Digital leadership skills that South African leaders require for successful digital transformation

Digital transformation, with all its rapid new technological advances in disruptive technologies, is impacting the way we work and how leadership is executed in the workplace. Leaders have realised they now need new skills and new ways of leading. Digital transformation in Africa can help leapfrog the current legacy system challenges and leadership competencies through gaining the skills needed to accelerate digital transformation. This chapter explores the literature around digital transformation in South Africa, and various forms of leadership and digital leadership skills. We unpack research conducted with 17 South African digital leaders who have carried out digital transformation successfully in their organisations and review the findings of the type of leader and digital leadership skills required for successful digital transformation. Complexity Leadership Theory undergirds our theoretical approach and we explore whether adaptive leadership is relevant for the disruptive environment of digital transformation. The Skills Strataplex is used as a foundation to understand if traditional leadership skills still apply. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the Adaptive Digital Leadership Skills Model that was developed based on what South African digital leaders believe is the ideal that a leader should possess to carry out successful digital transformations.