In 2013, as fast-emerging digital applied sciences and channels have been making a sea change in client product advertising, A.G. Lafley, then CEO of Procter & Gamble, acted to make sure that the buyer packaged items big wouldn’t be left behind. He appointed F.D. Wilder, one in every of this text’s coauthors, as international head of e-business and tasked him with driving digital transformation throughout P&G’s many manufacturers. The objective of this initiative was to develop and combine P&G’s digital advertising talents, e-commerce channels, and IT platforms — driving up gross sales, revenue margins, and money circulation within the course of.

Because the e-business crew thought of this difficult mandate, it targeted on the digital advertising capability of P&G’s model and enterprise managers as a key enabler of the transformation. Sadly, the crew discovered that the literature concerning digital transformation tends to provide brief shrift to the aptitude of leaders: It focuses primarily on elevating the “digital IQ” of the workforce — that’s, the measurement of how a lot a corporation can revenue from digital and technological options.

Digital IQ has its limitations as an efficient measure of capability, not the least of which is its robust emphasis on educating and testing for generic vocabulary and information. But digital and different transformational efforts almost all the time require staff to work in new and unfamiliar methods. To make sure that they will do that new work, leaders should be capable to assess worker capability by connecting it not solely to information and expertise but additionally to focused actions and efficiency outcomes. Solely then can they establish and activate pockets of power within the digital capability of staff and isolate and remediate pockets of weak point.

Assessing the Dimensions of Worker Potential

To evaluate worker capability, leaders have to establish the attributes of worker roles and convert these attributes into efficiency metrics. Then they want dashboards that can be utilized to trace and enhance these metrics, similar to by crafting coaching applications and different interventions to deal with gaps within the talents of people and teams.

At P&G, the e-business crew recognized a set of key attributes that outline the digital advertising capability of the corporate’s model and enterprise managers. These 5 attributes have been anchored within the buyer’s digital journey and relate to the traditional advertising funnel (discovery, consciousness, curiosity, buy, and loyalty).