Digital transformation
What skills do specialists and managers need to have today in the course of digitalization? The attentive reader and listener will notice two main theses in the ongoing discussions in the media on the subject of digitalization. The first thesis is the mantra that digitalization will affect us all in the near future. The second thesis is that our lives and the world of work will change dramatically as a result.
Your digital trend scout at Tempulse Global Consultancy, hereby clarifies:
Both theses are wrong. Digitalization is already here and is changing everything. Changing markets are forcing companies to rethink their organizational structures and managers in particular are being called upon more than ever to reposition themselves. Many managers are currently not suited to reacting quickly to the dynamics of the markets.
The focus is currently on the skills required of managers and an adaptation of the understanding of roles for employees: Shared leadership, in which team members are given individual leadership competencies or temporarily even the entire management of a project, leads to a decentralization of authority. Hierarchies are becoming significantly flatter. While organizational structures used to be strongly hierarchical, managers are currently required to rapidly change their understanding of their role. The team navigator has already arrived in the present and is not the future. In addition to their own integration in the team's work processes, managers are responsible for the composition of their team and are thus creating new structures that are changing the organization. The employees jointly define the team's own milestones.
Responsible specialists and managers in today's digitalized organizational structures want the corresponding freedom in workplace design and work-life balance. Managers must quickly recognize and combine individual employee skills. Assertiveness and "omniscience" are receding into the background. Power is redistributed and no longer accumulates at the top of the team. Instead, the network nodes are constantly changing.
Dynamism is required at all conceivable levels - projects and tasks must be constantly readjusted. Short-term change processes must be moderated and a permanent dialog with employees is required in order to adapt to constantly changing conditions and receive feedback. Ferber makes it clear that dialogue is the greatest challenge for managers, as the digitalization of the present also increases the possibilities of flexible workplaces. Good managers respond to their employees, try to understand them and give them guidance. After all, "big data" and the latest technologies of the present day will not provide these human skills.
Our result: personality cannot be digitized, says Bernd Ferber.