Scaling Leadership

Scaling leadership has two components 1) The growth and support of new leaders under your direction and 2) The growth and scale of your own leadership.

The growth and support of new leaders, requires an investment, just like the scaling of a tech platform. Irrespective of whether you got supported as a new leader, the chances of your new leaders succeeding are dramatically improved if you invest the time and energy in guiding, growing and training your leaders. Helping them to make the transitions from technology to people and to understand what it means to be a high-performance digital leader.

A tool I use in supporting the growth of digital leaders is the Digital Situational Leadership model (see figure 5)

Figure 5: Digital Situational Leadership Model

This model takes the rather fluffy and confusing domain of digital leadership and codifies and model that allows new (and existing leaders) to understand what is required for success. The model is based on my definition of success for a digital leader which is:

Success for a digital leader involves building a motivated, high-performance capability that tactically and strategically delivers value to customers in a sustainable way.

All four modes are essential to success and all are dangerous if we spend too much time locked in one. Digital situational leadership requires leaders to understand the current situation and maintain agility to move around the four modes as required. In a particular meeting of stakeholders, ultimate success may mean navigating all four modes over the space of an hour. In another scenario, say a one-on-one meeting, it may mean sitting singularly in one particular mode and focusing our frames and conversation around that. We may find ourselves in situations where it’s not clear which mode is appropriate; in that instance, it’s useful to try on a mode and ask questions related to it. For instance, stepping

into the Futurist role could mean asking about future tech trends and their impact on what’s being discussed.

Becoming aware of this model and discussing it with your new leaders facilitates a new awareness and clarity of leadership. There are two powerful questions that you can ask your leaders and indeed yourself in order to develop your digital situational leadership agility, and they are: