7 Must Have Skills for Leadership in Digital World

“It’s no longer the big beating the small, but the fast beating the slow” by Eric Pearson.

As for many years, everyone has been talking about VUCA, which is volatility, uncertainty, complexity & ambiguity. In this new world executives & organizational leaders are facing unrevealed situations that give rise to huge confusion. For decades, businesses have utilized technology to decrease cost & complexity, build better products, and develop new business models. Digital platforms provide huge value, help us to connect, cooperate & widen our minds – elevating awareness about main issues, leading people together for a mutual motive. Let’s find out how Leadership in Digital World works

Leadership in Digital World

Digital leadership is about authorizing others to lead & creating self-organized teams that boost their day-to-day operations. Leadership is no longer controlled – it requires participation, engagement & contribution from everyone.

But why digital leadership is important? The new capability of advanced robotics & artificial intelligence presents crucial new challenges for leaders as they look for to change their strategies for a digital age. Leaders will have to create & lead the way forward among disturbance, transitions, chaos & ambiguity.

Strongly operating a digital transformation at your organization needs reevaluating your leadership talent. Those leaders must own the skills to follow a fast- changing environment & cultivate those skills in others. They must encourage their organizations to solve big problems. Organizations that keep ahead of this digital revolt will be the ones that catch higher profits & market share.

A research conducted by McKinsey presents that appearing digital ecosystems could report for more than $60 trillion in revenue by 2025. The job of digital leaders will be important as they will need to guide, design & build systems that produce an all-inclusive future for everyone. 

According to Learn Transformation Experts who follow these below mentioned strategies are best furnished to navigate what lies ahead.

Strategies/ Skills for Digital Leadership

1. Forget hierarchy

• The digital world is one of empowered, personalized experiences, and leaders must welcome that it has no borders or titles. Leaders cannot take possession of everything. A leader cannot know everything & the hierarchical approach is no longer feasible.
• By essence, digital technology is manifold & all-inclusive and, when bring up, can give leaders infinite opportunities gear innovation, share knowledge, solve problems & learn from others working on the ground.
• Every member of the team should be motivated to contribute ideas & insights to achieve common goals. When people care about the tasks they are doing & work with their heart and soul, great things are possible.

2. Digging a growth mindset

• This term refers to a person’s ability to enjoy challenges, endeavor to learn & frequently see capability to develop new skills. This honesty to learning & discovery is important in today’s world since leaders face many challenges today, especially in the digital world, that they’ve never experienced before.
• For instance, [24]7 Customer, a call center based in India & the Philippines, lately experienced a digital transformation to become [24]7.ai, switching their focus to customer experience software & AI to automate more routine calls.
• In order to get ready their employees for this change, [24]7.ai produced a Digital Leader Profile program to generate a growth mindset & train customer service team leader in 7 roles that would motivate risk-taking, learning, experimentation, digital fluency & openness to change.

3. Capability to experiment, innovate, navigate & execute

• The contradiction of digital leadership resides in staying focused on the present, while also envisioning the future & generating a roadmap to reach it. Innovation is the way to endure resistance to creative destruction & disruptions. Leaders need to lead innovation & experimentation, and to consistently progress to meet vigorous needs.
• The EY report on digital transformation states that: “Digital-ready CIOs are preoccupied with innovation: they are continually on the look-out for opportunities for IT to uplift revenues, cut costs, , create efficiencies or ease the development of new products & services. And this doesn’t just apply to IT departments—all leaders face the same challenges & opportunities to welcome change.When organizations generate a culture of learning, failures and experiments lead to inventions & innovations. Creating leadership at all levels provides the support needed for teams to recapitulate their way to success.

4. Sense making

• Sense making refers to the process of creating meaning out of the chaotic world around us. It permits the digital leader to define the right course in the situation of events, experiences, or challenges that jump up in an ambiguous, confused or unexpected manner. We then try to make sense by collecting data, learning from others. From there, we experiment with new solutions to learn how the system reacts.
• For instance, Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, has been a sense maker throughout his career at Microsoft. By switching job, he learned about the complete processes & culture of the company. When he became CEO, he met with customers, employees & experts to understand the issues on people’s minds & possible pathways to success. Like Satyam Nadella, leaders should think about what additional sense making they need to do to keep up with shifting markets, business models, technologies & workforces.

5. Fast Decision-making & Agile teams

• The pace at which you do things can make the difference between success & failure in the digital economy. Leaders need a procedure to make their teams more agile, to deal with unexpected changes & challenge the circumstances.
• Digital leadership needs flexibility to handle pressure & continuous changes, and to take decisions with agility. The projects you’re working on can lose importance very swiftly through no fault of your own. In these moments of unpredictability, experts should be trusted to revive things, turn the organization and show the way forward.

6. Prioritizing communication

• When employees don’t understand the company’s direction or vision, they’re much more likely to be detached. Communication & the ability to influence people, are especially important in leader’s role. The digital world is not only about technology, but it’s about people. 
• Leaders need to create a captivating vision and communicate with clarity so that everyone understands what the team is trying to achieve & why.Digital Leadership also needs to be observant, and to create a long-term feasible value proposition for all stakeholders. Leaders needs to energize everyone & motivate them with an inclusive vision. When people know the why, they resolve the how.

7. Successful collaboration with other leaders & across teams

• The digital transformation needs leaders to collaborate well with others, and in many cases, it’s not just other managers, but other teams as well: 70% of digitally grown businesses use multi-functional teams to organize their work.
• With more supple networked & distributed teams, collaborative skills are interpretative in the digital age. New disruptive technologies are swiftly reformulating roles & needs the collaboration across teams who haven’t worked together before. For example, the uplift of digital marketing technologies means CIOs & CMOs are progressively collaborating with each other.

All the above skills will help leaders to lead the digital transformation of your business & will be condemning to the success of your digital future.

Check out the Video

How Sundar Pitchai CEO of Google is a Leader worth following in the Present Times?

Sundar Pitchai is one example of a current day digital leader who is steering the movability of the Digital twist in ways that are worthy of following.

For example, having to navigate Google after the leaving of its renowned founders meant that Pitchai had to communicate his distinct sight & he has done this in a manner that does justice to the basic values & the imaginations on which Google was founded, and at the same time, has to also given his employees a new sense of direction.

Besides that, Sundar Pitchai did not lose vision of the values that are required to be a Digital Age leader who does not become an Automaton himself and as can be seen from his denial to work with the Pentagon on projects that his employees were unbearable with, Pitchai has led from the front.

Additionally, he is also leading his peers in other technology firms to reevaluate how newer technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) ought to be used for the public good.

Conclusion

The Digital Age demands utmost focus & high levels of hard work to just remain in the race. Skills such as Deep Work or the ability to work valuably without being diverted by the continuous buzz of our Digital Devices are required for all of us in the present times. The importance of leadership in a progressively digital world must not go unnoticed.

The important outcome from my recent leadership thought experiment is this: the greatest leaders are those who make everybody around them better and are motivated & excited when those same people excel even their skills & achievements. The more highly skilled & adaptable leaders your organization promotes & develops, the brighter its future will be.

FAQs

Key Takeaways

• Effective leadership in the digital environment requires strong communication abilities both online and offline.
• Digital executives need to be strategic thinkers who can spot possibilities and use technology to their benefit.
• Harnessing the collective intelligence and different abilities necessary for success in the digital world requires collaboration and cross-functional teamwork.