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Blog posted by: GDS team, 21 June 2018 – Categories: Digital, GDS team, Transformation.

This week is Digital Leaders Week, created to celebrate and showcase the best digital transformation across the public, private and nonprofit sectors.

One of the events taking place is the DL100 Awards, where our own Digital, Data and Technology Profession team has been shortlisted in the Digital Team of the Year category.

To mark this special week, people from across the Government Digital Service reflect on the role that digital leaders can have in transformation and the qualities a good digital leader should have.

Simon Everest, Service Owner, Standards Assurance

"I’ve been really lucky to work with great digital leaders in my time in GDS. Leadership isn’t constrained to specific roles or grades, but is an attitude and approach to the problems we’re all trying to solve for users of government services.

"The best digital leaders are humble and collaborative, yet ambitious and creative. Paul Downey’s development of GOV.UK Registers, John Abbott’s transformation of HM Land Registry and John Fitzpatrick’s passion and energy at the Ministry of Justice are all great examples of inspiring digital leaders who have made a significant difference in their organisations, for their users.  

"They have vision and a great understanding of user-centred digital service development and agile ways of working. This is combined with an ability to inspire, trust and learn from the teams and specialists around them.”

Emily Ackroyd and Hazel Hobbs, Directors for Strategy and Engagement

“Digital leadership is not about understanding specific technologies, it’s about understanding people. It’s about setting aspirations, creating culture and building capability.

"The leaders we admire and who are transforming services across the public sector - from Universal Credit to our courts and borders - do 3 things brilliantly.

"Firstly they give teams the space to be disruptive and creative: increasingly leaders need to change the organisation around them rather than just work within structures created for a different age. That requires permission to challenge, try new things and learn from when things don't work.

"Secondly they work in partnership with others - the GovTech Catalyst programme is a good example. This is about working with business and tech entrepreneurs to define and solve the most important policy and operational problems, not inviting others in to deliver after the service has been designed.

"Thirdly they are comfortable with ambiguity. What we have realised working at GDS is that digital and data innovation is going to continue at pace. This means being humble about what you don’t know and embracing the need to constantly learn and change.

"And one thing that is critical in the public sector is that we lead inclusively and insist on having diverse design and development teams. We can only serve the needs of all citizens if our teams are reflective of society. We've been inspired in our role as part of the Digital Leaders Advisory Board by the brilliant young leaders who are showing the way on mission-driven ways to give everyone the skills to thrive - and we’re looking forward to seeing their work recognised in the Digital Leaders Awards on 21 June."

Full here for the blog post