Introduction
Disruption is happening everywhere and in every aspect of our lives. It is happening at a scale and speed that is unprecedented in modern history impacting diverse industries, from financial services to retail, media, logistics & supply chain, manufacturing, education, professional services, and healthcare & life sciences. Leaders are finding it challenging to navigate the near-insurmountable challenges resulting from the impact of these disruptive events on their operations and have to reinvent their operating and business models to ensure their survival.
Organizations all over the world face uncertain futures in a global business environment that is highly disruptive and increasingly Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous (collectively known as VUCA). (See Figure 1)
Figure 1: The New Normal of the World of VUCA
We face a new era of radical uncertainty and disruption brought about by other challenges such as climate change, financial crises, terrorism, Brexit, demographic changes in the labour market, health/disease risk, mass migration and rapid developments in digital technology and its impact on transformation at the workplace. The management of shocks and crises is becoming an everyday occurrence. Organizations also need to be agile, leverage opportunities and drive innovation to remain competitive in the face of challenging conditions. (Bawany 2020)
What Makes a Disruptive Digital Leader?
Digital transformation is occurring at an unprecedented pace, creating a more connected world, and providing new opportunities for businesses to grow and create value. The disruptive impact of technology on organizations of every size and sector is infinite, and we know the pace of disruption is accelerating. Leaders must be ready to lead in the digital age.
It’s also worth noting that today’s organizations are in different places on the road to digital transformation. If you are feeling stuck in your digital transformation work, you are not alone. One of the hardest questions in digital transformation is how to get over the initial humps from vision to execution. Even organizations that are well down the digital transformation path face tough ongoing hurdles, like budgeting, talent struggles, and culture change.
Resolving these challenges would require “disruptive digital leaders” who are visionary when it comes to the technology frontier. However, all decisions are still rooted in fiscal discipline and overall enterprise mission. This demands a risk-tolerant mindset—future technologies are volatile, and user adoption is challenging to predict. However, a true disruptive digital leader is driven by the challenge and potential for creating new business value by harnessing breakthrough technology.
Digital transformation can be viewed as the integration of digital technology into all areas of a business resulting in fundamental changes to how businesses operate and how they deliver value to customers. Beyond that, it’s a cultural change that requires organizations to challenge the status quo continuously, experiment often, and get comfortable with failure, as could be observed in organizations such as Microsoft, Starbucks, Grab and DBS Bank as featured in the book ‘Leadership in Disruptive Times’ (Bawany, 2020).
A survey of the current research and perspectives on high potentials who could be future disruptive digital leaders as well as similar research on disruptive and digital leadership indicates specific disruptive leadership qualities.
These include but are not limited to, a combination of variables such as visionary and entrepreneurial skills, innovation-driven mindset and experimentation (disruptive mentality), cognitive readiness and critical thinking (mental agility), emotional resilience, empathy, and social skills (people agility), driving for success (results agility), and resilience and adaptability (change agility). (See Figure 2).
Figure 2: The ‘Disruptive Digital Leader’ Competencies
Disruptive Leadership Competencies
Leading in an era of constant disruption and times of crisis would require a distinct set of competencies and these include but are not limited to:
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Disruptive Mentality (Innovation Driven)
Disruptive leaders empower their employees to innovate and co-create by developing and providing the pathways for these employees to quickly move concepts into experiments and learning or impact across the organization. Such leaders make innovation a priority and give employees and teams the time and space to collaborate, experiment, and learn with new digital tools like virtual reality, machine learning, and automation. In a disruptive business environment, organizations must be able to innovate faster than their competitors. Disruptive leaders would encourage innovation at the needed velocity by establishing a culture of innovation and creativity. They visibly champion this belief at every level of the organization, actively role-modeling a culture that encourages risk-taking and discovery. They encourage speed and embrace learning from inevitable failures along the way, equipping themselves much better to succeed in the digital world.
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Visionary and Entrepreneurial Skills (Creativity)
Vision is even more vital in turbulent times of digital transformation at the workplace. When building a digital transformation strategy, disruptive leaders sell the idea of the long-term benefits the new technologies will bring. These leaders can envision where they want their organizations to be so that they can better weather disruptive environmental changes such as economic downturns or new competition. They can make business decisions to counter the turbulence while keeping the organization’s vision in mind. Vision is ultimately an action-oriented responsibility of a leader that transcends articulating the desired outcome and communicating it to others. It also includes translating that plan into action to accomplish the desired result. They are also able to identify strategic issues, opportunities, and risks successfully. They communicate the links between the organization’s strategy and the business unit’s goals.
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Cognitive Readiness and Critical Thinking (Mental Agility)
Mental agility—they are excellent critical thinkers who are comfortable with complexity, scrutinize problems, and make new connections. This suite of cognitive readiness skills can be viewed as part of the advanced thinking skills that make leaders ready to confront whatever new and complex problems they might face. Cognitive readiness is the mental preparation that leaders develop so that they, and their teams, are prepared to face the ongoing dynamic, ill-defined, and unpredictable challenges in the highly disruptive and VUCA-driven business environment. The cognitive readiness skills will develop, enhance, or sustain a leader’s ability to navigate successfully in this new normal. e detailed descriptors of each of these seven cognitive readiness competencies known as the Paragon⁷ Framework. Overall, heightened cognitive readiness allows leaders to maintain a better sense of self-control in stressful situations, which is crucial when resolving complex problems and decision-making.
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Resilience and Adaptability (Change Agility)
Change agility—they are curious, like to experiment, and can effectively deal with the discomfort of change. To achieve achieving organizational high performance in an era of constant disruption and crisis, both agility and resilience are important. Agility refers to the ability to make a rapid change and achieve flexibility in various aspects of the operations, in response to changes or disruptive events in the external environment. It can also be viewed as the capacity for responding with speed and flexibly and decisively toward anticipating, initiating, and taking advantage of opportunities and avoiding any negative consequences of change. Resilience refers to the ability to anticipate, prepare for, and recover from disasters, emergencies, and other disruptions and protect and enhance workforce and customer engagement, supply network and financial performance, organizational productivity, and community well-being when disruption occurs. It can also be viewed as the capacity for resisting, absorbing, and responding, even reinventing, if necessary, in response to fast and/or disruptive change that cannot be avoided such as “black swan” events.
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Empathy and Social Skills (People Agility)
People agility—they know themselves very well and can readily deal with a wide variety of people and tough situations. Teamwork and collaboration are significant for organizations to embark on digital transformation. At a basic level, all employees, including leaders, must be able to develop a productive relationship to get along and earn the support of supervisors and co-workers. Emotional resilience allows an individual to remain comfortable with the anxiety that often accompanies uncertainty and to think “out of the box,” displaying on-the-job creativity and applying new ideas to achieve results. Conversely, people who are uncomfortable with risk and change may impact the organizational climate and undermine innovative ideas or be slow to respond to a shift in the marketplace. Disruptive leaders are those who are successful in assuming more significant, more complex jobs as they are first able to manage themselves—to handle increased pressure, deal constructively with adversity, and act with dignity and integrity. Second, they can establish and maintain cooperative working relationships, build a broad network of contacts and form alliances, and be influential and persuasive with a range of different stakeholders involved in the implementation of digital transformation projects as well as the management of crises at the workplace.
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Driving for Success (Results Agility)
Results agility—they deliver results in first-time situations by inspiring teams by leveraging on the Results-based Leadership (RBL) Framework; they exhibit the sort of presence that builds confidence in themselves and others. Although organizations are grappling with the market disruptions arising from digital transformation, results-driven disruptive leaders can not only keep pace with the ever-changing business environment but also ensure the successful adoption of digital solutions, achieving desired outcomes, and aligning all employees to the established digital transformation imperatives with the set performance standards or KPIs. Digital transformation is challenging how these disruptive leaders interact, communicate, develop, and oversee the performances of their people. It creates an environment of teamwork where people can continuously learn, adopt, and adapt to digital systems. However, in the digital era, the physical presence of leaders has been mostly substituted with a virtual form of leadership owing to the networked organizational structures, thus further adding to the challenge of connecting emotionally and establishing the much-desired interpersonal connection with the team.
Conclusion
As technology continues to disrupt the workplace, one of the key factors that would impact the success of the digital transformation is having the right team of disruptive digital leaders who can lead the digital transformation implementation successfully. Organizations should respond to this challenge by building new pools of skilled digital talent. To do so, they must identify or what are the skills and attributes of these high-potential employees and assess and develop them into disruptive digital leaders who will lead successful digital transformation initiatives at the workplace.
References
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