Leadership Disrupted: Pushing the Boundaries

As the digital revolution takes hold of the business world, organisations are beginning to comprehend the impact this is having on their leadership capabilities. Developing apt leaders is viewed as a priority amongst businesses, with 42% of respondents to Deloitte’s Global Human Capital Trends survey flagging leadership as a very important issue. Although this issue is expressly highlighted as imperative amongst organisations, many feel unable to deal with the changing competencies required in their leaders following the switch to digital.  Consequently this year’s survey results show a drop of 2% in the capability of organisations to address leadership.

It is becoming evident that leadership today is less about the traditional ‘art of leadership’ and more to do with the business challenges that leaders are facing in this climate of disruption.   Leaders need to be able keep people connected, engaged and drive a culture of innovation, learning and continuous development.  Business leaders now need inter-disciplinary skills to understand how various business functions, industries and technologies come together to form solutions. In short, there is a growing requirement on leaders to be more innovative, agile, and digitally-able.

Unfortunately, most organisations are finding it difficult to keep pace, with only 5% of companies indicating they have strong digital leaders in place.  To move beyond traditional leadership models organisations must redesign their development strategies, identifying potential digital leaders early and promoting risk-taking, innovation, and experimentation amongst their executives of the future.