Leaders who are making the most progress on digital transformation go beyond implementing new technologies or educating their workforce to enhance their digital literacy. They are transforming the way people work to build a digitally capable workforce. Researchers have identified four practices for leaders who want to build and lead a digitally dexterous workforce: reframing the challenge, engaging from the top, bridging people and perspectives, and sustaining long-term commitment.
Leaders across the globe have told us that despite having made significant investments in digital tools and data, their people are unwilling or unable to use them.1 Repeatedly hearing this lament led us to ask a critical question: Why are some leaders making more progress than others with their digital transformations?
In 2020, when we first began researching what it takes to lead in the digital era, we defined digital transformation as the evolution of an organization’s processes, systems, and talent in order to take full advantage of the possibilities offered by digital technologies, including big data, analytics, and artificial intelligence. Five years later, we have found that leaders who are making more progress on digital transformation have gone well beyond our original definition. They have redefined the challenge: Their ambition is to build what we now refer to as a digitally dexterous workforce — a workforce that is both willing and able to take advantage of new technologies, such as generative AI, to deliver innovative solutions and prepare their organizations for future opportunities.
Our research team, comprising academic researchers, executives who have led cultural and digital transformations, and digital natives, set out to uncover what sets apart leaders who are reporting more progress building digital dexterity in their organizations. Since 2017, one of us (Linda) has been writing longitudinal case studies on diverse leaders and companies that have been grappling with digital transformation. Since 2022, we have supplemented this research with global roundtables of over 240 leaders and digital natives and data from cross-sectional surveys of over 8,300 leaders across 109 countries and the 11 sectors identified in the Global Industry Classification Standard framework.2 In our annual surveys, we asked respondents to rate their perception of their organization’s progress on a 1-to-6 scale (1 indicating no progress and 6 indicating a lot of progress). For our analysis, we considered those reporting a progress level of 5 or 6 (30% of respondents in the 2025 survey) as reporting more progress.
References
1. All of the stories of leaders included in this article, from both our longitudinal case studies and our roundtable discussions, have been anonymized.
2. The 11 sectors identified in the Global Industry Classification Standard framework are energy, materials, industrials, consumer discretionary, consumer staples, health care, financials, IT, communication services, utilities, and real estate.
3. A. Edmondson, “Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams,” Administrative Science Quarterly 44, no. 2 (June 1999): 350-383,
4. L.A. Hill, E. Tedards, J. Wild, et al., “What Makes a Great Leader?” Harvard Business Review, Sept. 19, 2022,
link