To content
Department of Social Sciences
New publication: Leading together

Practice-based impulses for good leadership in the sociodigital transformation

Cover of the anthology "Leading together" © Nomos​/​sfs
The recently published anthology explores the questions of what good leadership and work mean in the sociodigital transformation, which competencies of managers are gaining in importance, and how these competencies can be built. The contributions are based on the results and experiences of the three-year collaborative research project "Good Leadership and Work in the Sociodigital Transformation" (ellaviernull.de), which was completed in December 2022. The project was funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the European Social Fund (ESF). The book is available free of charge via Open Access.

This anthology is structured in three parts. In the first part, findings of science related to challenges of leadership, starting points of good leadership and central aspects of leadership are highlighted. The conceptual point of reference is the socio-technical systems approach taken up in the research project in conjunction with an interaction-based understanding of leadership. Following on from this, the second part deals with the necessary interaction competencies of managers and their development. In addition, tools to support leaders are described. The third part is designed as a practice laboratory. Using specific examples, executives and researchers who played a key role in the project jointly describe which interaction skills have become more important in the course of the digital transformation.

Most of the authors of the anthology were involved in the eLLa project. These include representatives of the Social Research Center (sfs) at TU Dortmund University, Fraunhofer IAO Stuttgart and FIR e.V. at RWTH Aachen University. The BEUMER Group (development of a network organization and a network tool), Belfor DeHaDe (testing of VR glasses in technical service), DMG Mori (introduction of bots in the area of warehousing) and WBS Training GmbH (development of an executive workshop). The role of science was to support the managers in the development and introduction of their projects and at the same time to elicit in a generalized perspective how tasks of leadership change in digitization and which competencies become more important. Based on this experience, a one-week leadership training program was developed and tested. tested. One of the special features was that the digital learning worlds of the Demofabrik Aachen and the Future Work Lab of Fraunhofer IAO in Stuttgart were tapped for leadership development.

 

The book is available only in German via open access:
Zusammen Führen - Nomos eLibrary (nomos-elibrary.de)

Further information about the eLLa4.0 project