The world of work changes every day, thanks to progress in technology. Nowadays, digital leadership represents a direct competitive advantage, especially in recruitment. As digital leadership is an evolving matter, it is, therefore, hard to define. However, we consider it to englobe the leverage of social platforms, by building a base of followers who can benefit from your expertise. These social platforms include blogs, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook or any other social channel made for communication.
Being a leader in the digital era is advantageous for any business, though it offers a significant competitive advantage for recruiting firms. Indeed, digital leadership can generate more exposure and prospects, therefore attracting talent. Companies that digitally transform become 26% more profitable than their competitors in the industry.
Interested in becoming a digital leader? Here are 5 steps that can help.
5 Steps to make you a Digital Leader:
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Step out of your comfort zone, experiment
Use the platforms you dispose of to study your audience and plan your strategy accordingly. You can prepare for the immediate future by analysing and reporting the conditions of a current situation. This is called nowcasting, and digital platforms are the ideal place for it. For example, Twitter is a perfect real-time social media reporter. You can read the public mood and thus obtain immediate insights on rapidly evolving customer trends. However, in order to fully exploit it, a willingness to experiment is necessary. Embracing this digital transformation and building a relationship with your follower base can give you a competitive advantage.
Dedication to undergo transformation is necessary, in order to integrate digital thinking into everyday life. To become a digital leader, you need to be digitally fluent.
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Translate technology into possible business impacts, make predictions
Digital leaders need to possess certain skills. Understanding the shifts in economic, social or behavioural trends in customers, or prospect employees are one of them. Most of these shifts are brought forth by evolving technologies, like social networks, cloud and especially big data, and being able to adapt to their fluctuation effectively is a huge competitive advantage. The technological insights you study can be used to foresee any impacts on your industry and organisation. Mastering the understanding of how technology is transforming society and then translating it into business impacts is an essential step to becoming a digital leader.
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Promote collaboration and teamwork
As aforementioned, becoming a digital leader implies adopting a fully digital behaviour in the company. IT departments can no longer be treated as a separate section of the company. Technology is now at the centre of business and should be treated as such. For example, the trend toward BYOD, bring your own device, encourages employees to use their personal devices to work. Becoming a digital leader implies everyone in the organisation familiarising themselves with a certain amount of technology, as it should be implemented in daily tasks. Easing communication, it promotes effective collaboration between workers.
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Adopt technology, use its information and develop new skills
The biggest challenge to fully commit to digital concerns big data. Understanding the entire big data process is crucial: from what to use it for, how it can be most efficient or even understanding how to transform the information into strategic business decisions. Therefore, the overall adoption of this system is necessary. Encourage all employees to develop digital skills. The more agile the workforce is with technology, the greater their potential to contribute to digital leadership and overall innovation.
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Have a digital story, and share it
Just like any other business strategy, there is a reason behind it that forms part of the culture of your enterprise. Your company culture is very important with regards to employer brand, and your digital story is no different. However, a rather limited amount of firms have a compelling digital business narrative, that falls in line with the rest of their culture and makes sense both inside and outside of their organisation.
Becoming a digital leader brings profit, growth and attracts talent. No matter the size of the organisation nor its industry it competes in, it is recommended to adopt a digital strategy. Nonetheless, being a digital leader does imply having important visibility, and is therefore helpful for recruiting companies.
