If you spent too much time using social media, don’t worry… it’s legit. You might be working on your next gen leadership skills.
Social media will allow you, personally, to develop your social skills, get over fears of online expression and dealing with transparency. By developing your own personal skills, by creating your digital reputation you can effectively train your ability to lead virtual and resilient teams, and online communities.
At least, that is how my argument goes. 
In “The Ability to Lead Remote Employees Will Become the Next 2.0 Skill” Dan Pontefract argues:
“Whether small, medium or large in size, organizations have been or are set to grapple with remote based leadership issues. (…) the bottom line is that teams are going to increasingly become virtually segregated and leaders need to act differently. (…) Leaders must shift their thinking, they must re-think their style, they must suspend past assumptions.”
So, you have the opportunity to train your skills, you have the need to train your skills, but what is the style you need to learn?
An answer can be found in “Can Being Virtual Benefit A Leader?” by Surinder Kahai:
“Since virtual teams are supported by technology and technology tends to filter out vital nonverbal cues, can a leader be effective in virtual contexts?”
(Researchers) “found that the effect of transformational leadership on team performance was stronger in virtual than in face-to-face teams.”
“Transformational leaders motivate others by engaging their intrinsic interests (e.g., being associated with a particular cause) as opposed to engaging their extrinsic interests (e.g., salary or pay).”
So.
Let’s Tweet! Uhm. For a better world?
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How virtual is virtual? If you’re leading a team by consistently checking in virtually in tbuyerms of video and sound, then ok I can accept a leader could be transformational. But email, tweeting and facebook only? No way! You really need verbal and nonverbal cues that aren’t available in the written word. There’s too much up to interpretation in writing only.
Hi Kevin, I agree that visual and audio cues increase the chances of success but I don’t think it can’t be done without. The trick around transformational leadership is that you don’t consistently interrupt the group with checking.
Thanks for this Bas. To Kevin’s point above, I don’t think using virtual tools in a leadership context needs to be so black and white. Projects are so fluid and dynamic…when the leader embraces new *appropriate* vehicles for different types of communication, I can only see positive benefits.
We adopted faxing, instant messaging and texting fairly quickly as business communication tools, and we’ve found specific contexts where they’re appropriate. It comes down to finding new efficiencies.
If a leader finds those efficiencies and changes corporate culture as a result, isn’t that transformational in itself?
Fully agree, Geoff!