Introduction
Digital leader empower people with vision, understanding, clarity and agility. Waltraud Glaeser, Leadership Coach
Definitions
Leadership
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
Management is about coping with complexity, while leadership is about coping with change (Kotter 2017)
Management brings order and predictability to a situation. But that’s no longer enough—to succeed, companies must be able to adapt to change. Leadership then, is about learning ho to cope with rapid change (Kotter 2017).
- Management involves planning and budgeting.
Leadership involves setting direction. - Management involves organizing and staffing.
Leadership involves aligning people. - Management provides control and solves problems.
Leadership involves providing motivation.
Context of leadership
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 that cause major changes. (Karimi and Walter 2015).
Verhoef et al. (2021) identifies three phases of these disruptive changes:
digitization, digitalization, and digital transformation.
- Digitization is the “the process of converting analog signals into a digital form, and ultimately into binary digits (bits)” (Tilson, Lyytinen, and Sørensen 2010, 749).
- Digitalization is “a sociotechnical process of applying digitizing techniques to broader social and institutional contexts” (Tilson, Lyytinen, and Sørensen 2010, 749).
- Digital transformation is “a process that aims to improve an entity by triggering significant changes to its properties through combinations of information, computing, communication, and connectivity technologies” (Vial 2019, 118).
Digital leadership
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
- dissolving inertia and resistance to change,
- leading employees to assume roles that were traditionally outside of their functions,
- acting as boundary spanners that foster close collaboration between business and IT functions,
- depending on analytical skills to solve increasingly complex business problems,
- ensuring that digital technologies are properly leveraged (i.e., used).
Digital leaders empower people with VUCA — vision, understanding, clarity and agility.
Homework
Read Judge et al. (2002) and answer following questions:
- What are the most salient aspects of personality as proposed by the five-factor model of personality (i.e., Big Five traits)?
- How are these traits found to relate to leadership?
- What surprised you most?