Strategy Consulting
Why the Understanding of Leadership Must Change
Direct, personal contact declines when teams work remotely. This can result in workers losing their sense of belonging to their team and company. Organizations and their managerial staff must respond with appropriate actions and strengthen cohesion and identification with company values.
The changed working conditions in the age of digital transformation demand a new management style at all levels of the hierarchy – a “New Leadership”. The task that managers have, is to revisit and adapt their actions and management instruments. In a hybrid world of work, employees expect their superiors to be transparent and trusting, and be able to communicate and define clear goals. Those who have leadership duties must, therefore, be able to identify what motivates their employees, even if they are not physically close and the dialog is mostly exchanged digitally. This is how leaders develop into mentors.
What Qualifications and Competencies Are Essential for New Leadership?
The first thing leaders should have in the digitalized working world is the ability and willingness to adapt. Digital tools and agile working methods accelerate change, which is why they require a high degree of adaptability and digital competence. Furthermore, managers act as a role model for employees now more than ever. As coaches, they bring their ability to lead and motivate themselves independently into their team and help their team members see objectives that are aligned with those team members’ individual competencies. This mentor–mentee relationship thrives on bold, committed leaders who support workers and guide them on the different paths that each one takes. The topic of communication will continue to grow in importance in a leader’s arsenal and will represent an even greater proportion of working hours so that digital leadership is successfully achieved in distributed teams.
For this reason, companies must above all, empower their managers with soft skills – primarily social and communicative competencies – so that they can meet the demands of New Work and New Leadership. Digital technologies will not be a substitute for managerial staff at any time in the foreseeable future. However, they help give targeted support to managers for their duties. Consequently, they can perform their changed management tasks more efficiently and effectively. Pioneering leadership and corporate culture as well as an innovative, agile organization are needed to make the current transformation in the working world successful.
Top-Down Transformation Does Not Create Success
We separate the current challenges for people with leadership responsibility into two categories: Firstly, strategic factors such as coaching and communicating purpose are increasing. Secondly, operational matters such as communication and self-organization are also becoming priorities. There are also further challenges for upper management with consequences to match. The possibility and success of transforming determine the company’s future.
Change processes are characterized by a high level of risk, a strategic realignment, and strong leadership by upper management.
A company can only remain successful in the future when its employees accept and support the realignment. In this context, there are immense structural issues that can arise, especially at organizations that have a long history. This is because homogeneous workforce structures have usually developed over the years and are adapted to the existing corporate culture as optimally as possible.
A change in the strategic direction usually has consequences for the corporate culture too. The priority here is to reconcile the workers’ personality profiles with the new culture. Strong transformation/change management is needed to communicate newly developed cultural elements to colleagues and coworkers. This is the only way to realize strategic objectives successfully.
When companies fail at transformation, it is often because of management-related issues such as the wrong mindset, purely top-down approaches, insufficient project management, or a lack of communication.
What Strategic Management Actions Are Needed?
Strategic management is especially characterized by coaching approaches and the ability to communicate purpose. The potential challenges during transformation in this area are:
- The corporate culture should be tangible and shaped by the employees to communicate a clear “vision of actions”.
- Finding an answer that is logical or direct for all employees to the question: “Why are we doing this?”
- Transforming manager duties: moving away from issuing instructions and checking results, and toward a mentor role guiding employees personally.
- New concepts, routines, and training must be developed and communicated.
- The concerns of all employees must be equally respected.
What Operational Management Actions Are Needed?
When it comes to management at an operational level, solutions must be found including:
- Maintaining personal proximity and communication from a physical distance.
- Preserving and strengthening collegial leadership and collaboration in distributed teams.
- Creating options for responding to workplace injuries in home offices.
- Providing information about rights and obligations from home-office audits.
- Anchoring agile working methods to projects as well as team thinking.
- Safeguarding data protection and security when working from home and remotely (on the part of the company as well as employees).
What Operational Management Actions Are Needed?
The transformation of a management culture runs throughout the organization and poses challenges for people with leadership duties at all levels of the hierarchy. The key element to overcome them and respond to new situations and quickly respond to new situations is an agile strategy for processes, objectives, and thinking. It needs new rules, routines, concepts, and training.
