The speed of current emerging technologies like generative AI is impressive, but it only looks to continue moving faster. Even now, the excitement is palpable. While it’s good to be excited, it’s also important to remember that we must lead our organizations with our heads as much as our hearts.
To be clear, technology is powerful and provides many advantages. But with that power comes the responsibility to continue cultivating and maintaining relationships with your internal and external stakeholders. Those relationships, built on trust, establish the currency we need to grow our people, profits and revenue.
Bridging The Technology And Human Connection To Build Digital Trust
Digital trust starts with the testing, regression, validation and the cybersecurity elements that you usually think of. But I believe it should go further to also include the cultural trust, psychological trust and experimentation trust that you foster inside your company.
These human elements must align with your purpose and your technology to help you build customer loyalty, improve operational efficiencies and enhance or create new capabilities. Anything can and should be improved upon over time. Here are my thoughts on how to go about that.
Technology Can Skyrocket Growth Or Torpedo Progress: Your Approach Matters
You should be leading technology initiatives in partnership with the rest of your leadership team. Here’s why. No matter what industry you’re in, you will continue to have an increasing number of digital assets and processes, as well as some digital products or services.
In my business, I see it with manufacturing and wholesale distributor companies developing value-added services to their core product offerings, services that very often rely on digital tools to deliver. I see it every time a life sciences company has to manage safety and compliance issues while also delivering personalized outcomes. I see it increasing in frequency across many industries.
Significant gains happen in seemingly small increments, and they usually start in areas that don’t make headlines—the non-glamorous stuff. I’m talking about answering questions like, “How do I get more throughput on processing accounts receivable?” or the small reductions in the time it takes to serve a customer. These processes might mean saving only a half-percent in cost, but that half-percent can mean significant cost reductions when multiplied by your price-to-earnings ratio. That will then translate into an improvement in your enterprise value.
These improvements will be heavily influenced by the technology you leverage. The key here is automation, whether it’s AI-powered or not. Automation should always be in service to improve business processes and bring more value to the end customer while increasing efficiency and effectiveness.
It’s how you solve unique customer problems, enrich people’s jobs and get better data for faster decision-making that the human then can run their final mile on. That’s why it’s important for you to understand the potential rewards, limitations and risks associated with your technology.
Fostering A Collective Leadership Mindset
Perception is key. While there are many technologies and processes that can support your business, digital trust isn’t just about how well your technology functions. It’s about how you apply it and the humans that it’s designed to serve. It requires a collective approach across all the functions in your organization to be stewards of your brand. This can mean anything from assessing cybersecurity threats and vulnerabilities to educating and empowering your people to help ensure a consistent customer experience.
While your data must absolutely be protected and access should be role-based, you must also make sure that your people have the information they need. You balance these two things by communicating and aligning on strategy. That way, you can reduce instances of different departments attempting to do their own thing—a common culprit for data silos and less effective tools.
No matter the business function, everyone has a role to play and must understand it. The technology must serve them in their role-specific goals so that they can focus on and enhance the special skills and deliverables that make your company so great. If your internal culture fosters trust, then the external trust will follow.
Thinking Beyond Data Governance And Compliance
Everything we do generates data, but building digital trust goes well beyond data governance. Data integrity and protection are a good start—but just a start. Beyond being transparent with your customers about how their data is handled and protected, your policies should extend to internal processes so that your people can learn and evolve. It’s your job to foster a culture of learning and failing fast, with enough guardrails to adapt protocols as technology and security needs evolve.
Unfortunately, vulnerabilities are a way of life, whether they involve emerging technologies or well-established platforms. Solid controls and audit frameworks, from creating DMZs for advanced technologies to conducting periodic security assessments, will help you continue to consume and adopt advanced technologies in a controlled manner.
You create trust when the outputs of these tools have been validated, and the results of your customer transactions are not only fair and equitable but increase the value you deliver.
Digital Trust As An Ongoing Process
There are many technologies, platforms and protocols to ensure compliance, prevent fraud and detect non-compliance. From a business standpoint, this is a necessary cost of doing business in the digital economy. It’s also an ongoing and continually improving process; it’s not one-and-done.
This is one of the reasons that developing a culture focused on learning and improving matters so much. Since people are your ultimate measure of success in creating trust, the health of your business will depend on their development over time. The more you develop your talent and their ability to communicate back areas for improvement, the more you will be able to discover where you can deliver impact, mitigate risk and facilitate growth.
This will never be a situation where one technology investment generates a 1,000% ROI or increase in efficiency. The sum of your strategies and processes over time will determine your resilience and the value you are able to deliver to the end customer.
