Leadership Online in VUCA Times

• In Event: The Use of Digital Communications and Old Fashioned Storytelling

Short Description

During turbulent times, how do leaders use Digital Media (DM) with their local and global cross-cultural teams to create commitment, satisfaction, results, and a positive impact on their organizations and society? The presenter will explore increased agility, trust, and effectiveness of leader-follower DM communication.

Detailed Abstract

Over the last two decades leaders in public services, business and worldview have commented with an always increasing frequency on the rising volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity in their fields. The term VUCA has been born. The growing connectedness of our societies and business networks has been singled out as one of the key drivers of this increase in VUCA by authors like Joshua Cooper Ramos, The Seventh Sense (2016)
In Organizational Culture and Leadership, Ed Schein (2010) proposes leaders should create cultures that are proactive; committed to learning; committed to open, task-oriented communication; and positive in terms of their outlook towards the future (2010). Change in an organization’s culture must include adaptations by leaders in order to effectively integrate the new paradigm of doing business into the organization’s culture. Therefore, it is imperative that leaders learn to effectively position their organizations to use Digital Media to achieve higher satisfaction, agility and performance.
For the purpose of our research we have defined Digital Media as the sum of email, Skype, Webex, WhatsApp, etc. and Social Media Networks.
The objective of our research is to identify answers to these questions:
• How do leaders use Digital Media to lead their local and global teams in times of high Volatility – Uncertainty – Complexity – Ambiguity?
• Which leadership style do they develop when using Digital Media for their A.) Business related team communication, B.) Leadership conversations on the other
• How does the use of Digital Media change the leader´s capability to create commitment, satisfaction, responsiveness and performance in teams that cross cultures and borders?
• How does digital leadership impact the leader’s competence of being influential in her team, his organization and in the surrounding society?

Approach
We interview leaders in business and public services with an open-question based questionnaire in 1-to-1 interviews.
Our interviewees work in Europe, the Americas and Africa. All of them run geographically and organizationally distributed teams. Many of them lead virtual teams spread over several continents.
We aim to increase over the first six months of 2017 our current interview count from 24 to 100 interviews.
We already count on the tentative agreement of two business leaders to join our presentation in Brussels.
We invite to this panel researchers who have examined recent developments in online-based leader-follower communication in the areas of community leadership, business leadership, worldview and public leadership.

Participant

• Michael Brandenburg, Resonance Consultants, S.L.