A Progressive Board: Setting the Top Leadership Tone to Drive Digital Transformation

At today’s “VUCA” digital dynamic, organizations face both unprecedented opportunities to grow and hyper-competition or great risks to survive. Therefore, the corporate board plays a more significant role in overseeing business strategy, setting principles and policies, and making the judgment on and assurance of corporate action within a framework of practical knowledge. The digital fitting BoD is about mental toughness, progressive perspective, and in-depth business understanding in order to set the right digital leadership tone and lead change effortlessly.
A progressive board has the progressive mindset: BoD leadership needs to be future oriented. A progressive board is built based on progressive mindsets. The first principle of a progressive Board needs to be open-minded, foresightful, knowledgeable, innovative and committed in order to contribute to strategy oversight when required and effectively at all times. Progress represents change. Progress itself is a change, either by individual or group efforts or induced by environmental and cultural tangible and intangible force. Change the game is a mindset. The progressive digital boards can provide the direction as vision, mission, strategy, as well as leadership skills like delegation, decision-making, and monitoring. The BoD role also sets the top leadership’s tone for progression and affects most through congruent behavior, continuous endorsement of the change and regular communication to keep the momentum.
A progressive board advocates innovation: Innovation is change and advancement .Innovation is what leads to differentiation and progression. There are many ways to differentiate, and therefore, there are many ways to build innovation into a corporate strategy. Boards oversee strategy, and therefore, boards need to pay more attention to innovation and proactively pursue progression. If you want true innovation, find someone who does. It's time to not just think outside of the box on what type of persons should make up your board, but to seek people who truly think-outside-of-the-box, or more precisely, who can shape a new or bigger box and bring outside in viewpoint. There is friction in making change and progress. Indeed, the moment one begins to work towards one's improvement, one attracts a lot of judgment and criticism. People want to hold you back, and that is the test, not to get trapped, and to continue with focus. BoDs as top leadership team need to walk the talk in the progress journey of leading forward.
Progressive BoDs are continuous learners: It’s not the acquisition of knowledge that will make the leader, it is the desire to acquire and apply that knowledge, transform into the insight that will make the leader. Progressive boards make sound judgments based in-depth understanding and multidimensional intelligence. Progress is not hanging onto judgments from a way that does not apply. Insight is judging with an openness and understanding that your parameters for judgment are based on the full learning cycle: information-knowledge-insight-wisdom. The progressive BoDs have global breadth for competitive judgments and opportunities; their inherent nature and ability to adapt allows them to do just that, learn, adapt and provide valuable insights that truly no one else can or could see. Leadership in itself is future driven, in pursuit of human progress, a constant learning process that requires the leader to build experience and to share insight. Leaders not only learn themselves but also advocate a culture of learning.
The difference between a progressive board and a compliance board comes from altitude, attitude, and aptitude that drives continuous progress and become better. Progressive and insightful digital BoDs have better chance to figure out the “secret sauce” of directorship to blend the color of the character and make influence via wisdom and cognizance.




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