Print Business Leadership in the Digital Age
Leading by example is the most powerful way to approach challenging business environments. When the leadership is engaged in constant learning, the culture of the company is much more likely to be a learning organization.
We are in the midst of an uncomfortable and pervasive transition. It is so pervasive, we take it for granted. Technology is moving faster than most humans can keep up with; there is no pause to consider the ramifications as huge profits are the primary motivating factor in pushing technology as fast as possible.
As a print business leader, you cannot hide from this fact. Your customers are demanding that you solve challenges that require technology as well as provide access via software so they can interact with you in a self-service manner online. The profitability of your business requires that you continuously evaluate the workflows that drive your business for efficiency. For all business leaders, this is a steep learning curve that isn’t leveling off in their lifetimes.
It is easy to assume that what you need to thrive in the digital age is a more technically competent leadership. Of course this would help. But there is another underlying skill that is critical to leadership success in the digital age: compassion and empathy for the humans that work for you as they grapple with the technology changes. All organizations have a culture; in my experience, the culture of an organization is closely related to the personality and leadership style of the humans in the ownership/management role. If your management team is not technical and not empathetic to the people who work for them about the uncertainty that technology is introducing into their lives, it is a recipe for a culture of fear.
The people working for you come from all walks of life and have varying degrees of technical competency. The younger people who work for you were born into a very different technology environment than those of us who attended college before the Internet or cellphones. This is where our school system fails us; we get educated with a very uniform group of our peers (age, etc.) and then we get thrown into the work world where our colleagues and customers are very diverse. Where do we learn how to best interact with people two generations younger than us?
As a leader, you have to be thinking about how your business is investing in both the technology and your people. Everyone knows they have to invest in the technology; you only have to lose one big deal to a competitor with a better online system to get that lesson. What we often miss is that we have to have the people that can work in harmony with the technology. Great technology deployed into an organization that is deathly afraid of change and technically challenged is a giant frustration and a waste of money for all the parties involved.
The people side of technology isn’t easy to measure, doesn’t fit into a spreadsheet, and doesn’t have a highly motivated software sales representative taking you out to dinner. Your people are coming to work each day with the uneasy feeling that software is encroaching on what they do everyday. I interviewed a customer service representative recently about how her job has changed with the successful implementation of a Print MIS and an integrated web-to-print solution. She was initially hired to manually enter jobs from the web-to-print solution into the legacy/non-integrated Print MIS. She did this job for a full year before the new systems were implemented. I asked her what her feelings were about the new system. She immediately said she assumed she would be laid off. As soon as she saw the integrated demo, she knew the work she was doing every day wasn’t going to be needed moving forward. I interviewed her a full year after the implementation; she described her position now as an account manager who was helping customers with marketing ideas and providing valuable analysis on how the programs they are running are working. She did lose her old job to software; to her credit, she learned the technology and then demonstrated how she could be deployed more strategically. She loves her new job and can’t imagine going back to the data entry job.
The culture that I’ve seen work best for dealing with the rapid change in technology is a culture of learning and personal responsibility. Nobody can learn for you. You can attend a training, but you have to learn. A culture where the business leader sets an example as a learner is the best culture to thrive in this environment. No matter your age, no matter your position in the company, you need to keep learning. Nobody is an expert because the ground underneath everyone is shifting. You cannot rely on your 30 years of experience in print production to lead print production anymore. You have to see that today that the tools that impact your approach have to be upgraded for the toolset you have today. Experience is important but being a learner is even more important.
Every print business has technology that is underutilized. Individual users of the technology often complain about how they were not trained properly. My question back to them is always, “What effort have you put in to learn the technology?” A trainer cannot learn for you. A trainer can simply assist in your learning. You can’t delegate learning—it’s a personal responsibility thing. One of the primary reasons print software is underutilized is the lack of learning by the users.
