Читать книгу Digital Government Excellence - Siim Sikkut - Страница 51

I managed to do it with the help of a very strong chief of staff and my inner core team. People asked why I was meeting staff six levels below in the organization about this little project and I said that it was important. I had my chief of staff and my administrative support make sure we had recurring meetings with these people, that we would always find me time. Even if I had to be called into parliament for something, we would reschedule these meets as top priorities for me. I just had a really good set of people around me who knew that those things were important to me and understood why.

I made sure to also find the time to do “follow-through” because too many times leadership just does not follow through on stuff. Those projects needed my support, they needed an umbrella so that the white blood cells of government would not come in and kill the innovation that they were driving.

Usually, as you get to the top of a pyramid in an organization, you have to delegate; otherwise, you cannot survive. So, you delegate to your second in command, they can do the same, then someone will execute the task, and then everybody is happy. But in the digital world the products need to move faster, the decisions need to move faster, the collaboration needs to be broader.

If you are not directly involved as a leader in two or three or four key initiatives that target your organizational culture or your country's future, and you are not personally following through by meeting with these teams weekly or monthly, I think you are not executing your leadership duties properly in this day and age. You just run out of time. So, it is up to you to be super-disciplined to make time for those priorities.

It also helped to retain the focus that we were speaking about those things publicly. This made us kind of stuck to deliver them—you cannot let it die, because people would ask. Doing something in public adds another coat of Teflon to pushing change through because nobody could say you did not warn them. In addition, if you involve more stakeholders by being public, nobody can say they were not involved. Plus, it keeps you accountable. That is why we made those priorities very public and very important, so that we were able to follow through on them.