Digital Leadership 📊 CAI Leader
Digital Leadership with CAI® Leader
Tools for Everyday Digital Leadership

Background Knowledge on Digital Leadership – Make Your Leadership Future-Proof
New technologies have permeated all areas of life. The internet is omnipresent. Shopping, banking, entertainment – everything is available online anytime, anywhere.
In the private sphere, digital transformation is well advanced. In the business context, digitalization is also a major topic, and digital transformation continues to progress steadily. It is expected that digitalization will accelerate further, bringing significant changes. Examples include:
- Shorter product life cycles, requiring more agility and flexibility to keep up with market demands.
- Changing customer requirements, necessitating the development and implementation of innovative processes and business models for future success.
- Different expectations from employees toward employers. Previously, monetary aspects were key; today, employees expect more flexible working time and location models and greater participation. Due to the growing shortage of skilled workers, employers must offer more to attract and retain talent.
In summary, future success requires proactively addressing these challenges. This calls for a new leadership approach that incorporates these factors and leverages them to the organization’s advantage. Digital transformation needs Digital Leadership.
Digital Leadership – What Is It?
So far, Digital Leadership has not really arrived in companies. This is partly because there is no uniform definition, making it difficult to develop viable concepts for practical implementation.
Despite the lack of a unified definition of Digital Leadership as a new and digital form of leadership, many researchers and experts agree that there are several core elements that this leadership style must include, stemming from changes in technology and society brought about by digital transformation.
These core elements include:
- Appreciation and trust as central leadership values
- Democratization of decisions and decision-making in networks
- Opportunities for employee development and growth
- Focus on agility and flexibility
- Technologies and their use as a central pillar of leadership
Based on this, Digital Leadership can be defined as follows:
Digital Leadership is leadership through media that professionally uses the possibilities of virtual collaboration and online communication to manage organizations, enables agile, goal-oriented leadership processes with appropriate media tool support to achieve organizational goals, creates the necessary IT infrastructure, and empowers employees and teams to design their tasks independently and media-competently, network via media, exchange ideas in a trusting manner, and continue to develop.
(Prof. Dr. Elke Berninger-Schäfer in Digital Leadership 2019, p. 76)








