Filling Gaps in Leadership

One of my classmates brought up more about digital leadership and his thoughts that digital leaders need to understand technology to make appropriate choices. Although I think he brings up a terrific point, it makes me think about my own leadership at work. 

Our organization is going through a period of growth and transition. One of our primary leaders is self admittedly not a digital savant or techie. He embraces technology and understands the necessity of it for growth and profitability, he's very much a long-term vision guy. But what he has done is he surrounds himself with technologists and digital solutions leaders and he depends on them for their insight and their help in achieving his vision. 

He's very much a traditional leader who understands his weaknesses in the digital world and finds substitutes to help fill the gaps. The interesting part about this is that many people would call him a digital leader…  Say. He's just advancing digital leadership through proxy. I think great leaders understand their weaknesses and find a supporting cast that can bring their strengths to improve the overall organization's capabilities. In this case, our leader has done it with digital solutions in a digital leadership that reports to him.

One theme that seems to keep coming up, particularly in many discussions is the ability to be agile and adaptable. I wonder if being agile and adaptable has more to do with the current piece of technological advances in innovation than anything else. I was speaking to someone the other day about advances in business technology and one of the things we discussed was how in today's day and age process improvements and changes that might've taken decades in areas past now take just a few years. Is that organizations in liters afternoon adaptable and they might have been in the past? I think back to the original question about traditional versus digital leadership… A digital leader must be eminently adaptable and open to change compared to traditional leaders who seems to have more time to make decisions. I think about what you said about your finances notation and your DOS system. It certainly seems what you're describing is a more traditional approach where changes slow and in today's day and age I think we're discovering that agility and adaptability are traits that digital leaders must have in order to stay on the forefront.