Digital leadership is much about decisions and much about execution. In a digitally-driven economy, digital leadership is essential to quantum thinking rather than in a linear way. The purpose of digital leadership is growth through technology.
Executing quality digital growth involves leading by creating and cultivating growth using digital tools for the things that matter the most. It requires seeing growth opportunities that others do not or pursuing opportunities that others regard as risky or misguided.
1.Set The Vision
You can effectively create a digital vision when everyone understands all the essential elements in this big picture that you are implementing in your company. Every company needs a shared, overarching understanding of where it’s going, why it’s going there, and how you get there. People need to be inspired by the vision.
The vision you set as a digital leader should be simple enough that everyone can understand it, even while you stay laser-focused on your goal. Russell Haworth is a tech-enabled-business leader ready to help you achieve your business goals through digital solutions.
Leadership is setting a vision for your business and having the confidence to align the people behind it. The need to develop a company’s digital vision is critical with digital leadership because the nature of digital transformation means it’s essential to rally people together, moving them beyond individual agendas, whether they are business units, departments, teams, or individuals. Clarity of vision helps your entire team connect to a deeper purpose that satisfies individuals and collective ambition.
2.Influence Executives and Stakeholders
Leading a digital start-up is hard if you are trying to do it alone. Some top executives and stakeholders have varying degrees of understanding of technology and its rapid advancements. You need to ensure they support your vision emotionally, technically, and materially through constructive interactions.
As a digital leader, you must also be able to convince partners, customers, and vendors of the benefits of digital transformation. Digital leaders need to be persuasive and be able to articulate good reasons for their digital initiatives.
However, you have to ensure that your digital influence cuts across the entire organization, not just some departments. Of importance to note is that, in the digital era, leadership is not about control. It’s about influence.
If you can’t influence others to support your vision and strategies, you don’t lead. And the more senior your role, the more comprehensive your sphere of influence needs to be.
3.Create Sustainable Digital Platforms
Your biggest job as a leader is to build and maintain the underlying platform that supports your company’s growth. The best digital platforms allow people to self-organize and create at low or no cost and capture much of the resulting value. Rarely do companies become successful by inventing an entirely new platform, but rather by capturing value from existing ones.
To create such a system, you need to understand the forces driving the world’s changes, and you need to be stubborn enough to put those forces to work for your business. A functional digital platform offers the ability for customers to engage with your company in opt-in ways, with ease and complete transparency.
The best digital platforms are so sticky that users have no incentive to switch to another network. They are entirely standardized, open all the time, and on every popular network.
4.Track and Analyze The Digital Impact
Almost every company spends money on technology, yet most fail due to failure to track the digital impact they have created. The inability to track the influence of their digital involvement is because they have never thought to do so or have no idea how to go about it.
That’s why it’s crucial to track and analyze the impact of your digital initiative against all that you can about financial performance, audience interaction, general popularity, and your online presence- you need to know where you are digitally right now. However, If you’re a start-up looking to integrate social media into your product, tracking consumer behavior online will be much easier than a big brand trying to increase website traffic.
5.Optimize Continually and Improve
To optimize continually and improve, you should be alert to any process or performance that needs any improvement. Not just the back-end processes controlling your mass revenues, these are important, of course, but so too are the front-end customer experience and also internal processes that control your product or service.
Your company will never be fast enough if it can’t make constant ongoing improvements. There’s always room for improvement in every functional digital area, from sales to manufacturing to delivery. Digital leaders themselves are no exception.
What you are doing now is not what you will be doing six months or a year from now. For example, you may need to change your digital tools to include new features not part of today’s systems.
Conclusion
Without digital leadership, it’s hard to predict the future. However, you can now analyze data, predict the future, and harness it with the right digital tools. Good leaders will understand and adapt to their environment and help others adapt as well. The digital era has made strategic execution a must for leaders who want to build market share, establish a lasting identity or advance their cause. Digital Leaders must know how to harness the new technologies in the ever-increasing interconnectivity economy. Above all, your responsibility as a digital leader is to help transform the company digitally to take a strategic market position.
