Oleg Konovalov Discusses Leaderology For The Digital Era

We are still hesitant to stop trying to create leaders by using approaches and techniques from the Industrial Era. We fail to consider that such a decades’ old approach fails in the new and radically demanding conditions of the Digital Age. Reliance on a few prominently gifted leaders is not enough anymore.

At the same, new emerging contextual factors make leadership as a critical function even more complex and demanding than ever before – changes in people management, technologies, the growing importance of diversity and inclusion, shifts in national cultures, and many more. We are well into a new phase of business evolution, a fact businesspeople ignore or struggle to accept.

The demand for leaders capable of growing people and creating appropriate conditions for growth shows that competent leadership becomes more important than anything else in terms of driving businesses for success.

We urgently need to break out of the old paradigm of leadership and develop something new and relevant to the realities of the Digital Era. It is a choice between life and death for our businesses.

If leadership is so important for the existence and success of all organizations, then we desperately need a new system for leading businesses. Leaderology is a system of systematic knowledge, competencies, and skills that allow an effective aligning of the organization, culture, and the most appropriate modes of leadership to serve customers effectively. It is a response to the growing complexity of duties and tasks in the Digital Era.

In other words, success in business should have a code that defines its feasibility. The aim of leaderology is to find these codes of success for different businesses.

Aligning business as an effective composition of the company, culture, and leadership is creating harmony between the interrelation of a real entity (company), love and care of employees and customers (culture), and vision (leadership).

How do these three elements complement each other to satisfy customer demand? A company is a real entity with boundaries within which employees act. These boundaries are not physical. Whatever employees act out in their imagination, thinking about their duties while not in the office, or representing the company formally and informally in different situation, these are the borders within which we fulfill our roles and duties towards company, colleagues, and customers.

A company exists to the extent it allows a positive culture to flourish and facilitate common wisdom, love, and care. Culture as love and care transforms an organization from a mere place of work to a place where people can become better than they are. People inside and outside the organization will be affected by this.

We are moving from leadership as a function to leaderology as a system of leading and making a difference for people. Leaders face more responsibilities and much higher expectations in terms of the execution of their roles. The leader’s responsibilities are expanding enormously, demanding much stronger competencies and skills than before. Everyday learning and continuous improvement need to be the norm. Leaders need to become advocates of continuous development. The leader’s duty is to open a door into the future for people and explain how things should be considered and managed in that new reality.

Take these three elements separately and they will fall apart. Masterfully aligning the company, its culture, and specific leadership traits can be considered as the first element of the code of business success. The second part of that code lies in the ability of leaders to add vision, strength, value, and focus to every element of business to satisfy customers while securing their people’s growth and sustainable development of their organizations. Success in business is based on a simple approach – understand customer demand, form your vision, assess your resources, and bring them together.

Leaderology defines the beginning of the Renaissance period in modern management and leadership while helping leaders to reach a new level of success. Read Leaderology to learn more about latest trends and best practices. Get it here!