Leadership becomes more innovative and empathetic in the digital era.
Compared to the industrial era with static information and overly restrictive boundaries in the last century, the information-based global world has become over-complex and hyperconnected; with blurred geographical, functional, industrial territories and the very characteristics of hyperdiversity, knowledge abundance, economic interdependence, culture enrichment.
Leadership & authenticity: Although it has many facets, at its core, the foundation of leadership is based on authenticity with the ability to think differently, independently, and innovatively. It’s important to discover and enforce your own innate strength, ask the big “WHY” question to discover your intention to lead in order to amplify leadership influence and improve leadership maturity.
As change is often uncomfortable, yet a necessary part of reaching the future. Authentic leadership starts with the purpose, people find passion and clarity towards a specific cause or goal, and starts moving towards it confidently. The intention of becoming a leader is to inspire and innovate, to facilitate and encourage changes. The emphasis is on trying to determine which professional competencies should be used in which combination, and with what level of weight for each, for every different situation, in order to improve leadership effectiveness.
Leadership & innovation: Innovation becomes simply creating value by solving simple or complex problems in alternative ways. Innovative leadership is essentially anchored on the leader’s overall multifaceted resourcefulness and multidimensional competencies to explore unconventional solutions. Innovative leadership goes beyond the status quo, to value fresh insight and collective wisdom, which helps you actually understand the problem from different angles in order to solve it in a better way.
Senior leaders with high-level innovation competency can set the tone for encouraging innovation and advocating changes. Innovation leadership is in strong demand as organizations need to invest in the cultivation of capacity for innovation and recognize true innovators. An innovative leader has the interdisciplinary knowledge and cross-functional experience to connect the dots via unconventional connections, promoting a healthy climate for innovation. The essence of innovative leadership is to be open-minded, show flexibility, break down outdated rules, explore the emerging opportunities or new ventures, deploy great ideas, optimize processes, and build long term business advantage.
Leadership & quality: High-quality leaders are great in attitude, aptitude, and altitude, with quality leadership traits such as confidence, critical thinking, independent judgment, learning agility, professionalism with sense of responsibility, etc. Quality is everyone’s business; touch every important perspective of the business. Quality leadership harnesses quality management, which not only focuses on the quality of products and services but also the overall business quality and maturity.
Innovation is doing something better than it currently is. High-quality enterprise consists of high-quality leaders & professionals, high-quality products/services, and high-quality business capabilities/processes, etc. Great preparation, vision, intuition, perseverance and the ability to work hard, etc., are all crucial leadership qualities to earn the role of trust and guide the organization in the right direction.
Leadership trends continue to emerge due to increasing speed of changes and imminent challenges facing the business and the world. Leadership becomes more innovative and empathetic in the digital era, as the characteristics of innovative leadership show the following dispositions: visionary, learning agile, competent, courageous, and multidimensional-intelligent, etc, to see things differently, do things in alternative ways and walk the talk to build highly innovative organizations.
