Leadership is about nurturing and enhancing. As Managers manage things, and leaders lead people.
When talking about leadership in the IT domain, we need to bear in mind that we are talking about the leadership of the future, which does not necessarily have anything to do with the concepts and practices of the leaderships of the past. Leadership of the future is not a position, a title, or seniority in the organization. Leadership of the future might even be outside of the organization.
Tech leaders of the future need to think globally. Leaders of the past tended to be domestic, managing people in their own country, in their own region. The local leader didn't have to think about people around the globe. Today, with globalization and the new technologies, where leadership has become global, this is an obsolete vision. Moreover, in the IT area, even if your organization is local, you will have global customers and global suppliers and even global employees, shareholders, and stakeholders. Thus, global thinking has become one of the qualities of the leader of the future. Thus the leader of the future needs to appreciate and nurture multiculturalism as organizations of the future are more and more multicultural. The leader of the future needs to look for the diversity of his followers: cultural diversity, gender diversity, background diversity.
IT leaders of the future need to be technologically savvy--this means that the leader of the future needs to understand technology and understand how the most important technology is going to impact and change our lives, our values, our behaviors, the logistics of the business, marketing, and so on. Thus, the leader of the future needs to be constantly updated with the new technology. And under this umbrella, he/she also needs to follow the new social media presence, not only of the organization, but also the social media presence of the leader.
The IT leader of the future needs to know how to build alliances and partnerships--this means building alliances outside and inside the organization. More and more, in the new world, your direct reports are going to be your partners. Build partnerships with peers across the organization and outside the organization, build partnerships with your customers, with your suppliers, and even with your competitors.
Finally, the IT leadership of the future is a shared leadership. The leader of the past needed to know how to give orders, but the leader of the future needs to learn how to make questions and ask for help. This a very specific leadership quality for an IT leader as you are managing knowledge workers who know more than you about their work. Therefore, you cannot simply tell them what to do. You have to ask, you have to listen, and you have to learn.
The IT leadership of the future needs to be a 3D leadership. What do I mean by 3D leadership? When looking to the most basic traits of success in a leader of the future, we can easily identify three dimensions of leadership. The self (self-development), relationships (social awareness), and service (social skills).
A 3D IT leadership of the future is necessarily an emotional intelligent leadership as each of the parts of the triad is a set of the emotional intelligence competencies and skills.