Highly influential corporate boards are heterogeneous, inquisitive, intelligent, effective, innovative and influential.
People tend to make leadership very complex, but in its most simple form, leadership is an influence. With rapid changes and exponential growth of information, the command control style of management is gradually losing its steam. Digital leadership needs to be highly intelligent and influential, to lead through influence, but brute force. The corporate board as one of the top leadership pillars must influence and exemplify progressive leadership and help to shape an ultra-modern digital organization effortlessly.
Influential Intelligence: A mindset could be called influential intelligence if it can discover the patterns of inter-relationship among different disciplines, understand the mindsets of all members of the group. The insightful board leaders has the ability to influence peers or management team as they undertake a broad range of crucial decisions involving issues such as strategy, performance, branding, technological vision, finance, talent management, etc. They do not dominate discussions, instead, they encourage open critical debates, encourage fresh perspectives, and appreciate the collective insight from peer board directors as well as various stakeholders. To "influence" means to be able to shape other people's views or opinions towards one's own views or perspectives. With influential intelligence, the contemporary corporate board can inspire, innovate, improve, interact, interpret, exemplify, encourage, and orchestrate change. The corporate board leaders with influential intelligence have adaptability, consistency, profundity, and empathy to steer the business in the right directions under business dynamic and lead the business forward smoothly.
Expertise influence: Top board leaders need to have broader business acumen, deep expertise, transdisciplinary knowledge, cross-functional experience, and leadership skills. As a senior leadership role, corporate board directors should be the specialized generalists with “T” shaped expertise, and they are able to embrace the seemingly paradoxical point of views in order to gain a deep understanding of varying strategic topics holistically. Most of the board directors are top seasoned executives with decades of experience. Collectively, the digital board with a blend of expertise and capabilities can foster a culture of innovation and improve boardroom decision effectiveness and leadership maturity. To reach the state of knowledge proficiency and spread expertise influence, it is also important to identify and close the gap between knowledge and insight in the boardroom. Board directors are not just the follower to chase the tidal waves blindly, but able to capture the invaluable business insight to make sound judgments and effective decisions in a consistent way.
World class leadership influence: The ultimate criterion of "high-influential leadership," is the ability to create more leaders, to spread leadership, or more precisely, to groom more authentic leaders with the ability to think differently, independently, and innovatively. To amplify leadership influence, digital leaders including corporate board directors need to be constantly visible by sharing vision and enabling others to share it. Their leadership influence is made based on the leadership substances such as vision and purpose with effective digital leadership styles such as participation, coaching or delegation. The corporate board’s global leadership influence is based on their world-class leadership competencies such as self-regulation, social judgment skills, empathy, motivation to work in a global environment, cultural cognition, acceptance of complexity and its contradictions, the tolerance of ambiguity, flexibility, and learning agility. Their leadership influence must be built on the foundation of the moral competencies such as wisdom, justice, courage, and temperance.
Highly influential corporate boards are heterogeneous, inquisitive, intelligent, effective, innovative and influential. Open leadership, humble attitude, adaptability, creativity, sound judgment, inclusiveness, and fact-driven communication, are digital leadership traits to make profound leadership influence. Highly influential leaders understand themselves and have a story to tell, they develop an authentic leadership brand, and encourage others to do the same.
Creative Leadership is great when you think, act and enable others with a creative spirit that drives positive changes.
"Digital Master” is a series of guidebooks (28 + books) to perceive the multi-faceted impact digital is making to the businesses and society, help forward-thinking organizations navigate through the journey in a systematic way, and avoid “rogue digital.” It perceives the emergent trends of digital leadership, provides advice on how to run a digital organization to unleash its full potential and improve agility, maturity, and provide insight about Change Management. It also instructs the digital workforce on how to shape a game-changing digital mindset and build the right set of digital capabilities to compete for the future. Here is a set of “Creative leadership” quotes in “Digital Master.”
1 Creative leadership can be described as "Adaptability meets Agility" and "Innovation meets Principles."
2 Creative leadership is the ability to inspire, to create, and to maintain the social and psychological conditions and the environment in which people are able to reach their highest potential.
3 Creative leadership is being flexible enough to adapt to the situation and the players involved. It means doing unexpected, unconventional things to lead effectively.
4 Creative Leadership is great when you think, act and enable others with a creative spirit that drives positive changes.
5 What we deem as “creativity” in leadership, is at times down to cultural difference in traditions, practices, and perceptions of organizational productivity and community norms.
6 Creative Leadership show the following 'dispositions such as: visionary, faces reality, adaptable, persevering, competent, ethical, courageous, curious.
7 A creative leader is open minded, collects thoughts and ideas, seeks new experiences, plays, challenges, surrounds interesting people, things, environment, and enjoys solitude.
8 Creative leadership combines restless dissatisfaction with the current state coupled with the excitement of leading individuals or groups to find solutions that will produce results no one thought possible.
9 Creative leadership is essentially anchored on the leader's overall multifaceted resourcefulness, to formulate creative (unconventional) alternatives or solutions to resolve problems, to show versatility and flexibility in response to unpredictable or unanticipated circumstances.
Leadership is about the future, it’s about change, it’s about making a difference, a principle and a discipline.
Transformational leadership is the higher level digital leadership. History has shown us that transformational leaders place a high value on human beings within their organization and make sublime achievement of pushing the world forward. Transformational leaders have idealized Influence upon building vision and goals, inspire and motivate more people to commit to their vision. The truly transformational leadership requires leaders to have a deep understanding of themselves, and become conscious of the impact they are having on others. Here are three characteristics of transformative leadership.
Intellectual stimulation: Transformative leaders know how to inspire, woo and persuade various key stakeholders coming along with them on a risk-taking but significantly invigorating venture. They practice open leadership, have a growth mindset, make intellectual stimulation, nurture the culture of learning, enforce cross-functional communication and collaboration, and build a positive working atmosphere. Intellectual stimulation is critical to encourage creativity because people have to let go of “the voices from the past,” deprogram old mindset, break down the outdated customs or traditions, reprogramming collective minds with new values, norms, and attitudes, and keep their creative energy flow frictionlessly. Transformative leaders can empathetically let people know that they are part of something bigger than just keeping the trains running on time. They can make the big differences by exploring who they are, who they want to be, as well as how they can do things differently. A friendly digital working environment is like the melting pot to embrace diversity, inspire creativity, stimulate intellectual curiosity and encourage free thinking & experimenting.
Systematic Insight: Transformative leaders can make the large scale of changes at the individual, relational, and systemic levels simultaneously. In practice though, too often, transformational change is acted on the basis of improving one part of an organization at the expense of other parts of the organization. Therefore, often, transformational leaders are the ones who have cross-domain business and personality traits so that they can gain an in-depth understanding of the interconnectivity of systems and relationship dynamics. Transformative leaders desire to listen to the different viewpoint and discover the connectivity and common ground from the difference and shape their own viewpoint. They can gain business insight by learning to create inner space of consciousness and superconsciousness in the storming mind of thoughts, emotions, sensations, imagination, and reasoning. They are able to carry compelling conversations across business domains, speak functional dialects to tailor audiences, and make systematic design to construct a company scope digital transformation. Further, transformative leaders can see the patterns others may not, more specifically, they can see invisible behind visible, perceive hyperconnectivity and interdependence between parts and the whole; learn from the past and ride above the learning curve. Thus, they can engender new perspectives, diagnose the root cause of problems and solve them systematically.
Game-changing: The digital business today is not just working within the industry, but also permeating cross-ecosystem which is dynamic, continuous and interactive. Large or transformative change is not for the fainted heart. It takes a lot of brainstorming and energy to re-focus, kick start or “game-change.” Transformational leadership is based on vision, to connect the dots into the future. Transformational leaders are often driven by a purpose bigger than themselves and, thus, often constructively disruptive, to make the large leap of collective progress. The challenge is to prioritize what you know about and keep an eye open for signs of things you don't know about. Transformational leaders reject conventional thoughts and structures without apology. Rule-breaking or rule-making is part of transformative leadership which demands insight, understanding, patience, persistence, and courage, among other things. It’s a critical step for game-changing. Updated rules are still necessary for framing, setting the standard or safeguarding the status quo. Generally speaking, rule update, mind shift, and culture refreshment are all critical steps for driving game-changing digital transformation.
Digital transformation needs to be led by transformational leaders. Find those who dare to think bigger and thrive on change and innovation. Understanding each executive's authentic leadership traits and capability is where organizations need to start. Leadership is about the future, it’s about change, it’s about making a difference, should you also view digital leadership as a principle and a discipline.
People tend to make leadership very complex, but in its most simple form, leadership is an influence. With rapid changes and exponential growth of information, the command control style of management is gradually losing its steam. Digital leadership needs to be highly intelligent and influential, to lead through influence, but brute force. The corporate board as one of the top leadership pillars must influence and exemplify progressive leadership and help to shape an ultra-modern digital organization effortlessly.
