On October 19, Dr. Lynn Schäfer, head of the institute participated in the Personalforum – Innovationskreis Führen lernen 4.0 from the Unternehmensverbände Berlin-Brandenburg, hosted by the Allianz in Berlin with more than 100 participants. In her keynote speach “New Work needs New Leadership”, she talked about the changes in the work environment and how digitalization and VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity) impacts the topic leadership.

In VUCA times and times of radical digitalization and transformation, companies are “reinventing” themself, experimenting with new ways of working (e.g. swarm organizations, agile networks, democracy, holacracy, SCRUM), empowering members in teams and organizations in decision making processes, projects and people topics (e.g. team-based decisions in recruiting, performance management, feedback), as well as organizational culture aspects.

In this respect, Dr. Lynn Schäfer highlighted the concept of ambidextrous leadership (e.g. see Rosing, Frese, Bausch, 2011 or Zacher, Rosing, 2015), comprising two complementary sets of leadership behaviour, namely opening (fostering exploration) and closing (fostering exploitation). Both are needed to foster the complexity of innovation activities and successfull leaders need to be able to engage in both behaviours and flexibly switch between them.

The agenda for the whole event also included the launch of the new plattform “führen.digital” and a panel discussion.

A summary of the event from the UVB, including some pictures can be found here.

The newly launched website of the Innovationskreis Führen lernen 4.0: führen.digital can be found here.

For questions regarding the Personalforum or UVB, please contact: Jutta Wiedemann (+49 30 31005-207, Wiedemann@uvb-online.de).