Digital Leadership (DL)
Is leadership in digital world different than in non-techy world? If so, how different? If not, why Johnston and Astrid have quite different experiences with digital transformation?
To get you start on these questions, I want to highlight some of the obvious changes that technology revolution has been a direct catalyst for. These changes have challenged the foundations of the previously mentioned traditional leadership styles. The first change is speed. In the digital world, all organizations are working at a much faster pace than ever before. This makes it impossible for a leader to be the authority who knows everything, but still requires them to have the capacity to deal with complex issues at a fast speed. This means today’s leader not only needs to be a lifelong learner but also needs to have the ability to gather talented people around themselves so they can make quick and right decisions on the fly. The second change is democracy. Technology revolution has made communication transparent and information distribution easy and fast with no privileges to certain individuals, groups, and classes. With Internet access, we can send a message directly to an individual or to the entire world with a few simple clicks. In organizations, this attribute of technology makes it possible for top leadership team to communicate directly with any employees at any levels of the organization and vice versa. This type of non-hierarchical communication channels has greatly challenged one of the key traditional leadership concepts and that is the chain of command. The third change is diversity. In today’s digital world that the whole world is connected, the line between local and global is blurring and mixed. Local organizations can have employees working from across the globe and international organizations can capitalize on resources scattered around the world, all of which have created a heterogeneous workforce that traditional leadership styles were not created for.
Further, traditional low-tech leadership works well in a well-structured organization that resides in a relatively stable society. But the changes mentioned above have, to certain extent, flattened all the organizations. To be resilient, reliable, and efficient in the era of 4IR, more organizations are moving from being stable to becoming dynamic, from working with limited local opportunities and resources to seeking collaborations from the outside. So, professionals in the field of training and education are now working in a fast and ever evolving training and education environment, dealing with what many people call “disruptive technologies” on a daily basis, and experiencing both accelerated digitalization and information democratization. Being able to engage in multidirectional communications and collaborations effectively and productively seems to become the best practice in today’s training and education industry.
I also want to point out that digital leadership and technological leadership are two different leadership roles. Digital leadership emphasizes on utilizing organizational digital assets to transform an organization, whereas technological leadership focuses mainly on leading specific technology integration innovations. So, what is digital leadership and how is(n’t) it different?
