Leadership in a digital age

Digitalization and the changing world of work are accelerating this change in leadership [2]:

• The environment is becoming more unpredictable. This requires decisions under uncertainty and open processes that enable step-by-step progress.
• The increasing speed of processes and innovations requires faster decisions. The traditional official channels are often too slow for this. Decisions need to be made as locally as possible.
• Digitalization allows forms of collaboration without necessarily bringing people together. The task of leadership is to build bridges in order to create common ground, which can then become a "culture". This applies in particular to multicultural collaboration.
• Increasing automation is increasingly affecting knowledge work. While efficiency improvements have previously focused a lot on production processes, knowledge work is now increasingly becoming the focus of efficiency improvements. This requires management to accompany organizational design and change.

Surveys and studies are increasingly revealing a consistent picture of leadership in a digital age:

• Away from Taylorist silo thinking and towards joint process thinking.
• Away from heroes and specialists and towards collaboration, interdisciplinarity and co-creation.
• Away from hierarchical micromanagement towards joint goal setting and self-organization with coaching.
• Away from islands of knowledge towards networking.
• Away from fixed working hours and workplaces towards flexible working models.
• Away from rigid rules and processes towards flexible (dynamically robust) structures.
• Away from bonus systems towards motivation through self-determination, meaning and appreciation. [3]

The change affects both managers and employees. Leadership is neither disappearing nor diminishing, but is being practiced differently within the framework of new models and methods and tasks are being shared differently. This means that both managers and employees are rethinking and relearning. For example, while on the one hand they have to let go, on the other hand they need to take responsibility and organize themselves.

While the necessity and goals of change are widely accepted, the actual implementation is often unclear. Many organizations are experimenting with new models and practices to implement sustainable leadership. [2, p. 11] The extension of agile techniques to entire organizations is a concrete manifestation of what collaboration between leadership, employees, customers and suppliers can look like. We are only just beginning to understand what organizations can look like in the 21st century. Digitalization and agilization is the beginning of a major transformation, not the end.

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[1] Study by the New Quality of Work Initiative, p. 10, http://qr.wibas.com/leadinqa

[2] Zukunftsfähige Führung, Bertelsmann Stiftung, p. 5, http://qr.wibas.com/leadfuture

[3] Thanks to Pink: Drive