Harnessing the opportunities of emerging information technologies is one of the great challenges companies are facing today. To successfully master digital transformation, organizations need leaders who can grasp the opportunities of digitalization for their business and transform them into new business models. Aiming at providing empirical evidence regarding competencies sought by practitioners for managing digital transformation, we analyze 239 job advertisements targeting digital transformation experts and examine the skills and traits explicitly called for. Our results reveal that technical skills and in-depth expertise in information technologies play only a secondary role in job requirement profiles. Like in earlier strategic change processes, digital transformation experts should primarily possess collaboration, strategic thinking, leadership, customer orientation, and communication skills. Moreover, in contrast to purely conceptual studies limited to skills and abilities, our analyses emphasize the importance of specific personality traits, such as proactivity and creativity, since these are often explicitly mentioned in corresponding job advertisements.

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Purpose Business leaders are facing a change of role as digitalization continues to intensify in organizations. As technological change is bringing back supposedly old virtues of leadership, this study aims to explain the impact digital transformation has on leadership due to organizational size. Design/methodology/approach Cross-border study with experts from multinational enterprises (MNEs) in Austria and small and medium companies (SMEs) in Italy. Findings With increasing digitalization, leadership is becoming more important. In times of social distance, it is essential that leaders actively foster the management of relationships with their employees, manage social processes in their teams and shape change processes. This requires a bundle of skills consisting of effective leadership skills, strong change management skills and conceptual digitization skills. Practical implications Digital transformation is not mainly about implementing new technologies; it is about developing an appropriate strategy in which people are key. Organizations regardless of size need to recognize that digital transformation requires not less, but even more active shaping of the relationships between leaders and their team members. Consequently, they need active leaders who drive, communicate and implement technological change. As leadership and change require time, resources and, above all, attention, executive selection and qualification are critical for the broad integration of digitalization ideas into an organization. Originality/value People, not technology, drive digital transformation, and organizations require leaders, not necessarily technological specialists, to manage the complex changes that comprise an organization’s digital transformation. Technical and methodological skills can be substituted with the use of new technologies, but leaders’ interactional, social, strategic and conceptual skills are gaining in importance.

PurposeEven with the recognized impact organizational leaders have on the outcome of digital transformation (DT), a comprehensive scholarly understanding of the competencies that leaders must possess to lead a DT to success is lacking.Design/methodology/approachTo derive and list the competencies considered by experts as necessary for managing DT, the authors recruited 18 international senior managers with relevant experience and applied the Delphi method to survey the managers. Upon the completion of three survey rounds and the authors modifying the response list until consensus was reached, 39 items were shortlisted as constituting key competencies for managing DT. Furthermore, the authors engaged in inductive theorizing to derive propositional statements using these findings.FindingsThe practitioners agreed on visionary thinking, agility, understanding the value of data, data-driven decision-making, knowledge of strategy and accepting change as the most important requirements for managing DT. Through inductive theorizing, the authors further derived that the seven discovered clusters fell into two broader competencies – behavioral and strategic – and that each behavioral competency would have varying importance depending on the country and industry that the organization operates in.Research limitations/implicationsAs is typical for Delphi studies that involve multiple survey rounds, the study participant response rate was moderate. The implications of this study, in finding that a variety of leadership competencies are needed to ensure successful DT, validate prior research that people, not technology, drive DT.Practical implicationsThis study helps mitigate assumptions that successful DT processes are only possible by hiring technological experts, as doing so highlights the importance of behavioral leadership competencies.Originality/valueThe study is one of the first to interlink digital leadership with DT by inductively theorizing behavioral and strategic competencies. The authors also establish that contexts are vital in determining which aspects of leadership competencies are deemed most important in driving DT.

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