Today's entrepreneurs are building businesses in the context of permanent digital progress: the ability to quickly
But a breakthrough company can only be createdbreakthrough team. Thanks to a large number of successful and failed examples, large corporations realized this more than 10 years ago and began to study how to digitalize companies by building the right team.
The trend for digital personality sensitivity
How companies work in the digital age alreadyit is more or less clear: in matters of digital transformation of information systems and business processes of companies, the world giants McKinsey, Capgemini Consulting, MIT Sloan and other respectable business institutions have succeeded. From their work, it is clear to us today how you can transform an individual business function or an entire company. But how to evaluate and select the managers suitable for the new company is still not so obvious.
At Skolkovo, the issue of digital trainingmanagers have been involved for several years. The limited understanding of the phenomenon of digital adaptability prompted us to conduct research. More than 6 thousand employees working in the Russian market in local and global companies of more than 20 industries took part in the study: this made it possible to identify stable individual characteristics that are responsible for adaptability to the new digital reality. Based on the research data, an assessment system was built - Skolkovo Digital Index (SDI), geared towards analyzing the level of digital sensitivity of individual employees and teams.
We have collected data on managers at different levelsand specialists: how they interact with innovations, what approach they demonstrate in project management, how they behave under stress, what style of interaction with colleagues and team management they prefer. In addition, we collected data on the digital literacy of participants: their level of expertise in basic and complex digital solutions and experience in applying technology in professional activities. As a result of this large-scale study, we were able to form a digital susceptibility model that includes a block of digital literacy and a block of digital competencies and answers the question "How adaptable is this employee to digital reality and will he be able to become a new transformational leader?" The model was verified on a large volume of external objective data and showed high accuracy and reliability of the assessment. In addition to the research itself, the SDI tool was used in more than 20 projects to assess the potential of leaders and teams.
Risk helps you compete
It turned out that managers with high and low levels of digital sensitivity have significant differences in a number of competencies. For example, in their openness to new things and willingness to take risks.
Willingness to take risks is a trait that isfor many years it was perceived as destructive. For example, a few years ago, industrial and banking companies hired researchers to identify employees with an increased level of risk, because the decisions of such employees led to industrial disasters and significant financial losses. Early research also showed that risk-averse people are also more likely to enjoy extreme sports, receive more speeding tickets, and are prone to abuse. Thus, for many decades, risk appetite has been viewed by businesses as a negative trait.
However, the more a society is digitized, the morethe attitude towards risky employees is changing more strongly. Risk appetite is becoming a necessary competence for emerging leaders. This is due to the fact that the innovations we are dealing with today are complex technological systems. Now there are not enough examples in the world that would allow companies to plan in detail a project for the implementation of a new digital technology. Accordingly, the implementation of such innovative projects requires a certain amount of riskiness - a willingness to act in a situation of uncertainty and demonstrate a tolerant attitude towards mistakes. The ability to take risks, overcome losses and mistakes, and learn from experience is becoming an essential competence of today's digital leaders.
Interestingly, as part of model validationof digital susceptibility SDI, we used the neuro-analysis technology, developed by us in recent years and used to assess managerial competencies. Risk appetite can be assessed by analyzing the neural responses of the brain in winning and losing situations, such as a wagering game. Brain reactions that indicate increased emotional arousal in a winning situation, in contrast to a loss situation, indicate an increased propensity to take risks. Both senior executives and Generation Y - students of the Moove program - who showed increased willingness to take risks, according to the SDI, also showed more pronounced brain responses to reward in contrast to loss. It is important that both groups - top managers and undergraduates - with an increased propensity to take risks were generally more successful than their less risky colleagues in a number of business indicators.
Digital literacy and age
Digital literacy, based on ourresearch, broke into two large components: the level of basic digital solutions and the level of complex technologies. The level of basic solutions reflects how effectively a person is able to solve everyday household tasks using digital technologies. Communication, search and purchase of goods and services, transport, food - all these tasks today we can solve with the help of digital technologies much faster, more convenient, cheaper and easier than before. The Integrated Technology Level is an assessment of awareness of complex technology solutions that can have a significant impact on a company or an entire business industry. Understanding the principles of machine learning, the Internet of Things, virtual and augmented reality and a number of other technologies allows a leader to assess the possibility of integrating these solutions into the company's business activities and, thus, bring it to a new level.
Interestingly, we found a connection between the basedigital literacy and age: young people are generally better savvy in basic digital solutions: they are faster and more confident in digital opportunities that allow them to optimize the search for necessary goods and services, communication, transport and cybersecurity issues. On the other hand, in the field of complex digital technologies, top managers show better results - those who have already achieved the first successes on the path of digitalization of the company. They tend to have a better understanding of what opportunities the distributed ledger system (blockchain) creates and how they can be used to provide a qualitatively new service, which ultimately allows them to increase sales and increase market share.
Social Desirability: Boomers and Buzzers
The MOOVE group of undergraduates had a lower levelsocial desirability - striving to meet external expectations. This suggests that they are less likely to wear masks, play formal roles, or act in accordance with the expectations of the environment. This is partly due to the professional deformation of the older generation - the business environment has taught them to be more compromise, flexible, and be able to meet expectations.
However, another possibility should not be ruled out: these differences between youthful and mature digital leaders - zoomers and boomers - may reflect a broader cultural change: movement towards a more open, supportive and creative business culture.
Empathy as an important quality of new leaders
Based on the results of many years of research, digitalreceptivity and applied projects based on SDI, we see empathy becoming one of the inherent characteristics of emerging leaders. Modern teams are characterized by decentralization, a decrease in hierarchy - they begin to resemble communities of experts, each of which is strong in its own spectrum of issues, where there is no pronounced, constantly dominant boss. The task of leaders is to be able to accurately assess the strengths and weaknesses of team members in order to correctly allocate resources and team roles, as well as to choose individual methods of motivation. To do this, modern leaders need interpersonal sensitivity - the ability to feel the subtle dynamics of the emotional context, changes in the state of everyone.
The whip is no longer an effective methodmanagement - modern employees need more and more freedom for creativity and a psychologically comfortable environment to implement their often rather rare expertise. It is in such conditions that new valuable results, ideas, products appear. These teams are more difficult to manage, but they are the ones that bring the most powerful, breakthrough ideas now and give birth to new companies. Our results show that successful executives - both the older generation and the young MOOVEs who have successfully launched startups - have increased interpersonal sensitivity.
Despite the fact that in recent decadesthanks to research in the field of behavioral genetics, it was possible to establish that all personality traits have a significant biological basis, all of them are also subject to changes throughout life. The development effect has not been canceled. This means that reduced stress resistance, lack of empathy, low willingness to take risks and insufficient level of innovation can be developed to a certain extent, thereby increasing their level of adaptability to a new, digital reality.
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