What is leadership and what is special about it in the digital age?
Neu-Ulm University of Applied Sciences
February 14, 2024
Digital leader empower people with vision, understanding, clarity and agility. Waltraud Glaeser, Leadership Coach
From leadership
to the digital age
to digital leadership
What is leadership?
A leader. . .is like a shepherd. He stays behind the flock, letting the most nimble go out ahead, whereupon the others follow, not realizing that all along they are being directed from behind. Nelson Mandela
A leader is “is one or more people who selects, equips, trains, and influences one or more follower(s) who have diverse gifts, abilities, and skills and focuses the follower(s) to the organization’s mission and objectives causing the follower(s) to willingly and enthusiastically expend spiritual, emotional, and physical energy in a concerted coordinated effort to achieve the organizational mission and objectives.” (Winston and Patterson 2006, 8).
Management is about coping with complexity, leadership is about coping with change (Kotter 2017)
What is the digital age?
The digital age is coined by digital technologies (e.g., social media, mobile computing, analytics/big data, cloud computing — SMAC) that are inherently disruptive and that cause major changes (Karimi and Walter 2015).
Verhoef et al. (2021) identifies three phases of digital transformation:
digitization, digitalization, and digital transformation.
What are specifics of the digital age
that require distinct leadership skills?
Digital technologies do not develop linearly, but exponentially, which is leading to significant changes in peoples behavior, attitudes, and expectations.
Volatility
Uncertainty
Complexity
& Ambiguity
Digital technology has changed and is changing organizations’ structure, work environment, processes and culture, in an irreversible way, creating new challenges that leaders have to face.
Organizational leaders must work to ensure that their organizations is capable of responding to the disruptions associated with the use of digital technologies and of responding to the changes (Vial 2019), e.g., by
Digital leaders empower people with vision, understanding, clarity and agility.
Read Judge et al. (2002) and answer following questions:
Moore’s law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years
Metcalfe’s law states that the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system