Leaping Digital Leadership at Leap Day

Leaping digital leadership to the next level of maturity is a journey which takes advanced mindsets and progressive actions.

The substance of leadership never changes, it’s all about future and change, innovation and progression. Either past, today or future, there's no magic formula for leadership effectiveness, because every era has its own opportunities and risks. It is the leap day today, but what're the emergent digital leadership trend, and how to leap digital leadership to achieve the next level of leadership maturity in the leap year and beyond?

Synthesizing leadership: Digital is about hyperconnectivity and interdependence, synthesis is understanding a thing by examining it as a whole. It is to understand how the “part” interconnected with the”whole.” From a leadership perspective, this is always a good start when working to break down the silo mentality, go beyond crunching numbers, harness cross-functional communication, build cross-functional collaboration, understand where each is coming from and have some trust from them, with the ultimate business goal to ensure business a whole is superior to the sum of pieces. Via synthesizing leadership, interconnections, and interdependencies are distinguished, wise choices and decisions are made via the full cycle of analytics and synthesis. Solutions are also made from a much broader and encompassing view that is not possible in linear or analytical thinking only. It is both detailed and holistic pictures. Synthesizing leaders master at contextual intelligence, not only digest only one word or sentence, but pondering the full conversation or article to capture the tunes and implication; not just understand things on the surface, but capture the insight underneath.

Cognitive leadership: Many leadership pundits advocate diversified or inclusive leadership, at the deeper level, it’s to promote leaders with the cognitive difference. “Cognition" is a word that dates back to the 15th century when it meant "thinking and awareness." The traditional concept of diversity can not fill out the gaps caused by cognitive difference necessarily, the culture intelligence, and the strengths of the problem-solving capabilities people bring to the team. Minding the cognitive gaps can benefit with any organization to make a sound judgment, and generate innovative solutions, to improve your company’s agility and maturity. In order to build a high-effective leadership team, foresightful organizations should always look for complementary mindsets, capabilities, and skills that they don't have so that they can build a winning team and complement each other. Empathy is one of the most important attributes of being a great cognitive leader -have the ability think as if you were in the other party's position. In such a global climate, those businesses that are unwilling to GENUINELY embrace “thinking differently,” are unable to know how to tap their diverse resources, and be inclusive and recognize merit and ideas, no matter where they come from, will not be able to survive, leave alone thrive. Anyone can find themselves leading effectively if they find themselves in the right place, surrounded by the right people, at the right time and they recognize this and seize the opportunity.

Creative leadership: Creativity has emerged as one of the top leadership qualities and most wanted skills for digital professionals. Creative leaders are the one who are capable of predicting future trends, manage the presence and delegate the past. In each context, a creative leader is always conscious of the changes needed to connect the past with the future, prospecting and communicating tangible such as resources and intangible such as cultural changes needs and identifying the proper vision for each cycle in the life of a corporation. Creative leaders are futuristic and forward thinking. Realizing that what has worked in the past isn't today's best solution and having the vision to see what it has now become. Creative leadership is more global than local, global leadership is shifting toward grooming historic digital leadership skills embodying effective communication in networks of global conversations that inspires creativity in diverse domains of expertise. Be courageous to take risks. Creative leadership is the unique combination of leadership mindset, behaviors that develop and achieves high-quality results over a sustained period of time and risk tolerance.

Leaping digital leadership is a journey. Transformation is the change, but on a grand level, from transactional to transformational; from mechanical to organic; from local to global; from sympathetic to empathetic; to always 'keep learning' is a must. A leader needs to know what resources are available and how best to utilize these resources. But this doesn't change leadership substances and principles - they are timeless.