Digital Leadership Excellence: A Journey that Must Continue

A guest post by MCMC's Racheal Chan Wai Lai, particpant of the third cohort of the MCMC-Huawei Malaysia Digital Leadership Excellence Programme.

The programme, which concluded earlier this month, brought together senior leaders from Malaysia's private, government, and academic sectors to foster leadership, innovation, and sustainable growth in the digital era. 

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My Journey: The Humanised Trinity of Digital Leadership 

I was enrolled to understand the mapping of the journey towards digital excellence. My start was delayed, but I was excited nonetheless when I was offered a spot in the Digital Leadership Excellence (DLE) programme after a colleague had to pull out. I jumped at the opportunity, knowing this was the exact growth challenge I had been seeking. In fact, missing the first two months of Cohort 3 only fueled my determination to learn quickly and catch up. It did not deter my enthusiasm as I was certain I was on the trail to something great and was committed to making a difference.
 
The aim: to decode the mastery of skills in the ever-evolving and intensive learning curve of digitalisation, an era that is moving faster than any atom. I had anticipated a curriculum of strategies and frameworks. Instead, what I received was a profound lesson in humanity, a revelation that the true engine of transformation is an unlikely trinity of Courage, Culture, and Purpose. 

The foundation: More than tools and touchpoints, it needed more… 

We began with the hard skills. An immense wave of knowledge flooded our minds that was already very much set in what we have learned and navigated in the course of our careers: dissecting the mechanics of digital transformation, learning how the future of digitalisation and leadership work inherently together, and how understanding customer behaviour and automation can streamline operations. 

The very first day, I was met with an immense conflict of understanding of how things have changed and how it is essential to be immersed in the "voice of the customer". To me it has always been pushing the envelope further a to achieve what is or what we thought was the goal. 

Clearly, in the execution of tasks, I realised we had failed to see what is core and important to us. 

This was my introduction to the first pillar: Courage. It is an inward-looking step and brave honesty in knowing what we know isn’t enough. 

Dual courage: To lead and to change, cognisance before leadership begins 

This wasn't about reckless bravery. It was about the courage to lead — to stand in the face of uncertainty, to make decisions with incomplete information and to champion a vision that others cannot yet see. It’s the courage to say, "We must move here," when the destination is shrouded in fog. 

Huawei’s energy and synergy to me was clear and concise, the tandem of moving in cohesion with all was imperative to success. This has taught me that courage is not just about the initial thrust; it is also about the resilience to persist. This is where the courage to change comes in. We learned that stubborn adherence to a failing plan is not dedication; it is folly. 

True leadership involves the humility to admit when a tactic isn't working and the agility to pivot, all while keeping the ultimate goal—the True North—fixed in view. 
It is the foundational path to success which is rarely a straight line, but a series of calibrated corrections. 

The uncomfortable teacher: Embracing intelligent failure 

This concept of "calibrated corrections" led us to the most challenging, yet liberating, part of the journey: the acceptance of failure. The course reframed failure not as a mark of shame, but as the most effective teacher. In the relentless pursuit of innovation and customer relevance, missteps are not just inevitable; they are essential, just as Thomas Edison conducted plenty of failed experiments before finally producing the light bulb we use today. That’s the price of admission for true breakthroughs, which to me seemed to be useful learning laboratories that yielded priceless data, bringing us one step closer to a solution that would work. 

Failure, we learned, is simply success in progress. 

The soil in which everything grows: Culture and mindset 

However, a team cannot embrace failure if it lives in fear. An organisation like Huawei, and the other organisations we visited during this trip, cannot pivot if they are rigid with bureaucracy. This is where the theoretical met the practical. I came to understand that culture and mindset are not soft, HR-centric concepts. They are the very soil in which digitalisation and customer-centricity either flourish or wither. 

A tool is only as effective as the person wielding it, and a person is only as innovative as their environment allows them to be. We studied how to build a culture of psychological safety, where team members felt empowered to speak up, experiment, and challenge the course without fear of reprisals. I have seen this evocative culture within Huawei. 

Charting the course: The discipline of benchmarking 

So, with courage as our fuel and a learning culture as our foundation, how do we ensure we're moving in the right direction? This is where the discipline of benchmarking became a useful compass. A journey is not about blind experimentation. It was about strategically benchmarking key components — not just against competitors, but against the best-in-class in learning agility, decision speed, and customer empathy. 

The Synthesis: Where purpose paves the path 

All of these threads — courage, culture, customer, and digitalisation — converge on a single, powerful truth that has become my guiding light: "When there is purpose, there is a path." The goal of leadership is not to magically create a journey free of obstacles, failures or difficult decisions, it is to forge a "why"—a purpose so clear, so compelling, and so shared that it illuminates the path through the challenges. When a team is united by a genuine purpose, the courage to make tough calls is found. The resilience to learn from failure is unlocked. The energy to constantly benchmark and improve is generated. This learning journey did not just provide me with a new set of skills. It has gifted me a new lens through which to view leadership itself. 

It is no longer a role defined by authority, but a practice defined by the courageous cultivation of a purpose-driven culture, ready to thrive in the beautiful, unpredictable landscape of the digital age. 

With all that I have experienced, I am certain that my enlightened self-discovery will heighten with new perspectives as I understand now that I walked among giants and that my journey continues. 

Thank you all at Huawei for lighting up my path in which I will continuously question in how we do things with the knowledge we not yet know but will certainly embrace through the passage towards leadership and digital excellence.

Learn more about the Digital Leadership Excellence Programme.


About the author

Racheal Chan Wai Lai
Head, Industry Relations Department
Malaysian Communications & Multimedia Commission (MCMC)

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Disclaimer: Any views and/or opinions expressed in this post by individual authors or contributors are their personal views and/or opinions and do not necessarily reflect the views and/or opinions of Huawei Technologies.