Leadership in Digital Age

Leadership in Digital Age

Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................1
Section 1...........................................................................................................................................1
Leadership theories and relationship between digital technical leadership and enhanced
performance of business..............................................................................................................1
Self-analysis to identify strengths and areas of development......................................................3
Section 2...........................................................................................................................................3
Leadership capabilities and behaviour that can be applied on future role of digital leader
within retail industry....................................................................................................................3
Section 3...........................................................................................................................................6
A contemporary issue within professional practice of leadership...............................................6
The way digital technical leadership can enhance business transformation and performance of
contemporary issue......................................................................................................................6
Section 4...........................................................................................................................................8
A professional development plan to set objectives of future approach to leadership with a
range of learning objectives, success criteria and timescales......................................................8
CONCLUSION..............................................................................................................................12
REFERENCES..............................................................................................................................13

INTRODUCTION
Leadership in digital age, is all about empowering others for leading and creating a self-
organized teams. This would help in optimising the day-to-day operations, where leaders require
participation, involvement as well as contribution of all. Today, due to Fourth Industrial
Revolution, which is driven via advent of latest technologies, leaders are needed to deal with
unprecedented changes and a challenging or unpredictable. In coping up with changes in
business due to digitalisation, leadership plays a bigger role that helps in developing a way for
influencing people towards objective goals. The present report is going to evaluate the role of
leadership in present age of digitalisation, through a number of models. The main aim behind
this is to demonstrate relationship between technical leadership and increased performance of a
business. In this regard, as a digital leader I will identify major strengths and areas of
development through diagnostic tools, to evaluate leadership capabilities that can be applied in
retail industry. Furthermore, a contemporary issue will also be identified, to analyse how this
concept helps in overcoming from same. At last, professional development plan for enhancing
digital technical leadership qualities is also made.
Section 1
Leadership theories and relationship between digital technical leadership and enhanced
performance of business
Today, with advancement of technology, it becomes possible for every organisation to run
its business more effectively. Concept of digitalisation help in increasing customer collaboration
and interaction, with company’s products and services. In reshaping the customer value
proposition, transformation of whole business operations into digitalised panel, has become
essential for organisations. In this regard, to implement and transform business, leaders play an
important role in digital age. They help in influencing people to give their more contribution in
digital transformation, so that performance of business can be improved. Digital leadership in
this context, can be defined as strategical use of digital assets of company, to achieve goals in
desired manner. This concept can be addressed both at individual and organisational level, for
enhancing the performance of business. Hereby, digital leaders are generally willing to explore
how information technology can be used to enable a firm in becoming more responsive, towards
needs of customers and changes in business requirements.
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New digital technologies that has completely changes the way of operating a business
includes Cloud, Social Media, Mobile or Smartphone applications, Big Data, Internet of Things
(IoT) and more. These technologies have provided the new sources of value to improve
economics, in terms of reducing the marginal costs, with increasing loyalty, profit margins,
revenue growth and more. To implement such system, a company has to change its business
models, hire talented workers and provide training to existing ones and new recruiters, so that
they can learn how to work in digital age. However, these procedures arise a number of issue in
business transformation like mismanagement, conflicts among workers, employee
disengagement and more. Therefore, to cope up such issues, a leader or a manager needs to
adopts the new style of leadership like participative, transformative and more. Leaders in digital
age are required to possess some universal characteristics like personal charisma, personal level
of leadership and flexible as per changes in business environment. Hereby, a charismatic leader
normally possesses a rare gift to influence subordinates easily while inspiring loyalty and
obedience.
Figure 1How to be a leader in the digital age?, 2016.
For this purpose, a number of leadership theories that can be used to demonstrate the
relationship between digital leadership and its role in enhancing business performance can be
elaborated. With respect to leadership theoretical frameworks, two main theories are used –
Contingency and Universal. Hereby, first one argues that to become an effective leader in digital
age, it is essential to adopt a perfect style of leadership, which matches with current situation of
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