Leadership competencies for digital transformation: An exploratory content analysis of job advertisements

Harnessing the opportunities of emerging information technologies is one of the great challenges companies are facing today. To successfully master digital transformation, organizations need leaders who can grasp the opportunities of digitalization for their business and transform them into new business models. Aiming at providing empirical evidence regarding competencies sought by practitioners for managing digital transformation, we analyze 239 job advertisements targeting digital transformation experts and examine the skills and traits explicitly called for. Our results reveal that technical skills and in-depth expertise in information technologies play only a secondary role in job requirement profiles. Like in earlier strategic change processes, digital transformation experts should primarily possess collaboration, strategic thinking, leadership, customer orientation, and communication skills. Moreover, in contrast to purely conceptual studies limited to skills and abilities, our analyses emphasize the importance of specific personality traits, such as proactivity and creativity, since these are often explicitly mentioned in corresponding job advertisements.