Navigating the Human Element in Digital Transformation - Stefanie Krievins, Business Coach and Podcast Host

Welcome to the CFO Corner. I'm your host, Nick Ezzo. In the CFO Corner, we sit down with CFOs and corporate finance professionals and people who support them to hear about the innovative approaches and technology they use to scale and grow their organizations. With me today is Stephanie Krievins, a trained coach and facilitator with experience in HR consulting, executive and business coaching, nonprofit management, and process and systems design.

Stephanie is the host of the Hot Mess Hotline, a podcast for ambitious leaders who want to be in the C-suite. Welcome, Stephanie. Thanks, Nick. Thanks for having me.

Yeah. OK, so let's get started. Can you tell us about your role and how you work with the C-suite? Yeah, so oftentimes the C-suite will bring me in when they have a change management challenge.

And so starting in 2020, the rate of adoption or the rate of us trying to make digital transformation efforts really sped up in our businesses across the country. So that's been a lot of what we're focusing on is how to make digital transformation actually happen with our people inside of the business. Ideally, digital transformation should impact every single function in the business, not just IT. And so we've been working with a lot of C-suite leaders to make that a reality.

And really what digital transformation is, is the technology is there to solve some of the problems that we want, but where we run into roadblocks in our organization really is with the people not adopting the technology. So it then becomes an issue of how do we get our people to engage themselves? How do we get our people to motivate themselves? How do we get our people to change their habits to adopt the technology that we've that we've invested in on all sides of the business.

Yeah, I'd like to explore that a little bit further on the adoption side of things. But before we go there, digital transformation is a term that gets bandied about quite a bit. I think I understand what it means. Maybe I have a different definition.

How do you define digital transformation within the corporate scene? Yeah, so little known secret, a lot of IT leaders don't know what digital transformation is. They're making it up as we go along. So if you feel in the dark, my finance professional, there are many others in the dark too.

And frankly, what that means is there's probably, if you ask 100 people, what is digital transformation? There's a hundred different answers and there's multiple layers. From my very simplistic view, I see digital transformation as the opportunity to truly align the customer and employee and all stakeholder experience across all lines of the business so that data flows in and out cohesively. And the age old problem, hopefully that we could solve of sales promising one thing and the service side delivering another, digital transformation should create alignment so that sales sells what the tech side or the service side can actually deliver.

Or, you know, for my finance friends, that the same data that flows out of your office stays in the same database to lower level staff or other departments. So I know my definition is very simplistic, But to me, it means alignment and integration across all business functions. Well, thanks for that definition. I think that makes a lot of sense to me.

And I think it aligns with my definition as well. Let's go back to this hesitation question before where you'd mentioned that there's sometimes a reluctance to adopt or fully embrace digital transformation within an organization. Where's that coming from? How do we mitigate that?

you know, what are the causes behind that? Yeah. So again, my simplistic view, because I know how people do and don't change. Digital transformation is a change management problem.

And as human beings, we have a natural aversion or fear to change. And this comes from the way our brains evolved with us sitting around the campfire, fearing the woolly mammoth. And the only way we survived was if we stuck with our people, we did what we know, we used our skills, people had different roles. But If we got separated from our people, you were probably likely to die.

And the reality is, is none of that is relevant in 2023, but the oldest part of our brain sees fear and change as stress and death. And it doesn't know if stress is, if it's a one out of a 10, if that means, Oh, not so bad. Or if it's 10 out of a 10, it translates both one out of 10 and 10 out of 10 as certain death. And so what people can't manage, they can't self-manage their fears.

And so it turns into, Oh my God, I'm going to lose my job. Oh my gosh, this technology is going to take away my livelihood. And then if my livelihood goes away, they're going to fire me and my wife's going to divorce me. Then I'm going to lose my house and it's all over.

And so in half of a nanosecond, our brain goes through that fear and we can't manage our way out of it without self-awareness. So we put people with self-awareness to be like, you're not going to die. The woolly mammoth's not gonna get you because this change is happening. And as human beings, we go through what's called the change curve.

And it's just a pattern where we first resist it, we deny it, we blame ourselves, we blame others, we get super confused about it. And then we can begin walking ourselves back into problem solving. And so again, without self-awareness, you can't coach yourself out of that. And managers can't coach their employees out of that without more tools to do that.

Yeah, yeah, I love your analogy on the sitting around the campfire. I'm not worried about the woolly mammoth. I think I could outrun a woolly mammoth. I think the saber-toothed tiger is the one I'd be most concerned about.

Yes, yes, and I don't have my animals aligned with like when humans were alive, so. Well, they were there. Not literal. In North America, it's the mega fauna.

So when we're talking about the adoption and the hesitancy, to me, that seems like it's from people who are set in their ways. I've been doing the same job a certain way for a certain number of years. And that kind of change is scary because I don't know that I'm gonna be able to, you know, cope and adapt with that change. So I think that that's, you're spot on with that psychology.

But what about the, I don't call them kids, I've got kids in college. What about the young people who are graduating from accounting school, CFO school, whatever, they're out in the world, how are they thinking about the nature of work? And how are they thinking about it with respect to what their parents used to do? Yeah, I think we can all recognize that especially the Gen Zers coming into the workforce and are in the workforce.

They are digital natives, very comfortable with. Really fairly complex technology that, you know, so I'm a Gen Xer, right? And like my first gaming system was a Coleco and it was amazing, right? My second one was an Atari and it was even more amazing.

But these folks are used to relatively complex technology, but to them, it's everyday life. And I think that point about them coming in and expecting to not have to manually move data around or, you know, I think about my accountant friends who are public accountants manually entering in, W2 info and all of that stuff, which hopefully there's some OCR readers that can do that now. But I think they expect very complex technology in the workplace that they do not understand the expense and investment that goes into making that happen.

So as a C-suite executive, I think our CFOs really have to help them understand, here's why we're not there yet. And what you're asking us to do is such a heavy lift in terms of time and energy. This is an entire three-year project in and of itself, and your expectations don't align with reality. Now, should we invest in it?

Absolutely. But I think educating these folks on it could go a long way because folks just don't understand. What they're asking for when they ask for certain technology upgrades or certain technology capabilities, they don't understand that that's a million dollar project. They're like, but it would make my life so easy.

Cool. We pay you $50,000 a year, all in that 75k. I need you to work for 10 more years. Then we're close to a million dollars.

Like there's a cost benefit to. All of this that, that folks need to take into consideration that goes beyond how bored they get in their job. Yeah. Yeah.

So it sounds like there's a continuum. You've got the people who are the resistors on one side who are hesitant to learn technology. You've got the accelerators on on the other side who want the tech and they want it now. How do we find that happy medium?

And then after you answer that question, I've got another follow-up question about robots taking away accounting jobs. How you find the happy medium. Everyone that is a mid-level leader and above, so manager, director, vice president, CFO, controller, you need to be communicating the vision story for finance and how it fits into the company. And the rate of change and the pace of change that you as the top level leader are creating for your finance function.

And so we use a tool called the Vision Story, and this is something I crafted based on other expert research, but you set the pace for change. Your employees don't get to, no matter how fast or how slow they go, you as the top level leader set the pace, you communicate that pace with a vision story and you communicate about seven more times than you want to. Yeah, you got to bring everybody on board. You got some people moving fast, some people moving slow.

You got to keep the group together so that we don't get trampled by woolly mammoths or eaten by saber tooth tigers. That's right. What about accountants? I mean, are they gonna be phased out?

I mean, is ChatGPT gonna take away accounting and finance jobs? I think as with all technology, technology phases out certain roles, but if we're doing it right as individuals and managing our careers, we're looking to up-level, we're looking to grow, we're looking to use our intellect more than our fingers to type or copy and paste, right? Control C, control V. And so I think your concern should not be about if your job is going to go away, your concern needs to be, am I always up leveling myself so that I can demonstrate the value to my company that I deserve?

And that connects to the vision story of finance in my company. If that's what you want. If that's not what you want, go make your own vision story for your career. But connect and demonstrate value in your role at higher levels.

Will certain jobs be phased out? Yes. But will we be able to level up as human beings to do more critical thinking, problem solving, absolutely. Yeah, I love that.

So I'm gonna leave you with the last word. Any thoughts you wanna leave with the audience, Steph? Gosh, you know, here's what I'd love to say. Change isn't hard and not all people hate change.

It's about you as a leader being able to use the right tools at the right time, based on your change problem to get them on board to what you're driving and how to drive value for the finance department in your firm. Well, thanks so much, ladies and gentlemen. I'd like to thank Stephanie Krievins. You can catch her podcast, The Hot Mess Hotline, where you get your podcasts today on behalf of the auditoria team and the rest of the CFO corner team.

Thanks so much, Stephanie. Everybody have a wonderful day. Thanks Nick!