The Soft Skills of Great Digital Organizations

Smart organizations have recognized that introducing new technology into the workplace isn’t about hardware or software: it’s about wetware, also known as human beings. If you want to be the kind of nimble business that can make the most of successive waves of tech innovation, you need human beings who can adapt to change.

That means equipping each person in your enterprise with the skills and mindset that will help them successfully adapt whenever you introduce new tools like Slack, Basecamp, or even Google Drive into your workplace. But what exactly are these digital skills? They may be more familiar and low-tech than you think. Here’s how to cultivate a more digitally nimble workplace:

Goal-centric thinking. It’s really easy to get caught up in the pressure to adopt the latest cool platform or tool. But most people only embrace technologies that actually help them achieve concrete and valued goals. Accept that not every tool is going to be embraced by every employee — and empower them to choose the tools that will actually help them work more effectively. To ensure that inertia (or tech phobia) doesn’t discourage people from adopting the technologies that really can be valuable to them, communicate the specific problems, benefits, or situations the technology is meant to address. And teach your employees to start each tech adoption process by thinking about the specific goals they want that technology to help them accomplish, so that they make effective use of each tool.

Collaboration skills. Collaboration tools like Google Docs and Basecamp can’t make up for missing kindergarten. If your employees don’t know how to play nicely together, having the tools to communicate is not going to combat tendencies to hoard knowledge and resist sharing progress with one another. Your organization will only make effective use of collaboration software if you foster a culture of mutual trust, and reward team effort as much as individual contribution. Even a cooperative team culture may have players who have difficulty sharing: help those employees build their collaborative capacity by encouraging them to share in a smaller way, and to expand their use of collaboration tools as they get comfortable sharing what they know.