PDF-Download

Leadership in a Digitalized World
New Expectations,
Proven Basics
4
Detecon Management Report dmr • 1 / 2016
If digital evolution, new methods of collaboration and a digital work style
become more and more prevalent – are expectations from a leader different
or higher than they were a decade ago? Let’s discuss.
eaders are required in all aspects of life – work, commuL
nities, home. Harvard Business Review writes “…that leading
people well isn’t about driving them, directing them, or coercing
them; it is about compelling them to join you in pushing into
new territory.“1 Expectations are different from leaders today.
Demands from leaders are greater than they have ever been.
dern connected world, efficiency pales against the need for innovation and speed and in this incessant race to become faster
employees find themselves getting left behind or lost. While in
theory self-sufficiency (through increased information availability) should improve, the need for working in teams has never
been greater.
Dissatisfaction at work affects the majority of employees
Transparency and speed are setting new requirements
Gallup ran a survey2 with results showing that only 31.7% of
US employees are engaged with their work. That figure dropped
further to 28.9% when the survey pool consisted of only Europeans.3 Let us take a step back and really attempt to grasp the
data here – approximately 70% of the developed world is NOT
engaged with their work; somewhere they spend their ­majority
of waking hours. In its state of the workplace report Gallup
­further reported that 13% of people worldwide are e­ngaged
in their work.4 This number has barely changed over the past
­decade.
But not only isolation is an issue. Has work-life balance truly
improved? Or are everything-everywhere and total c­ onnectivity
actually worsening the balance – not allowing the employee
to literally switch off, turn his mind completely into private
matters, family, hobbies and regeneration? Exhaustion and
­
burn-outs are on the rise, not only on managerial level. Scholars
and management authors are still debating if this is the result
of a changing work environment or an increased awareness and
better training of medical personnel.
Decentralization of the workplace, online collaboration, telepresence etc. while on the one hand might have improved the
perception of work-life balance but on the other hand have
certainly increased the sense of isolation in the workplace. An
average day consists of an employee receiving tasks as well as
feedback via remote interfaces – phones, emails etc. In the mo-
1 Harvard Business Review, Great Leadership Isn’t About You,
https://hbr.org/2014/08/great-leadership-isnt-about-you/
2 Gallup Employee Engagement Survey, www.gallup.com/poll/183041/
employee-engagement-holds-steady.aspx (May 2015)
3 Effectory International Employee Engagement Survey,Global comparison,
www.effectory.com/thought-leadership/blog/employee-engagement-how-does-eu
rope-compare-globally/ (May 2014)
4 Gallup, State of the Global Workplace Report,
http://ihrim.org/Pubonline/Wire/Dec13/GlobalWorkplaceReport_2013.pdf
Isolation as well as having to be available 24/7 create stress and
health issues. Living and working in the digital age is a contributor and people / employees need to learn, how to manage this
peculiar situation.
Here is where the increased demands from leaders come in! Leaders no longer have their teams located physically near them
and hence it is harder to motivate, inspire and lead by example
over the telephone or web-meeting platform. It is much harder
to detect issues and take care of employees via digital means.
Leaders have to be aware that not only the workload as such
has to be managed differently but also the well-being of employees. Social media platforms, such as internal company blogs,
Twitter and Facebook accounts and SharePoints, have provided
various platforms and means of communication, however the
key ­question to be asked is – how much is too much? The sheer
number of platforms and overlap in terms of service offerings
5
Detecon Management Report dmr • 1 / 2016
None of this means that the fundamentals behind leadership –
humility, communication and the ability to build trust – have
changed. Primarily it is the application of these fundamentals
that must change/adapt to the times.
her employee. While this was always a pillar of leadership, in
the digital age it holds significance because it proves that the
basics don’t change no matter how many different methods
of communication and work styles come and go. The key is a
mindset change – maintaining control is not the key to power or
­leadership in the digital age but building a trusted network and
enabling of employees are the keys.
Not the basics of leadership but there application is changing
From control to trust
In today’s day and age of decentralized and virtual teams,
­hierarchical position has started meaning little. The key determination of power and influence is the size of one’s network.
It is this network that helps in making meaningful decisions.
“Being in control” or “maintaining control” no longer signifies
power. Leadership, in the digital age, comes from encouraging
and enabling those around you to grow – even into positions
where their knowledge increases beyond that of the leader. A less
autocratic style certainly resonates with the empowered and informed employee pool today. The leader’s role today is to ­enable
the personal development of employees all the while ensuring
that this development is also adding towards the company’s development. All of this points in the direction of establishing and
building a trustful relationship between a supervisor and his/
Further integral to leadership is the necessity of culture which
intensely promotes sharing. Those leaders who merely pay lip
service to the idea of creating or changing to a culture of sharing see diminishing returns on their investment of time and
effort into their employees. Having a culture of sharing again
promotes trust, creates transparency and enables the establishment of a bond between supervisor and employee wherein both
parties feel engaged and valued as contributors. 84% of respondents to a survey from the Katzenbach Center of Strategy&
believed culture is critical for business success while only 35%
believed their organization manages their culture effectively.6
makes it difficult to distinguish between relevant messages and
noise.
6 DeAnne Aguirre, Rutger von Post, Micah Alpern, Culture and Change, ­November
19, 2013, www.strategyand.pwc.com/global/home/what-we-think/reports-whitepapers/article-display/cultures-and-change-infographic
Leader‘s Focus
Figure: Challenges focused upon in the Digital Age5
Delegation of tasks and complation of results
Capabilities kept locally owned
and centrally controlled
Demand for personalized talent development plan
Bedarf an gezielter Kommunikation
Higher expections for access to
information and speed of decision making
Employees Focus
Source: Detecon
5 Leading in a digital world: strategy, risk, and business transformation – EY
www.ey.com/Publication/vwLUAssets/EY-The_digitization_of_the_insurance_sector/$FILE/ey-igln-viewpoints-leading-in-a-digital-world-july-2014.pdf; Detecon analysis
6
Detecon Management Report dmr • 1 / 2016
Given remote environments, impromptu meetings, discussions
and exchanges have been replaced by strictly regimen appointments, conference calls and emails – leaving a lot of room for
interpretation by both the supervisor and the employee. If this
gap is to be closed, a culture that promotes open exchanges must
be established, promoted and lived starting with the leader himself/herself. So because of this, trust and openness are even more
important than in the pre-digital age.
A basic cornerstone of leadership is having followers
So far we have listed the various challenges of the digital age –
the transparence, the speed of decision making etc. However a
basic cornerstone of leadership, which in a way makes sure that
one remains a leader – having followers – must also be c­ atered
for, but with a slight twist. Developing genuine interest in the
professional development of employees can help transform them
into followers. Involving employee in the journey, in the decisions and the success of the company and/or even the projects
builds of sense of belonging and loyalty in the employees. An
employee is more likely to go the extra mile to help accomplish
tasks if he/she believes in it, rather than it being a top-down
directive. Building this sense of belonging and belief, in the digitally connected but physically disconnected age, can be more
time consuming. Here is where leaders must tap the potential
of social media – not just any platform but t­hose which are
targeted and embedded into the working lives of their employees such as SharePoint. Simply blogging, sharing pictures and
videos of the progress of a project can go a long way in involving
employees. It goes without saying that these efforts to engage
social media must be genuine and not just become another “tick
in the box” exercise.
While the challenges of our professional lives and those posed
by digital evolution are ever increasing, leadership, when done
right, can go a long way in helping employees overcome these
challenges thereby having very direct and meaningful impacts
on a company’s success. In the digital age, employees must be
engaged by their leaders on a daily basis – not through add-ons
of platforms and extra logins – but through targeted channels
which intertwine with their daily work. Further, leaders must
recognize that the physical barriers of distance, location and
time have added an additional dimension to “trusting your
­employees” than ever before.
Has your leadership style evolved
to deal with digital age?
Digitalized HR tools can help leaders
Leadership in the digital world is more than using social ­media
and collaboration tools for every-day interaction. It is also
about the tool-kit which a leader uses in order to fulfill HR
management, performance management and HR development
tasks. How do you evaluate performance in a virtual team?
How ­employee data is managed and made available for a ­leader
wherever, whenever he needs this information? Digitalized HR
tools can help leaders in recruitment, learning & development,
employer branding and most importantly in performance
­management to be more effective in their day-to-day work.
Björn Menden, Managing Partner, is an Expert in Strategy Development,
Organizational Desing and Restructuring. He advices international clients
on their way to digital transformation.
Udit Pandey works as a Senior Consultant and advices clients on digital
HR Management, Skill Management and Restructuring.
7
Detecon Management Report dmr • 1 / 2016