Discours.es

Good digital leadership means pushing against the status quo. Taking risks. Some people at GDS have taken extraordinary risks, sometimes without telling me that they were doing so. It takes courage to take risks, and being a leader is partly about building an environment where people feel courageous enough. That probably means building a different culture within your organisation.

That in turn means reforming traditional hierarchical management. That’s one reason why we wrote our Design Principles, one reason why we’ve turned “The unit of delivery is the team” into a catchphrase. GDS is built on trust and teams. Those teams know that they’re trusted to get on with good work and to do the right thing. I get to stand up on stage and take all the glory, but believe me: without that team working incredibly hard behind me, I wouldn’t be here at all. Again: welcome to leadership.