Leadership style with digital influence

As digital business goes to the core of the products and services and permeates across all aspects of the enterprise, digital business leadership must become a team sport. No individual leader will ever have the perfect blend of all the needed leadership traits. While remastering personal leadership should be pursued, an equally important change lever is to build a balanced and cohesive leadership team around you in order to complement gaps in your personal leadership style and ensure the needed behaviors are present across the leadership team.

The same outside-in critical assessment of the anticipated leadership context should be the starting point, along with brutally honest evaluation of the leadership team’s composition. Based on a critical team-level assessment, selectively hire, promote and develop from within the needed mix of personas and associated digital business leadership behaviors to create a balanced and capable leadership team.

A period rife with digitally enabled disruption necessitates leadership behaviors that “challenge the norm.” This is in stark contrast to management behaviors in more stable situation that make existing models and processes more efficient. Furthermore, as digital business change penetrates right to the core of the enterprises products and services, the stakes, emotions and risks of action all rise.

Effective digital business leaders must be brave. They must force their peers to face the new competitive reality and to take calculated risks, moving forward despite the uncertainty. To survive and successfully lead in this context requires more than just courage. Digital business leaders must bring an inspiring vision of what’s possible, a deep conviction that change is necessary, and an almost adventurer’s zeal for the quest.

For example in the automotive industry, nontraditional competitors such as Google and Uber are pioneering at the digital frontier of self-driving cars and new-platform-based business models. They exhibit behaviors akin to those of an adventurer. They have a deep vision and passion for a new digitally enabled art of the possible, and a conviction to move forward despite the technology, social acceptance, and regulatory ambiguity. They constantly probe, move, learn and move again. Leaders from established enterprises in this sector must remaster their behaviors to amplify similar adventurer’s traits, or be marginalized from the new competitive frontier.

Further, to successfully retain and unleash the creativity of precious talent requires much more than an initial attractor honeypot. Digital business leaders must remap their structures and process to be fit for delivering digital business innovation and needed marketplace speed.

Let’s consider an example from financial services where leaders created a “data and analytics” business as a separate legal entity from the mainstream bank to enable a “startup”-like culture, entrepreneurial workplace and practices; for example, remapping processes to enable the fastest path to monetization of new insights unlocked from big data analytics. While some innovations could flow through modified internal processes, breakthrough novel data-centric services outside the bank’s traditional model required a completely new path to market. Here, the leader completely re-drew the map in ways that exploited the unique contours of digital business, such as creative incubation, venture-type funding and rapid offering of services.

The most advanced digital business leaders will use techniques with the ability to visualize and understand the emerging new external competitive terrain to identify new opportunity spaces. They then remap to position at key intersections, hubs or contours where influence can be exerted or advantage seized in an ever-morphing industry competitive landscape. Think of how digital business information aggregators, or platform players, seek to redraw the map and flow of customer interactions in ways they can provide new sources of value and hence command higher margins of the industry value stream. Finding and exploiting the natural contours of digital business to out-maneuver competitors with less foresight and agility will be a key digital business era behavior.