Digitalisation and leadership

I have been building IT solutions since I was a boy, getting a drum program to run in sync with a Casio synthesiser while I played the guitar myself. The fascination with what you can make machines do has stayed with me all the way — but it is not the machines that have decided whether the projects created value.

Peter Bastian wrote in “Ind i musikken” (Into the Music) that it is in the silence between the notes that the music comes into being. There I was, programming everything precisely, and he claimed that the experience was really created by what we ourselves fill into the gaps. He was right — and the same goes for digitalisation.

Competencies put into a system

At ISS we invented what we called IKA2: a competence licence in the same format as the old EU driving licences, laminated and all. It was the project manager’s stamp to show that we vouched for the person being trained to a certain level, and it was used as a job application at the local bicycle repairer or the village co-op. It worked because it was an effort from company to company in the same language. We managed the whole thing in an Access database we built ourselves.

It put the company’s social responsibility into a system and laid the foundation for the entire CSR area, which was developed into a very successful business — something nobody thought possible when we started.

ECOL: HR out to the front line

In 2007 I became HR manager at Eltel Networks: a complex organisation with two employers’ associations, 11 collective agreements and 23 local agreements. Drawing up an employment contract was a nightmare, and 16 people were involved before the new colleague had arrived. The costs of recruitment, employment and induction were sky-high, and it created organisational instability and less satisfied customers.

Together with an external partner we developed, in two months, an automated process that took every parameter into account and could generate an individual contract. We called the system ECOL: Employee Circle Of Life. On top of all the practical things a new colleague also needs, we placed a traffic-light management system. The process was cut to less than half the time, with zero errors, and three quarters of those involved could spend their time on value-creating work instead.

It is leadership, not technology

What all the projects have in common is that the technology was the easy part. The hard part was getting leaders to change their ways of working, to dare to cut processes away and to insist that HR belongs on the front line as a daily tool for the leader — not as a staff function you send cases to.

The leadership readiness of the future therefore does not primarily need to be able to code. It must be able to ask the right questions about what really creates value, hold on to a change long enough for it to take hold, and have the humility to ask the people who do the work what the screen ought to look like.