Digital Leadership Is Mostly Not Digital

I read a lot of academic research for my doctorate. Most of it confirms what you already suspected. Every so often, a paper stops me cold, and a 2024 study in Management Review Quarterly did exactly that. I actually put a few lines in my weekly article to my professor that I was going to use the article, so hopefully she finds it here.

Three researchers set out to answer one question: what capabilities does a leader need to thrive in a digital environment? They reviewed 21 years of published studies. Then they ran a four-round Delphi panel with 24 experts across six countries, pushing until the group reached consensus.

The result: 4 dimensions and 29 specific capabilities. Two dimensions face the business (strategic focus and delivery). Two face people (interpersonal skills and personal attributes).

What had me interested, oddly enough, is that the list looks ordinary.

• Build trustworthiness.

• Communicate clearly and listen carefully.

• Coach your team.

• Establish psychological safety so people can voice disagreement without fear of retaliation.

• Act with integrity in word and action.

• Take initiative.

• Manage your time.

Out of 29 capabilities, the explicitly digital ones (being technologically savvy, thinking analytically about data, scanning new tech for business impact) are a small minority.

Twenty-four experts who study digital transformation for a living agreed that leading through it rests mostly on durable human fundamentals, exercised in a faster and more uncertain setting.

Two terms worth separating

The authors draw a line I found useful. E-leadership, the older concept from around 2000, meant leading through electronic channels: email, video calls, virtual teams.

Digital leadership describes how a person thinks and behaves when the environment itself keeps changing. One is a channel. The other is a mindset.

That distinction matters if you're hiring. You can put anyone through a Zoom etiquette course. Judgment under constant change is a different purchase.

Why employers should care

If you're steering a company through automation, AI adoption, or plain old digitization, this research changes your hiring math. The scarce resource is a person your team will trust while the ground shifts under their feet.

So where do you find people with the fundamentals already installed? I'd point you to the military for starters, but I am a bit biased as well.

Set the study's capability list next to how a young sergeant spends a deployment. Building trust where trust has real consequences.

Communicating intent clearly enough that the plan survives contact with reality. Coaching constantly, because the team's readiness is the leader's report card.

And running after-action reviews where a junior soldier can tell an officer exactly what went wrong, out loud, without damaging a career. That last one is psychological safety practiced as a formal discipline, decades before most HR departments had a name for it.

The study's personal attributes dimension reads the same way: adaptability in unforeseen circumstances, lifelong learning, initiative without being told, a level head under pressure. Ask anyone who's managed a veteran what they noticed first.

The honest caveat

A DD-214 doesn't arrive with digital judgment included. Veterans still have to learn the technology layer: data literacy and the business context of the tools. Some show up with it. Many don't.

But split the study's list into its two halves and ask which half you can train in 90 days.

Software skills move fast. Trust habits and composure under uncertainty take years to build, and the military spends those years on purpose. I'd rather teach a trusted leader the dashboard than teach a dashboard expert to be trusted.

What to do with this

If you're building the team that will carry your company through the next 5 years of technology change, screen for the fundamentals first. The research says they're the load-bearing wall.

That's exactly what we built the FRONTLINE Leadership Assessment to measure. And if you want to talk about where veteran talent fits in your organization, that conversation is what Veteran Bridge Solutions does every day. Reach out, or start with the assessment and see where your team stands.

Source: Tigre, F. B., Lopes Henriques, P., & Curado, C. (2024). The digital leadership emerging construct: A multi-method approach. Management Review Quarterly, 75, 789-836.