so far, if you have built a strategy and you have been working based on strategy, how effective have you been to keep everyone on the same page and keep them all aligned around the very vision? Because vision would drive strategy, will drive execution. So if you created a strategy, you started working on it, are you effective, is that strategy effective? Or you have to continue to improve it to get where you want to go? Do you think there is a kind of benchmark an organization can develop which then they use as a yardstick, if you will, to make sure that strategy effective, or rather strategy effectiveness measure is a good measure and then it’s accurately measured in the first place and that keeps us all in alignment. If we see the lack of alignment, we know how much of lack of alignment we have, so we become intentional about bringing it back in.

Helen Norris [00:16:23]:
I think when you talk about measuring strategy, it’s not an additional challenge in that the strategy effectiveness. Excuse me, it’s got an additional challenge in that it is a really long term measurement. You set a strategy, define a strategy. First of all, you have to have clarity around what that strategy is and what your goals are with that strategy but it is by definition a long term approach. So setting the benchmark around that or setting the metrics around that becomes much harder because in some organizations the strategy could be to completely shift how our the percentage of revenue that comes from a different area and their strategy is kind of setting at that level. So that I think is very difficult to do.

Helen Norris [00:17:18]:
The approach that I have seen have success is really take those strategies, that strategy that outline and break it into a more focused set of high level goals and be able to measure around that for example, we want to be in a university, we want to be. Our strategy might be to improve our standing across the country to be a more highly ranked university. Well, the measurements there is actually pretty easy but how do you get there in that strategy? Well, you have to improve our student body, we have to improve our faculty. So all of those things I think become things that we have to measure as we go over move in the direction of the strategy that we set for ourselves.

Sanjog Aul [00:18:12]:
Now when we talk about for the strategy, that is good. But then once you build the strategy without having the right type of people and the right type of org structure and org design, design people will go all over place or there would be conflicts and there would be tug of wars, if you will, or we wouldn’t be having confusion and that happens in many companies, especially when they’re trying to bring about change at any level. But then organizations would willy nilly. I’m not going to grossly generalize here but a lot of times people would put thoughts in there, but it looks a little chaotic and or ad hoc in the way they think about org structure without having a certain benchmark to say if this org structure is at this level, this is the outcome I’m getting. They could use historical data, they could work with third parties, whatever that is. So we change organization, we restructuring versus re engineering and that creates a whole lot of leakage before they realize this did not work well

Sanjog Aul [00:19:14]:
and then you again go back to the same staff and say now we’re going to change this again. So what they start saying oh my god, this is going to happen on a weekend basis I would not know what’s going on and they lose team. So if we had a benchmark of saying what kind of organizational structure or processes level maturity we will bring over a period of time, then you know, you have a stepwise plan on how we will grow in maturity and you’ll take one bite at a time. But what would that look like in context of digital transformation? How should an org structure be formed first and that when what second step should you take in that regard and what’s the third?

Helen Norris [00:19:54]:
So I think the question that you’re asking is really there’s two different perspectives or two different lenses that we need to look at through. The first is around. I mean we’re essentially talking about leading our organization through massive change. So that’s the first lens I’m going to talk about and then I think you’re really talking about culture in the organization and how and different organizations have different cultures and different readiness levels for change and for digital transformation so I want to get into that a little bit. But first I think leading an organization through digital transformation, it is about leadership. And all of the tools that we use as leaders really are amplified in this journey toward digital transformation.

Helen Norris [00:20:46]:
So it’s all of the things that we should practice as leaders on a daily basis it’s good and clear communication, making sure that we are communicating on a regular basis with our team around the strategy and around the depth towards those strategies toward that strategy and I want to be clear that communication is a two way street. It’s not just about the leader coming out and talking to the organization about here’s how we’re going to move and here’s how we’re going to achieve this digital transformation. Communication is really about listening and our people in many organizations are our strongest interest and so it’s very important for us to have that great communication back and forth with our team. What’s interesting and going to be a little bit on a tangent in the current environment with COVID 19, where we’ve been physically separated from our team and I know that many organizations have global teams and they’re all physically separated, but this is new for a lot of us. Finding different ways to maintain those good open communications with your team in a virtual environment is really critical.

Helen Norris [00:22:06]:
Whether it’s using constant video conferences or collaboration platforms to help people know what’s going on, being timely in communication, especially in a virtual environment, is really critical. The second tool I think that we use as leaders in order to lead our team through this massive change is really empathy. Empathy is one of the most critical attributes and skills that a leader can bring. You talked about we’ll set an organizational structure to help us address digital transformation and we don’t want to be in a situation where we set an organizational structure and then we go, oh my god, that’s wrong. Let’s do it again and again but one of the things in today’s world there’s, I think du cheat and that we do change. We’re not going to set like maybe was an expectation in the past

Helen Norris [00:23:02]:
we set an organizational structure and it’ll stay there for years. That’s not the reality today and again, I’m going to talk about the current crisis. What I had to do with my team in the current crisis is completely on the fly. Temporarily reorganize people so that we could deliver what the organization needed. So if you’re a staff member sitting there in your organization, what they experienced coming from their leadership was okay, yes, you’re a data analyst today. Tomorrow I’m going to have you supporting people who are working remotely. Clear communication and the empathy for understanding that change is impactful to that individual.

Helen Norris [00:23:49]:
In reading what sets apart as a great leader and a leader who can successfully bring an organization through digital transformation and a manager, the clarity of communication. It really feels very kind. It’s very kind to our staff to be clear around what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, acknowledging that we will probably be making changes as we go on through and being really intentional about that, I think is very critical in terms of measuring the success or benchmark of change in organizational structure. That I think is really about measuring how the success are we delivering what we need to, but also I think measuring the comfort and the happiness perhaps of our staff who are working in that environment. So moving to feedback from people, so staff surveys, moving away from the old annual evaluation process and to more to A consistent constant discussion between supervisors and staff, good expectation settings, looking for turnover and burnout in the organization. I think that they’re all things that we can actually measure how effective our organizational structure changes have been. So if that gets some of the questions of the topics you’re thinking about in terms of benchmarking.

Sanjog Aul [00:25:28]:
Absolutely no. Thank you so much. This was a great response. So now let’s take a quick break, listeners. We’ll be right back and then when we come back, let’s talk about the culture, that living organism which needs to stay healthy and we need to have good benchmarks or do companies have benchmarks so that they use them as a yardstick to make sure that culture always stays conducive for any and everyone who wants to be and should be at their best. They’re all having fun while doing so and they’re always motivated and charged up and innovative as we go along the journey. So what could be a good way to establish those benchmarks and how do you use them to keep improving your culture? Please stay tuned listeners.We’ll be right back.

Sanjog Aul [00:27:14]:
Welcome back. So Helen, let’s talk about culture. Living organism has to stay healthy but most people work on culture saying okay, a leader is going to come and build culture. One leader leaves, culture suddenly crashes, they want to run rebuild again and it is more of an art form than a science and we understand that because you’re dealing with human beings. But can there be a set of incremental levels of maturity which we can assign to it and then work towards that next milestone, if you will, versus saying I’m going to totally turn it into an amazing culture or it’s going to totally get trashed because we don’t have clarity on where we are going with cultural related efforts and how far did we reach at any given time and where are we at any given time? That doesn’t really give us a lot of hope as a leader and the people who are working in the company to know if we are working on culture and we are working with a very methodical approach to it.

Helen Norris [00:28:09]:
Well, this is a really hard question. How do you benchmark culture? Because it feels so fuzzy. I have a good culture. I have a bad culture and it also feels that culture is a very difficult thing. I don’t know that it’s really true that a leader comes in and sets the culture. A lot of culture comes from within the organization, from the team that’s there but I think the first thing is to really think about as a leader, to think about a kind of culture that you want to have in an organization.

Helen Norris [00:28:44]:
And since we’re talking about digital transformation, I understand that in and as a leader, I want to have a culture where that’s inclusive and collaborative and that employees are productive and happy. But when we’re thinking about digital transformation as a leader, you might want to come in and have a culture where change is embraced. So I can think of many examples in my career where I’ve come into an organization and the culture has been, this is how we do things. And my challenge as a leader was to try to shift the culture a little bit so that the culture was more open to change. So I think that’s the first thing is you’ve got to really think about what culture do you want to have in your organization, and then evaluate the culture that you currently have and think about what the difference is. And I recognize that some of the culture words are a bit fuzzy. I want a culture where that are productive and happy.

Helen Norris [00:29:54]:
Okay, so happy. How do you define that and then how do you measure it? But I would argue that there are ways that we can measure things like employee productivity and employee satisfaction. In terms of the culture, I would say that we can. If we define that we want a culture that embraces change, there are ways we can measure whether or not we embrace change. We can look and see if we change things or you think of culture as we have a collaborative culture. I hear people say that all the time, right. In our organization, we’re collaborative. That’s our culture.

Helen Norris [00:30:32]:
Okay, so how do you measure that? How do you ensure that you’re actually being collaborative? I think that there are ways we. We can do that. So it’s really about defining the culture you want to have, what the values. Some of it is very values based, what the values are that are associated with that culture, and then breaking it down to pieces that can be measured like death Satisfaction like how quickly we can change from one system, if you will, even to another, and how truly collaborative are we if that’s the culture you want to have in your organization? So I think it’s really difficult because it feels fuzzy but I think you can take those fuzzy things and maybe it won’t be quite the same as measuring how many calls we took at a call center or how much our revenue increased over the last 12 years. Or maybe it’s not quite the same as measuring the growth of the COVID 19 virus that we can see on a graph, but we can measure things around these fuzzier thoughts, perhaps mostly through survey. So does that.

Sanjog Aul [00:31:48]:
Yeah, you know what? Frankly, it’s not an easy question to answer, but you definitely gave it a good shot because the culture itself can mean so many things to so many people and that’s where while we understand that not every plan, everyone on the planet would think exactly the same, but we are more appealing to the leaders to become intentional about giving it some qualitative or quantitative measure because if you don’t, then it is. It’s not going to. Your efforts are not going to reach their maximum potential. To say the least.So that said,

Helen Norris [00:32:25]:
So that said, can I build on one thing that you said? I really like that you use the phrase qualitative versus quantitative because I think again, when we think about measurement and metrics, we’re naturally inclined to think about things that are quantitative, like fails or number of calls or how many races, how many things froze or something like that. Qualitative is a form of measurement too and certainly when you’re thinking about culture and in some ways when you’re thinking about customer service, these are more qualitative things. So we can learn from how we’ve measured qualitative things like customer service in the past as we look at things like measuring culture but I really appreciate you using the word qualitative. It really helps in having that measurement discussion that measurement can be qualitative as well as quantitative.

Sanjog Aul [00:33:26]:
Now let’s talk about the systems, tools and skills combined to be seen, or you could say it is the capability that a CIO should bring within their department to be able to support the digital transformation efforts. So we always as CIOs have been trying to optimize the portfolio. Yes, you would have technical debt, yes, you would always get some new deals, tools, some old and try to preserve of the existing investments and say we are going to run at a very lean levels. Now with all of that said, what you need to do at any given time from systems, tools and skills perspective, if it is not optimum, you are leaving money on the table, you’re leaving opportunity on the table, you could leave PR and marketing and every other’s effectiveness on the table. And again, we could say we are doing the best we can. But are you maturing across different initiatives, pre digital or post digital? Did you mature? And for you to be able to confidently say yes, you ought to have some sort of a benchmark, Is there one?

Helen Norris [00:34:41]:
Well, I think this is one where we. It’s another hard question. I think it’s one where when we think about the tools and the skills, and I’m Thinking from the CIO’s perspective with the IT staff is can we measure the improvement of our team in terms of delivering? And I think we can do that. Some of the things that we need, some of the approaches that we need today from our staff to handle these digital initiatives are really more focused on an agile methodology and an agile approach to projects, as opposed to the approaches we used in the 90s when we address enterprise systems where it was more monolithic and project management approach. So I think we can measure how our staff are embracing these new approaches and more to increase the participation in using those new approaches. I think in order to be successful, it really does require investment in our staff because our staff has had success over the years. When you think back to again, when we did enterprise systems, our measure of success was maybe in a year and a half we would implement a big enterprise system and people were rewarded for that and today we’re doing more developing mobile technologies where there’s an expectation that there are constant updates.

Helen Norris [00:36:14]:
And it feels like a very different approach to our staff. So investing in our staff to ensure that they have the skills to embrace these new ways of doing different and then being able to measure again, that makes a lot of sense. I also think, however, that the digital approach requires a change, the digital initiatives require a change in approach on our partners across the organization because it is more a more iterative approach. And so part of our duties as CIO are to help the rest of the organization embrace this more agile approach. We also have to do that while we’re still maintaining our underlying system for in kind of keeping the trains running on time. We still have to have our network work and we still have to have those enterprise systems that are in place. So it is a very challenging piece because people are going to get rewarded for that type of work too and measured in a different way. So focusing on critical systems and building resilience and resiliency into those systems, while at the same time taking an agile approach to digital initiatives is actually really pretty hard.

Helen Norris [00:37:38]:
You’re really using both sides of your brain. You have to have different ways of measuring success in both different areas.

Sanjog Aul [00:37:47]:
Now, if you had to suppose build these benchmarks or use them, in both cases, the journey, the way you’re having today, or you see your peers having today, what would you, how would you have run if you already had these benchmarks, how would you have run whatever you’re running today as your shop, if you had the benchmarks and you were using them to develop maturity?

Helen Norris [00:38:10]:
I think so. I would say is that the benchmarks we’ve used for in the past, the enterprise systems, the benchmark have really been focused on quality and ensuring when we put these systems in place that they don’t fail and they’re. And so we’ve taken a lot of time to implement those systems or make changes in digital initiatives. I think the benchmark is more about speed to implementation and sometimes even at the expense of quality. Sometimes it’s more of the approach of not letting the perfect get in the way of the good, getting things out there. So when thinking about digital initiative, when thinking about benchmark, one thing I would do a little bit differently is really focus on time to market a little bit more so than even quality. And that’s something that we’ve absolutely had to do in the 19 crisis. In fact, I recall a few weeks ago when we were talking about are we ready to do remote teaching or remote working for 100% of the workforce? And my president asked me that question, like, are we ready? I was like, well, we’re not 100% ready, but we’re ready enough.

Helen Norris [00:39:31]:
And that’s, I think, a different measure than we have had in the past. Are we ready enough to go with this or rather than are we 100% ready? So that’s one thing I think that we would maybe have done that I would think we may introduce that approach in our digital initiatives in the future. Are we ready enough? Then let’s go.

Sanjog Aul [00:39:54]:
Last question for you. Think about other areas that we spoke, from strategy to culture to organizational structure to capability levels. How about thinking about a benchmark for the leadership style, or rather leadership maturity? Because in organizational maturity requires us to become more mature as the way we lead. Yes, people could have different leadership styles, but leadership as a discipline, which is required in today’s day and age and beyond that, needs to mature as well. So what would you say, or rather propose to the leaders out there, what kind of benchmarks they can create because not they themselves should be seen as leaders, but their goal or their role as a leader is to develop other leaders but if they did not have a benchmark, how would they know this person has become better than what this he or she was, say, two years ago or a year ago?

Helen Norris [00:40:53]:
So send out all the questions you’ve asked about benchmarking. Culture have been really hard, but this one is the hardest. How do you benchmark success for a leader? It’s really hard to benchmark because some of it is about style. As leaders, we need to be inclusive and participatory and collaborative and then to your point, it’s not just about you as a leader or the CIO as a leader, but how they infuse leadership in the organization and create, and I borrowed this phrase from a colleague, a very leaderful organization and how do you benchmark that? I think it’s very difficult to do so but one thing I would say to leaders out there, if I could just leave with one piece of advice around benchmarking how successful you are as a leader. I think the critical thing is for us as leaders receive feedback.

Helen Norris [00:41:49]:
That’s, I think, the only way we’re going to address, measure the measurement of our success as leaders and other leaders in the organization. It’s not necessarily fairly natural for us to go out and say to people at all levels of the organization, how the hell am I doing as a leader? What’s working? My goal as a leader is to be collaborative. My goal as a leader is to be inclusive. How am I coming across to you at all levels of the organization? I think that’s a critical thing, is to seek the feedback around the different skills that you need as a leader and ensure that you’re meeting the needs of everyone in the organization. But if again, it gets back to, it’s a more of a qualitative measure than a quantitative measure. If you think about strategy. How am I as a leader articulating a strategy for an organization? It’s not quite as simple as a number. It’s a much more qualitative benchmark that we’re looking at

Helen Norris [00:42:59]:
and I think the only way to really mark in a qualitative way is to seek constant feedback, which is uncomfortable constant and honors feedback and that, I think is what leaders need to do as we move forward in this world.

Sanjog Aul [00:43:15]:
On behalf of our show and the listeners, thanks so much, Helen, for sharing your insights. I know these are not the easy questions, but then a good conversation like this could hopefully provoke thought among all the listeners who are trying to get better themselves and also take their organization to the next level. So this was amazing input. So thanks so much again for taking the time.

Helen Norris [00:43:40]:
Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Sanjog Aul [00:43:43]:
Great. So listeners, hope you enjoyed it. It rattles a few brains, including mine. Please like us on Facebook search for CTN CIO Talk Network. Be sure to follow us on Twitter and join our LinkedIn group. Thank you again for listening to this segment on CTN This is Sanjog Aul your talk show host till next week. Take care and God bless.