Abstract:

The paper is devoted to a proposal of a methodology of a development of the managers working within the conditions of a digitalized industry. It refers to an assumption that digitalization of the organizations will change also the demands on the performance and behaviour of their management. The paper is divided into the three main parts. The first part of the text offers an overview of the sociological knowledge concerning an influence of the digitalization on the society and its organizations. It also describes a concept of "Agile Leadership" as it has been proposed by the research conducted by IMD and "metaBeratung" in 2017. The second part compares the concept of "Agile Leadership" with the three empirically verified theories of management and leadership development - meta competencies of international manager (Willis and Barham, 1994), experiential learning approach as it has been developed and tested in the "Center for Creative Leadership" (McCauley et al, 2010, Wakefield and Bunker, 2010) and a theory of versatile leadership (Kaplan and Kaiser, 2007, Pavlica et al, 2015).

The last and the most important part of our paper contains a proposal of a new methodological framework of a development of the managers working within a digitalized industry. In particular it contains the following points:
(1) definition of the objectives of this framework;
(2) explanation of the key methodological principles of this framework (integration of a "versatile" philosophy of management development with an experiential view of a learning process) as they follow from a conceptual comparison presented in the second part of this paper;
(3) description of the key content elements of the new development programmes for managers -
(a) skills associated with a self-development and self-management - ability to combine different learning styles is proposed as crucial in this respect;
(b) competencies associated with managing and leading the other people - except of some "traditional" skills like active listening, delegating etc. a new attention must be paid to competencies associated with controlling and trusting people as well as to ethical decision making;
(c) skills and competencies associated with management of an organization - an ability to combine the new strategic (i.e. coping with unexpected and ambiguous situations, implementing a new, possibly Denison´s, model of organizational culture) with the new operational (i.e. interconnecting different resources, planning and completing the tasks by the means of new technologies) skills seems to be rampant in this respect
(4) proposal of the "behavioural" (i.e. Leadership Versatility Index) and "internal" (i.e. standardized personality inventories and tests) techniques and methods focused on a diagnostics of a level of a development of the managers and their competencies;
(5) specification of the tasks related to a further development of a new framework.

Keywords:

Agile leadership, development of the managers, management competencies and skills, digitalization, industry 4.0, leader, manager, versatile leadership.