[March 8, 2017] The short answer is “yes.” Technology does make leadership easier but this answer comes with a significant caveat. There are many components to leadership (communication being one of them) and technology can make a leader’s communications easier to reach a larger and more geographically-dispersed audience. You knew that.
What you likely didn’t know is that most senior leaders are reluctant to use technological advances to improve their leadership capacity. Some of their concerns are that it may have unresolved security problems, unintended consequences when used (even correctly), could create false hopes about its effectiveness, may distract from other useful and proven technologies, may encourage over-reliance on it, and is expensive and may not be worth the economic and social costs.
Any technology is a two-edge sword when used and that is also true for those who use it to improve their leadership capabilities. For example, in late 2003 my military unit was fielded one of the early GPS handheld devices to assist in navigating. Few of us had any experience with either civilian or military GPS devices.
We found the GPS a major addition to our tools that allowed us to do our jobs better and faster. Yet, twice in the first month during combat in central Iraq, we followed it to the wrong location putting our troops at risk. Fortunately we carried maps that allowed us to find our way back.
Where technology gives us the greatest advantage is when our leadership environment changes; the speed, scrutiny, and sensitivity of everything that is going faster than we have experience and for which we train for. There are times when the environment evolves faster than people have time to really reflect on it, adjust, and make changes. The context of the exercise of leadership, therefore, matters to those who use technology to make their leadership better.
Use of multiple and overlapping forms of technology is often a better answer to leadership environmental obstacles. In Iraq, we had to communicate with military and civilians engineers from several countries, speaking different languages, and do with without significant disruption. That meant using email, video teleconferencing, and satellite phones, as well as traditional face-to-face meetings and message carriers. No technology was rejected unless we could not ensure security of the message.
Any technology that we used to communicate better had to give us the ability to give the soldier on the other end of the conversation greater confidence in his senior chain of command. Otherwise, the technology was a brick to weight us down.
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