Navigating Politics

They can hinder digital initiatives. What can you do about it?

I’m doing a webinar "Don't Let Politics Block Your Digital Initiatives" with MIT Sloan Management Review on Thursday July 12. (11:00 a.m. EDT, 5:00 pm CEST, and 8:00 a.m. PDT.) I’ll be talking about internal politics, how they can hinder digital initiatives and what to do about it. I wrote about neutralizing internal politics on the MIT Sloan Management Review some time ago, and the webinar will go into more detail. I'll talk about 3 how's:

1. Deepening involvement

2. Broadening decision-making

3. Fluidifying silos

I got too many questions to answer them all during the webinar, so wrote some of them up here.

My webinar “Don't Let politics Block Your Digital Initiatives" triggered high interest and lots of questions. I'm writing a series of posts in response to the questions I did not have the time to answer during the event: "So many questions, so little time!"

I suggest you first check out the slides I used in order to understand the context for the questions in this series.

Overcoming challenges: 6 questions

Q1: What in your opinion is the biggest political challenge in digital transformation?

J: Fear.

Q2: On what level of the organization do you see most of the internal politics happen?

J: Territorial Challenges

Q3: How do you improve situations where BU managers or others posture alignment for digital platforms to upper management but are not really invested?

J: Walk the talk at the top.

Q4: What is the difference between a normal change management and digital initiatives?

J: Digital changes your vision of the world.

Q5: How would you know that politics are being managed well enough not to impact the success of the program, apart from just measuring the digital transformation KPIs?

J: Stories beat numbers.

Q6: What are your views on dealing with senior execs who downplay digital? How can you create a change that goes in the right direction?

J: Bring the outside in.