Leading Growth through the Digital Leader

As Millennials, and next in line the iGen, begin to take over the workforce, they are bringing with them leadership trends that will shape the future of organizational leadership. Modern organizations must respond to an increased pace of the workplace, and the nature of executives’ tasks is increasingly complex. Despite the evidence suggesting that focusing on growth versus performance will lead to better long‐term performance, our business schools continue to emphasize managing performance instead of leading growth. Trends such as real‐time feedback, agile networks of teams, advanced people analytics, micro‐learning, personalized learning, and artificial intelligence enable the digitally minded leader to shape the future of leadership. We know that many leadership dimensions have a causal relationship with desirable organizational outcomes, and that the foundational pillars of leadership, such as shared values and vision, talent development, change management, and reward and recognition, will likely continue to drive these outcomes. However, how we lead in these areas is changing. The current paper explored these phenomena based on current literature with an eye toward the future.