The Key Role of Leadership in the Digital Transformation

Introduction

During our last articles, we tackled the subject of Digital Transformation along with Agile Methodologies and Human Resources.

However, change cannot successfully occur without a proper leadership style to lead the digital transformation and its actors.

Businesses must adapt to the increased market disruption and rising competition by focusing on its leadership and personnel.

So what is leadership? How is it relevant to the digital transformation process? And what styles of leadership work best during this change.

Leadership

Influence, maximize, and achieve. These are the three main pillars of leadership. It consists of:?

• Influencing others to follow your lead.
• Maximize their efforts through motivation.?
• Achieve the goal that will best meet the company’s needs and goals.

A good leader inspires others to act while simultaneously directing the way they act. They must be amiable enough for others to follow their orders, and efficient enough to maximize the use of the company’s resources.

Are leaders necessarily seniors?

This is a common misunderstanding of leadership, because, in fact, leadership doesn’t automatically happen when you reach a certain pay grade or position within the company. It is rather an attitude and an intuition; a leader is anyone from your neighbor who leads the community life, to salespeople or engineers.

Leadership x Dig. transf.

According to Wipro: 56% say that the biggest technology barrier is training lines of business to change or use new technology, methods, or processes

Digital transformation is very much a holistic event that affects an organization completely. It is driven by humans within an enterprise who understand the organization as is and who can envision what it can eventually be.

This requires the whole organization to buy-in to the new cultural shift, and the establishment of a community of leaders among the C-suite who will oversee, inspire, and direct this change.

Humans, by their very basic nature, are resistant to change. It takes you out of your comfort zone and puts you into an unfamiliar situation where your confidence in success is reduced.

Questioning what you have known as the proper way to do something for decades requires a very open and brave mindset. Which is where the role of strong leadership steps in.

Leaders must evidently possess a certain level of tech savviness. Along with strong communication skills, they can create a vision, purpose, and motivation to adopt new strategies.

Leadership Styles:

1.Transactional Leadership:

Often referred to as managerial leadership, is a leadership style that relies on the reward-punishment system. It has a strong emphasis on structure and assumes that employees may not be motivated to complete their tasks.

This “give and take” leadership style is mainly concerned with organizations that follow a rigid routine and established procedures. They are less concerned with change and transformation.

However, this style can lead to diminishing returns and motivation. Leaders must value their employees' efforts and provide incentives that are consistent with the company’s goals.

2.Authoritative Leadership:

Often referred to as a visionary leadership style, this leadership style heavily relies on mentorship. Not to be confused with authoritarian leadership, authoritative leadership places more emphasis on a “follow me” approach.

Authoritative leaders focus on getting to know each member of the team so they can direct their guidance and feedback accordingly. Through promoting individual success, visionary leaders can accomplish new projects smoothly and develop new talents at the same time.?

However, leaders need to adapt to the growing size of their team and must exercise caution not to micromanage, which could overbear the team and put pressure on them.

3.Delegative Leadership:

Often referred to as “Laissez-faire” or “Let them do”. This leadership style is one of the least intrusive forms of leadership that focuses on delegating initiative to team members.?

Leaders who adopt this style give their employees the freedom to utilize their creativity, resources, and experience to meet their goals. They generally trust their employees and rely on them to get the job done without getting too involved in providing feedback or guidance.

This strategy works wonders if the team members are competent and take responsibility for their work. Otherwise, it could lead to conflicts and disagreements among employees which may cause the team to split or divide.

4.Participative Leadership:

Also known as “Democratic leadership”, this style encourages leaders to listen to their employees and involve them in the decision-making process. This leadership style is all about inclusiveness, communication, and shared responsibility

Participative leadership is often favored by teams as it helps building trust with employees and empowering them to share their ideas on important matters. I.e, this approach demonstrates the individual value and contribution to the overall mission.

5.Transformational Leadership:

Transformational leadership is a leadership style that places emphasis on change and transformation. Leaders who adopt this approach strive to inspire their followers to innovate and achieve more than they ever thought possible by tapping into their individual potential. This type of leadership can be extremely effective in organizations that are looking to make major changes or transformations.

Transformational leaders avoid micromanaging their teams. Instead, they trust trained employees to take authority over decisions in their assigned jobs. This approach gives employees a room for creativity and directs them to solutions.

An effective digital transformation leader

Traditionally, CIOs and CTOs were in charge of a company’s IT modernization. But now, their roles have evolved and became a lot more focused on heading up strategies for the digital era.

Today, these C-suite leaders are not only responsible for the company’s overall IT strategy, but also for the digital transformation of the company in terms of:?

• Business Model
• Technologies
• Costs and profits
• Strategies
• People
• Communication

And with the ongoing change in the business and digital world, leadership styles must as well adapt to changes and develop new strategies that fit the current projects and teams.

So, what new qualities should the digital transformation leaders possess to successfully lead the change?

1.Build talent for the future:

Within the digital transformation era of the company, new talents and profiles are built. Transformation leaders develop workforce capabilities through the consistent monitoring and the reformulation of roles and responsibilities.

2.Inspire others to embrace innovation:

Encouraging people to change old habits is not always an easy task. And that’s what separates leaders from traditional bosses. Transformation leaders have the intuition to keep people connected and engaged. They should even encourage other C-suite executives to deploy new ideas and look to the future. Again, this needs communication skills and the ability to reduce organizational resistance and drive change.

3.Leverage new technologies:

When deployed at the right time, new technologies can help companies thrive on top of the business competition. Therefore, transformation leaders need to monitor these technologies and know how to measure their success. Additionally, they need to be persistently looking for ways to reinvent themselves and find new revenue opportunities from new technologies.

4.Encourage collaboration:

We can all agree that Covid-19 has radically changed our perception of the digital world; with workers increasingly working remotely, leaders need to embrace knowledge-sharing models and encourage teams to collaborate with each other, often with the assistance of tools such as CRM software.

5.Improve employee-customer engagement:

Transformation leaders must always be informed on how customers make their decisions, what technologies they are using and how the company can leverage this technology to boost their own services and infrastructures, so that employees can work with these and address these new demands.

6.Lead purposefully:

Business leaders must be attentive to how their leadership is experienced, and decide which tools, technologies, and methods to deploy to make stakeholders, consumers and employees feel valued.