The world of e-commerce is exceptionally fast-paced. Customers now increasingly expect exceptional service, even from very basic e-commerce sites. This includes personalised offers, rapid delivery of goods or services, and a user-friendly and easily navigable interface. Success in this environment often depends on the ability of team leaders and members to take decisive, proactive action in the moment.

To enable this, you need to help them to develop strong leadership skills in a range of contexts. This applies to teams throughout the organisation, but is typically easier said than done. E-commerce agencies therefore need to encourage certain qualities and approaches across teams, especially team leaders. These include continuous learning, flexibility and creativity. This page explains how to start to develop these key leadership skills among the staff in your e-commerce agency.

Foster a Culture of Continuous Learning

It bears repeating that the world of e-commerce is rapidly changing—and also that this situation is likely to continue.

It follows that for those in leadership positions to lead effectively, they need to be able to stay up-to-date on digital marketing trends.

You therefore need to provide them with the incentives and resources to enable them to do so. Access to resources is relatively easy: there are many webinars and industry publications available. You can also encourage people to attend networking events, or even host your own.

Building a culture of continuous learning is harder. After all, in a busy environment, time is money.

E-commerce agency managers must focus on and emphasise the importance of learning. They must encourage teams to carve out time for learning activities. Leaders need to lead from the front in this, demonstrating how important they find keeping up-to-date.

One good way to do this is via a weekly or monthly ‘learning tips’ newsletter. For example, leaders might use this to talk about the events they have attended, and what they have learned, or share resources that they have found helpful. They could also share what they have learned from mistakes. This is helpful because it also encourages a culture of experimentation and tolerance of ‘failure’ in small ways.

Fostering this kind of culture can have significant benefits throughout the organisation.

It encourages everyone, not just leaders, to be more proactive, and learn about what’s new.

Develop Agility—and Remain Agile

Start-ups, simply by their nature, tend to be flexible and agile.

Teams and individuals are used to taking on different roles (and our pages on Entrepreneurship Skills explains why this is so). However, as businesses grow, they tend to become more rigid. Scale-ups struggle to find the free-flow that characterised their early days—and larger businesses often find flexibility is beyond them.

E-commerce agencies cannot afford to let this happen. You cannot just keep using the same methods and expect to stay ahead.

Instead, you need to develop a leadership vision that embraces agility and flexibility, to enable your agency to thrive during ongoing change. Like the focus on ongoing learning, this requires cultural change. However, over time, it can be built into your workflow methodologies to ensure it is integrated into long-term leadership habits. It can also be encouraged through the use of adaptive e-commerce partners such as Fluid Commerce.

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Encourage Creativity

Flexibility goes hand in hand with creativity. And like flexibility, creativity is also harder in larger organisations.

There are certain formulas that simply work in the context of e-commerce. However, it is important not to let these formulaic approaches become static and outdated. You therefore need to encourage managers and leaders to be creative in their approach. This means encouraging experimentation—which in turn means developing a tolerance of failure.

This is challenging, but can be done alongside a culture of lifelong learning, by encouraging learning from mistakes and failures. This means that teams will not hide mistakes, but share them—and the learning from them.

This needs to be balanced, of course. Failure rates must not be too high.

However, there needs to be room to explore new techniques and technologies, to ensure that the agency is able to grow and develop.

Keep Highlighting Long-Term Goals

In the fast-paced environment of digital marketing and e-commerce, it is all too easy to become swept up in the importance of short-term goals.

There is no question that key performance indicators like short-term traffic increases and conversion rates are important. They are what keeps the money flowing through the agency, and without that it will not survive in the short term. However, short-term goals and indicators can only take you so far. They also do not necessarily highlight the path to long-term success. That requires a good understanding of your customers and their needs—and a willingness to act on that understanding.

You therefore need to encourage leaders in your organisation to embrace the bigger picture.

You—and they—need to keep carefully and deliberately taking a step back and considering your long-term growth and position. You should harness reliable data and information to help you to understand where you are. You also need to understand where you need to be—your long-term goals—and then develop a plan to help you reach those goals.

Our page on Strategic Thinking explains more about this process. You may also find it helpful to visit our pages on Gathering Information for Competitive Intelligence and Turning Information into Action.

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A Final Thought

Developing leadership skills among your teams is not a one-off event. You cannot achieve it by sending people off on a course or giving them access to a webinar.

The skills highlighted here—lifelong learning, creativity, flexibility and strategic thinking—cannot be developed overnight, or in isolation. Instead they need to be a core part of company culture, from top to bottom of your e-commerce agency. However, once you have started to build a culture that encourages these skills, you will find that your agency reaps the benefits. Over time, this should help you to thrive in a fast-paced and rapidly changing environment, providing the building blocks for long-term success.

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