What is digital leadership and why does it matter?
Digital leadership is the strategic leveraging of an organization’s technology to drive business goals. When business leaders are innovative and forward thinking, they can use technology to achieve results in today’s ever-changing environment. Implementing digital leadership is essential to remaining competitive, and giving both employees and clients an exceptional experience. At its core, it is about maximizing efficiency while facilitating innovation.
Effective digital leadership involves fully embracing technology and digital transformation, which is the practice of using new technology to solve workplace problems. Adept digital leaders apply digital transformation to adapt their business for increased productivity and revenue. Bringing in new technology, however, is not enough. Without leadership, a company’s resources may not be fully utilized by its employees. When digital tools are used effectively, the cost of operations can decrease and the resultant work can be faster and better, creating loyal and satisfied clients and employees.
A guide to implementing digital leadership:
- Leverage data to monitor change and predict market outlooks– By using technology to plan for multiple scenarios and forecast market changes, companies can pivot quickly to implement strategic decisions
- Raise your own digital game – Advance yourself and your own knowledge, and try out new virtual tools with your staff to facilitate engagement and connection
- Get creative with serving your customers and clients virtually – By teaming individuals with digital expertise with those who have establishment knowledge, teams can creatively transfer traditional solutions into virtual ones. This can increase engagement and add continued value to customers/clients
- Empower your employees to innovate and co-create – Give employees the time and space to collaborate, experiment, and learn with new digital tools. By prioritizing innovation, digital leaders can conceptualize and implement a strong impact within their organization
- Focus on shifting the mindset and culture – Leaders should embrace the opportunity to reinvent themselves digitally and in doing so, elevate their employees by providing them with the necessary tools and the skills to use them.
A workplace with a good digital leader that strives for a digital culture will be able to anticipate challenges and can make good decisions based on data to overcome them. The relationship between digital readiness and improved financial performance in businesses is directly proportional and can only offer businesses success.
