Leading in Digitized Workplaces

Introduction

As digital technologies advance, the pace, scope, and complexity of change experienced in organizations have reached unprecedented levels. It is important for companies and leaders to understand how digitalization affects the business and to learn how to lead a success business strategy moving forward. This course aims to equip leaders at various levels with the skills needed to adapt themselves to the change and challenges faced in dynamic, fast-paced, increasingly digitized work contexts, and to support effective technological adaptation, adoption, and innovation within their teams.

Leading in digitized workplaces requires having both a “digital mindset” regarding technological changes and transformation, and an understanding of how to adapt and move the organization forward in volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous environments. As organizational success, in this context, largely relies on employees’ willingness and ability to be adaptable and innovative, leaders are thus responsible for relaying and supporting change and innovation within their teams.  

Given the demands of leading in digitized workplaces, the course has two foci. The first explores what it takes to be an effective leader in a dynamic and increasingly digitized business environment. Here the focus is on understanding the drivers and implications of your own behavior, and learning how to lead yourself to be more effective in a fast-paced, digitalized workplace. The second focus is concerned with how to lead others in a fast-paced, digital era. This part of the course emphasizes what it takes to make team members, and the organization as a whole, more resilient and adaptive towards change and new technologies, and how to generate the innovation necessary to survive in this environment. It also explores how traditional models of leadership may or may not hold in the digital age.

This course is relevant for leaders in both private and public organizations and across industries. By attending this course, leaders will develop the knowledge and skills to lead more effectively in an age where digitization and constant change are the new reality. Further, they will develop a level of awareness about their own leader behavior and reflect on how that may be received by their team.

Course content

Topics covered in the course include:

• The workplace of the future: Major trends and challenges related to leading in digitized workplaces and digital transformation initiatives
• Implementing agile, digital teamwork: Learning agile implementation methodology, strategy and the benefits of working within or executing a flexible project plan
• Crafting jobs to jumpstart digitalization: How proactive innovations in job design can be leveraged to facilitate change processes
• Developing and leveraging digital mindsets: Gaining a better awareness of fundamental beliefs about technological change and how to both develop and leverage the mindsets needed in the organization
• Enabling innovation and digital transformation: How leaders create the adaptive space needed for the learning and innovation necessary for digital transformation to flourish
• Leveraging digital platforms to lead organizational transformation: Learning how digital systems can facilitate digital transformation at higher levels