Given the opportunity to spend 3 days with over 50 digital leaders from across
Europe and the UK, leaders from Freshworks and the always insightful Hot Topics
team I jumped at the chance.
With a focus on the vitality of our leadership and all the permutations those words
could mean we knew we were in for something different, here I am a few days later
and the reflections on the 3 days are here, partly for me to celebrate the memory and
partly to ensure the learning sinks in.
Imagine trying to distil down three days with 50 people, all of which had rich insight
and thoughts, here goes; 1,050 hours of insight in a ‘long read’ blog post!
From Fortune 500 to FinTech scale-up: C-suite leadership lessons on
adaptability and growth.
The CIO of Revolut was first up with his insights bringing ideas that have formed
through the creation of an amazingly successful financial institute who started as a
tech company in so many ways and grew from that.
His immediate view was that we should remain curious always, no matter what you
studied as an academic background, openness and curiosity are the most important
skill we bring as digital leaders. As leaders we need to stop waiting for THE business
to come to us and ask about technology, we need to be out there and understand
how technology can create business value. He suggested a start-up like intensity is
about trying almost everything and managing the failures, only one in ten ‘bets’ are
successful, this creates intensity and pace and value happens when IT is done. Its
our job to find out if it can be done and to urge our teams to stop waiting for
perfection or if that’s what you need then you can’t be at the front. Failed bets are not
to be regretted.
It was brilliant to heat him echo a mindset change in approach that has been at the
heart of some of what we are trying to make true for us. Leaders that allow control to
be ceded to the team will be successful. We need to move from fixed mindset to
growth mindset.
He believes the definition of challenger in an industry has changed. Big corporate is
don’t touch it until you are sure, challenger is give it a go, test, learn and move
forward. Revolut put in 78,000 changes in one year, and they are no longer a small
bank and have a huge ambition. As an organisation they have moved to remove
departments from the organisation structure and created definitions around the
solutions they need to deliver to the business. A product mindset is now in place, a
product owner has 90% of what they need to deliver their own product; from
marketing and sales people to data scientists and engineers. It has been a huge
mindset change but its clear that everyone contributes to every success.
Most impactful thing we need to do as leaders in 2025 is define targets put in place
objectives and key results and work with them. Give clarity always and keep
oversight of progress clean and clear but always relate everything back to business
value.
Talent definition is key; how do you define and acknowledge that talent is there.
Talent is defined by ability to do, not what gets done but the ability to work together.
Evaluate talent density all the time to define how groups work together.
I had not heard of Conway’s Law before and it was fascinating to understand more
on this one. The law says that a technology architecture will always mirror the culture
and structure of the organisation it serves. Revolut have inverted Conway’s law and
now structures the organisation around the technology assets they build, this allowed
Revolut to grow their organisation more easily with a perpetual focus on value.
Building for tomorrow: The evolution of leadership at the intersection of AI, IQ
and EQ.
The panel really took the ideas of a change in focus for digital leaders a long way
into the HR and OD elements of what we are here to do. The suggestion that HR
and the digital leader are becoming the most important partnership in an AI world
was brilliant to hear more about.
AI Agents becoming known as digital Co-Workers was floated, not really liked as a
concept but the idea that the Agentic workforce is indeed where the digital leader
role becomes one that manages resource and therefore one that needs some of
those HR type skills did land with the audience.
Will AI ‘remove’ the IQ of leadership or does AI give us more space for EQ was a
question that had a lot of thought around it. AI has become something even our 80-
year-old family members asks us about, we need to collaborate and make sense of
it, really understand what the opportunity is.
There is no way the AI genie is going back in the bottle, so when someone comes to
us as Digital with an idea, we shouldn’t push back and say they don’t know as much
as us, we should bring them in. We in Digital don’t work with the business, we ARE
the business, we need to create a culture where we are seen as part of the business
and here to work with every colleague to solve problems.
Every company and every role is going to be disrupted by AI. AI will enhance IQ, but
EQ is something to still be derived. When we have thousands of agents in a
business, who is going to provide the EQ? Will the CIO become the Chief People
Officer for AI agents. Digital Leaders should lead with more EQ going forward as AI
will not give us that, but it will enable us to do more of it by removing the more
mundane tasks.
Energy + grit = longevity: How to sustain peak performance in leadership.
Interesting how others see that you are burning out before you ever do. How to move
away from that, what are the ‘tells’ you need to notice so that you recharge as you
go. Its hard but that reflection moment will help was key advice.
Find what your own value proposition is and apply those to the moments when you
are losing the energy you need. Find the balance for energy in and energy out. We
need to also accept that sometimes it is the stuff you just have to get done that saps
your energy but once there you can go again.
Always remember your own team when you are focused on the wider role of being a
digital leader, important to be part of YOUR team not just be part of the leadership
team. I have found this hard in my last three roles, which team is your team ONE,
the team you lead, the leadership team you are part of or indeed if you are on the
Executive Board the board itself, its hard to get right but super important for your
own vitality I think.
Share more with your team, your experiences, your life and this creates a sense of
community and belief in you. I have always done this and yet I always worry about it
too.
Motivating your team through the troughs of despair requires you to be able to
positive during those times but remain authentic to a hard balance to crack. The
glamour of working hard is there for all of us BUT we must use our teams more for
our own capacity and to use their capabilities, the reasons they are on your teams
rather than trying to be master of everything.
The big debate: The technology executive will never be CEO.
Is it even possible if we are always described as an enabler rather than a leader –
BUT if you move to business transformation then you are closer to being a CEO
maybe the closest role in any business. The organisations that have the digital
leader on the executive shows that it ‘respects’ the attributes of a digital leader.
The reputation of the digital leader is one of a narrow mind that can be stuck in the
detail, we have to prove that this is wrong! We need to be able to talk about the
business knowledge we have to do this we MUST become better at story telling – It’s
how we sell ourselves and how we alter the global perception of what we do.
Ultimately, it’s the key to success.
Outputs Vs Outcomes will help us tell the right type of story dependent on the
audience. Understanding the business is key and is the best route to understand
your people which we must face into and realise is the best asset we have when it
comes to making change deliver value, ultimately the key result of every objective
we have.
The C-Suite language lexicon: How to really communicate with the board.
Connections with the colleagues on the board is key, how to make sure it remains a
consistent message from everyone involved in change, the way to do this is to agree
the plan and keep reiterating what it is, of course the plan will change but keep going
back to what the end in mind is. Give the board the relevance and lobby beforehand,
there should never be a surprise at the board, particularly in the digital field.
Understand what each of their priorities are, who are your supporters and
detractors? Who do you need to spend more time with ahead of the board meeting
to get them on side. Look out for those who have previously owned other areas; it
can bring out challenges driven by emotional history.
How do we avoid adversarial culture remember we are on the same team, you
should not need to justify YOU at the board, you should be building your support.
Some boards are adversarial, but most actually collaborative and work together and
almost always everyone wants the end result, the sales pitch is really the route not
the end.
Who is the right ‘digital’ person to be on the board or the exec in 2025. Build a board
on organisational assets; Brand, People, Value and Data; these should/could make
up the board. We were asked do we move to having a Data Aware person on every
board would help us get some of the language right, we dong need a CIO on every
board but we do need a champion who has knowledge on every leadership team to
be successful.
Give the board confidence in you as a digital leader and your team as experts every
time you are in front of them. In the end, the board needs to believe you’re the right
person to get it done and the definition of ‘it’ is transformation with value at its heart.
Growth trajectory is key to the influence you can bring, what value do you add, being
shrewd with OpEx or absolute responsibility for growth, in many ways in 2025 it
requires you to be excellent at both.
The Big Debate: Does tech’s democratisation diminish IT’s influence?
The panel started off with a Family analogy to try to describe the different ways
democratisation is now happening.
- The returning badly behaved child who has been a way and had their
wayward years and now needs you the parent to help put the pieces back
together again. 2 - The returning history mum who thinks that all things new are grounded in all
things that have passed before and remains a little closed to the art of the
possible. - The child in a blended family who needs to work out what the rules are for
every scenario.
It’s on us to enable the organisation to be the guardian a new type of vigilant trust is
needed where we give accountability and give risk ownership.
Analogy one sees the digital team taking on the decisions of other parts of the
organisation and trying to fix the bits that are perhaps less enterprise and bring the
whole deliverable into he fold as neatly as possible. Analogy two sees the digital
function trying to learn that not everything has been done before or started with an
old way of doing ‘it’, sometimes there are new ideas and its on us to embrace these.
Analogy three is an example of how we need to work together across the entire
business to set rules that we all agree on so that everyone can move forward
together even if we are not related anymore.
From a data perspective this is a problem that is getting harder and harder to
resolve. One organisation gave an example of going from the Wild West for data to
bringing in a gold standard for data, to then see parts of the business use it to create
their own models from that same data. At first this felt like a success but it then
colleagues came back later to say their numbers don’t match, they had applied some
new ways of thinking, in a good way to the data, but done that locally and corrupted
the enterprise view of the world.
Trust was then eroded in the gold standard that had fixed so many problems and the
whole cycle had to be started all over again.
We need the right level of trust and dynamics but remember that complete freedom
doesn’t always lead to the right outcomes if guardrails and oversight are not applied.
Who are the leaders of tomorrow? Inspiring the next generation.
Sometimes a single sentence can reframe how you think entirely was a powerful
opening gambit for me.
Lead by example but always know your soldiers! One ex-forces CISO talked about
best serving her soldiers by getting to know them and tailoring what they do to what
they need. They warned that those soldiers will see their digital leaders as not
knowing as much as they do, as they’re the experts in their field. However, if you
show up consistently, you’ll eventually get through. Whilst somewhat specific to the
armed forces it resonated with the audience hugely.
Many felt that in 2025 servant leadership is the top way of inspiring the next
generation of digital leaders. The ‘new’ HR responsibility is to make sure that
everyone can be the best person they want to be and as leaders in every field we
must take this on and apply it.
One comment for us all to mull over though was as a leader, a digital leader
specifically, how do we ‘self-propel’ as it’s rare that someone organisationally sees it
as there job to help us. This made me thankful for my own current position where I
think I may be lucky enough to have a number of people propelling me and what we
want to achieve.
Hiring new talent is hard and needs to be a really thought through ‘thing’, don’t jump
too quickly, widen opinions and get collective thoughts as you build teams. A Star
talent is hard to find but worth the effort, one comment was how do we find it, first
define what it is for us all was the answer, I thought really interesting, do we really
know what we are looking for when we set off on the journey and how do we allow
that to evolve as we meet possibilities.
The resilient leader’s playbook.
One way of thinking about this was what is your motivation if it is to make things
count then how do we do what we need to do to build the right playbook.
How do you get the balance between empowerment and ownership and when you
think you have that balance then make sure you are always able to modulate the
actions you take as it will change, the balance will be temporary. always. Be an IT
leader and a business leader and set challenging and yet achievable goals for
yourself in doing that, model your needs on those of your team and the organisation
to achieve a level of synchronisation.
Deadlines are a risk to quality, if you have a hard deadline then ‘things’ need to be
protected for quality and go live. Listen to the teams they will know the challenges
and know the way to resolve them if you give them a voice you will be more
successful.
You have to create a trust relationship that is bi-directional, to some degree think
through the way you sell the message. Spend time demystify everything this is
different to simplifying, its about taking away the fear factor of what it is you are
trying to achieve.
Put truth at the top of your communications list and deliver the goods for the
organisation will gather support for you and your playbook.