During Emerson’s Exchange Virtual Series, Eric Qualman, a best-selling author, and top speaker in digital issues shared with the audience five rational habits to become digital leaders.
As the pandemic has accelerated all digitalization efforts, across industrial and social sectors, authentic digital leadership is more relevant now than ever.
During the webinar Digital Leadership: Transforming you Future, best-selling author Eric Qualman shared his views upon the importance of undertaking leadership efforts in the digital era; that, ironically, has more to do with the social spectrum, than with the technological one.
“We have to understand that technology changes every second, but human nature never does. In that sense, relationships and habits shape every digital endeavor,” Qualman said.
And he shared a friendly example: “in today’s world, we have been forced to be like Jetsons, the cartoon. But we are also the Flintstones. Our digital relationships are shaped by these two approaches.”
With a true marriage between these two spectrums, Qualman explained, we can access a balanced digital relationship and exploit one of the best assets in the digital world: word to mouth said Qualman.
“The difference is that worth to mouth has now escalated; word to mouth is now on digital steroids.” So, to become a digital leader, Qualman offered a five-step guide, as digital leaders are not born, but made, and all of them share five simple habits.
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STAMP, habits for digital leaders
These five habits were represented by Qualman through an acronym: STAMP. Simple. True. Act. Map. People. The first habit he explained is just to simplify our tasks; by multitasking or by addressing more than we can actually get done, our productivity goes down.
By “single-tasking you focus on just one item, the one that if you do it well, everything else becomes easier, or maybe even irrelevant. It’s simple, but not easy,” he said.
The social spectrum of the digital leader
About the T standing for True, Qualman explained it’s not just about the “know-yourself trend” but to care about your digital footprint and your digital shadow. Taking care of what you post about yourself, your product, or your brand; and what others say about you, your brand, service, or product.
“By joining the two, you get your digital stamp and your digital stamp is your legacy. You have to embrace it, take care of it, and think about what is your ultimate digital legacy,” Qualman concluded.
The A standing for action, for Qualman is the essence of a digital leader, as the action is surpassing the fear of failure. “We have to understand that failure is part of the process; is accepting ten no’s to finally get to the yes. It’s about failing fast, failing forward, and failing better.”
About the M, standing for Map is about the resilience for obstacles and resistance to our plans. “Many of us establish our road map as a line. We think our objective is there and we are going to achieve it by going in a straight line to it. No. It’s about being flexible in our path but firm in our destination.”
Finally, the P for People, “you gotta surround yourself with the right people, offline and more and more online, but how do we do it virtually? The secret is on endorsing people around you because your relationship matters.”
The keynote talk by Qualman was flooded with examples from known digital leaders, and engaging exercises to actually think about our relationship with the digital world, and how to improve our engagement on it.
