Digital Leadership: Why Your Management May Fail in Digitalization
Small and medium-sized enterprises are increasingly finding themselves struggling to make their leadership digitally compatible and to achieve digital leadership at all. Digitized leaders, however, are the wrong target, says guest author and coach Antje Bach.
In the face of digitization, more and more SMEs are throwing a lot of money at it: kick-off events with great speeches and presentations but no real content, innovation days with all the hoopla, visits to Silicon Valley ... The range of ideas on how SMEs want to successfully tackle digitization is wide. In the end, however, the same thing almost always happens: no one really makes any decisions for all the events and pleasant talk without a goal. Responsibility for digitizing the company continues to move from department to department, from executive to executive, like a misdirected package without a return slip. Or everyone is responsible for it and, as a consequence, no one is.
That's because SMEs often focus their well-intentioned digitization efforts on their executives, whose work, however, is traditionally designed for effectiveness. And in the end, the company is surprised when the digital plan goes awry.
I'm not saying that you as an SME should completely abandon the idea of digitization - absolutely not, you can't go that far. The only question is: Where do you really need to start?
With a new start
In my opinion, the great opportunity of digitization is not to make your management more effective. What digitization can do, on the other hand, is increase efficiency in your company. From this perspective, you can also see that management is the wrong place to start. Because efficient work is the domain of management.
Your managers are the ones who install processes, develop key figures, manage and control processes. Management is the Definition of planning, organizing and controlling a system. Always with the noble goal of efficiency. And yes, you can very well digitize this work.
Because managers work at system and maintain it. In a digital future, this activity can certainly be performed more quickly by a program or software - without lengthy meetings and with real transparency about figures, targets and so on, simply at the push of a button. That's why I think: Yes, you can digitize your managers - but not your executives.
The human being in leadership
Of course, numbers and processes also form the basis of managers' work, but they do not reflect the purpose of good management work. Managers work at system. That's why leadership in the digital age means more than ever taking a serious interest in people and working with them in a goal-oriented way.
At the threshold of digital transformation, executives have the task of creating the space for the new development. Only people can meet this challenge. No computer or robot can reliably assess which strengths your employees bring to the table, where they can optimally contribute them, or where further development is still necessary. No software can convince your team to implement changes or expand their skills.
That's why I don't want digital leadership for SMEs, and I certainly don't want CDOs and the like. Instead, I want highly human managers who lead their people through change in a goal-oriented manner. And then we can dispense with the managers and "digitalize" them away.
About the author: Antje Bach is the owner of the management consultancy lead to Performance AG.
"Welcome, dear problem!" - Antje Bach goes through life with this conviction. The author and coach likes to put her finger in the wound - hard, but equally honest and empathetic. She is convinced that every private or professional development begins with an obstacle. So it's all the nicer that people don't have to change. They are allowed to complement each other.
