Jeremy Blain is determined to help the current generation of CEOs bridge the gap in our digital era. The CEO of Performance Works International (PWI) hosts several podcasts, workshops, and coaching seminars to help entrepreneurs come to terms with the many moving parts of digital transformation and include them in their business strategy.
Being digitally confident isn’t easy; that’s why Blain wants leaders to accelerate through the challenging pace of digital transformation to develop their business. Blain spoke to us about digital leadership and why entrepreneurs need to adjust their leadership.
Can you tell us about Performance Works International?
It’s a modern consulting and action research company. It’s focused on transforming leadership practices for a digital world. The pace of things means that we need to keep on top of the data. We invest in annual research, which includes consulting, learning, and coaching.
We focus on the three transformational challenges that leaders have: digital transformation, workforce, and leadership. Leaders need to develop to become 21st Century leaders, not 20th Century leaders.
What role does Digital Leadership Play?
I have just released a piece of research called The Digital Leadership Perspective 2024. It’s never just about digital transformation. It’s about the leaders themselves. We have this whole digital space we must adapt to, that includes cyber security, generative AI, Web3 coming around the corner. How you adopt data, how you build ecosystems and move away from platforms, all of these. In my experience, many leaders whose legacy was in the 20th Century are finding it hard to shift their mindset and are going on a very steep learning curve.
Tell us about your book Unleash the Inner CEO?
We have been talking about distributed leadership empowerment for decades, yet there’s no blueprint out there for how to do it. So sure, there are case studies and data about empowerment, but there’s nothing out there about how-to, and that’s the leadership question for today. I developed that book as a blueprint to explain why this is important and what needs to be done at an organizational level.
How you adopt things like horizontal management principles, moving from performance supervision to performance support and then to the individual contributor; how entrepreneurs can unleash their inner CEO, which is the whole point behind the book. I put that together by rolling 90-day plans and learning suggestions so that it becomes a fast-start planner for any company, large, small, or medium, that’s ready to go.
What challenges did you face in your career, and how did you overcome them?
There are hurdles every day, but I’m still a hungry learner. Reinventing myself as a leader, staying ahead, and probably learning ahead of other leaders in the space that I’m teaching or consulting— all of these are hurdles that I’m dealing with. The way that I deal with it is by embracing experimentation, embracing learning, and treating my job as iterative and the things that I do as iterative activities; making the same mistake is not acceptable to me. Being iterative has helped me tackle those hurdles and accept them.
What advice would you give aspiring entrepreneurs who want to become influential leaders?
First of all, leave your ego at the door and be open about what you know and what you don’t know. Have that courage to step into the unknown, embrace those hurdles, experiment, and accept that perhaps 70 per cent of the solution is okay; perfection isn’t needed. Be an influential leader through service, not through command control or the stripes you think you’ve got on your arm or earned because you’ve been a leader for 20 years.
Sometimes, slowing down to speed up as a leader is your greatest friend. Perfection is not necessarily needed. You can speed up to get something out there, but you can also accept that you might take one step back to move two steps forward. It all boils down to the atomic unit of your business, and it’s not a number, revenue, or profit; it’s the person. Without people, your customers, or your employees, you’ve got nothing. You have to look after them before you look after your business.
Aaron Levinson | Contributing Writer
