You have now met with twenty remarkable digital government leaders in this book: reading about their achievements and the working methods and learnings that went into making their success happen.

They share plenty of tricks and good practices to copy from or use for inspiration. Having been in a digital government leader's shoes myself, I can confirm that each chapter is rich in detail about what works and what is needed to do similar work in any government or organization.

As such, synthesizing or summarizing any of these stories feels like I am committing an injustice to the individuals and their insights. Surely the details of practices will inevitably get lost. Regardless, I will attempt to generalize the overarching themes and most-common aspects that keep reappearing through the twenty leaders' journeys in leading a government to digital excellence.

The following pages will read a lot like the classic ABC of management or general leadership, public sector management, and reform wisdom. Or digital transformation best practices. This is to be expected, because digital government leadership is first and foremost leadership in its core, and only then about the digital and government specifics—the specific contexts in which the leadership wisdom and best practices have to be applied. But at the start and end of the day, digital government leadership is about—well, leadership.

Several insights can be considered trivial or common knowledge. However, the fact that digital progress varies so widely over time and across countries is enough reason to highlight the aspects that might seem trivial or obvious—because these are not necessarily applied or followed systematically.

To my eye, ten common themes stand out from the stories. They are by no means exhaustive and do not carry any pretense of complete conclusions. Perhaps, let us think about them as the ten most basic traits of what it takes to be an effective digital government leader. The concrete ways of how to apply them will always depend on the context of governance setup, digital maturity, culture, the wider ecosystem, and so on. But there are certain general roles or hats that leaders should adopt to be effective in their missions, whatever their context is in detail.

Deliver, Deliver, Deliver

Delivery is where all the remarkable digital government leaders have put their sharpest focus on and made the strongest efforts for, from their very first days in the office. Whether it is the policy changes or actual products and new digital services that they have set to deliver, the act of delivering is what matters the most in this (or any!) job.

The obvious reason is that your time in office can be—and often is—limited. If you do not start immediately, you will lose in potential impact you can make in sum during your time. The more unstable your role and the context you operate in, the better it is to run as fast as you can because you are running against time.

It can also be that the political masters expect quick results. Even if they have not explicitly said so, they do. Or at least they will like results if you can make the quick wins happen. If you deliver, you build credibility. This may be a prerequisite to be able to ask for levers or resources from higher-ups or build up soft power to ensure collaboration from other stakeholders—plus, get support from the public, too. These are preconditions to maintaining the momentum of change for the time when things will get harder (at some point they most probably will!) and also helps to speed up delivery in the next phase and to make changes stick for lasting effect.

Delivery is also the only thing that brings results and impact in terms of digital government development in the direction of the vision that likely brought you to office in the first place. Thus, you are most probably driven for delivery yourself. Without the taste of actual delivery, it is easy to lose confidence to keep going. Delivery gives you yourself assurance.

There are many ways you can organize and lead for delivery: through remaking or creating policy, strategy, organizational structure, processes, team, culture, values, your own routines. You have seen many such useful ideas and practices in the chapters before, each a bit special given their different contexts. Whatever works for you, just start managing for delivery, and keep doing it. This is fundamental because it will not be you doing the work, as you know well (or will find out immediately).

Something you see from the stories is that you must be present and follow through enough—then things will happen. It is not enough to initiate and sit back. You also need persistence because hardships most probably will come, too. That is exactly why you need to constantly be ready to reconfigure for delivery.

You should be the chief delivery officer if you want to be an effective digital government leader.

Strategy Is Your Job—and Your Opportunity

More often than not, political masters will not give you a concrete deliverable to reach. Their expectations are often quite generic or, completely at the other end of spectrum, narrowly operational. They want you to figure out what to do, as long as you “do the digital thing” and take the country forward. The best political masters also purposefully give such a freedom to their chosen people.

Think of it as a sweet spot, actually. This is where the remarkable digital government leaders thrive. They grasp the opportunity to carve out the vision and strategy to reach it and the action plan to put the strategy in effect. In many ways, strategy setting is a core role of top leaders in any organization. In digital government leaders' case, it is particularly important because they (you!) are essentially setting the strategy for the whole government (and country).

The chance to set the strategy is a sweet spot because a skillful strategist and leader can use it to build up the portfolio of activities and create a road map for lasting change. Wide-scale impact usually requires hard work on governance mechanisms, infrastructure, and platforms that cannot come as quick wins in a short time frame. But the work to build them has to commence early, accompanied by smartly chosen quick wins and constant delivery to sustain support and air cover for longer-term changes.

Setting a clear vision, an ambitious strategy, and an achievable action plan also can help to make delivery easier, because it can empower the team (if accompanied by a suitable management style and processes) or rally other stakeholders behind, especially if cocreation has been your way to craft the road map. Naturally, each and every strategy will be different in substance, depending on the core problem to solve, the resource conditions, and the existing state of digital affairs.

Note how several stories in this book speak about the need to be ready to revisit the plans as you go along and, in particular, if the context changes. COVID-19 affected the strategies and delivery of all the leaders in this book who were in office when the pandemic hit. Notably, they all seized the opportunity it provided to boost the digital progress journey they were trying to lead anyway—by mobilizing to make lasting impact.

A good strategy takes into account your limits, your resources, and is realistic in ambitions. However, you can also strategize to amplify your starting resources by leveraging the ecosystem and your surroundings; thus, you do not have to always be constrained by what you start with.

You should be the chief strategy officer or the chief planning officer if you want to be an effective digital government leader.

It Is Hard without Proper Political Support

Some of the remarkable digital government leaders in this book emphasize that a strong political support from highest-possible level in your country is the most fundamental precondition to any success in your role. They imply that if you do not have it, perhaps do not even try.

However, some others in the book have been a bit more risk-taking and dared to start the journey with less clear political backing. They have then moved at the first possible instance to carve out the support they needed to succeed.

Whether you have it from the start, or you request it as a precondition to taking the job, or you start with what you have and once you have proved delivery capability, you seek a political air cover then—you will need the political support one way or another to be effective.

Building up a digital government means transforming how government works and how public services are run. As with any change, this is bound to inevitably create some opposition. Bottlenecks will appear, if not in the direction you set out for, then in terms of speed and depth of delivery you can squeeze out of the “system” of public sector around you. If you want to deliver, you need backing to be able to smooth (or fight) your way through the bottlenecks.

The faster you have to deliver, the more backing you need. The more profound the changes you are starting, or the more legacy or even hostile the public sector is about the change you bring, the more backing you need. For example, if the government around you is not naturally geared for collaboration, you will need some enforcement levers to have them fall in line if the milder ways of influencing and negotiation do not work.

Effective political support does not just mean voicing out the rhetoric of recognition. Political masters need to take actual steps to give you the institutional levers for coordination and delivery across the government (the sticks) or through the power of their office put weight on stakeholders if you need them to.

If you do not have such hands-on readiness and champions from the start, start building the base for it. Even better, give it a thorough thought before you take the role and put in the asks. You will save a lot of time and energy later if you can carve it out at the earliest.

Note that you can never take the political support for granted. Delivering helps to keep it. But you also need to manage up or sideways, as necessary, to keep the political masters on the same page and in the loop with what you do. Yours is a political role in that sense, whether you like it or not. Best to embrace it like that. Mind you that in some jurisdictions, you would have a political role also by definition—if you are also a deputy minister or otherwise a political appointee, for example.

You should be the chief political officer if you want to be an effective digital government leader.

It Is a Networked Job and a Job of Networking

More than half of the people featured in this book highlight that your most important role—next to strategy and delivery—is stakeholder management. This is the most common thread through the bottom-line recommendations of each of the twenty people interviewed.

You should pay attention and devote ample time to this part of the role. It enables you to leverage beyond your own thin resources so that you do not get stuck. It can also ensure necessary collaboration for delivery, because in your whole-of-government role you need really the whole government to change and deliver.

Even with strongest political support and in less democratic contexts, it is hard (if not impossible) to coerce collaboration. That is why you see in this book so many “charm offensives,” cocreation mechanisms, and “carrots before the sticks” approaches to build networks and partnerships for delivery.

You need to navigate your public service, but also the wider ecosystem around you. You need to figure out the win-win opportunities to build institutional arrangements for involving others in decisions and delivery, to make efforts to build personal relationships, and also to sustain them over busy calendars.

Many leaders in the book talk about the need and ways to make other people and agencies successful, supporting them in their hardships and aspirations, and also having them take the recognition. This indeed has often proven to be the best possible way to ensure alignment and collaboration from others around you, for the long run, too.

Networking and stakeholder management is not just about you as the leader. You need to gear your whole team toward it through culture and practices that support it. Most of the work gets done by others around you anyway, and relations can be broken or built at every step of that journey.

You should be the chief relationship officer or the chief networking officer if you want to be an effective digital government leader.

Good Communications Will Empower You

Among the self-manifested lessons learned or even regrets of the twenty digital government leaders, one special theme stands out. Several of them say that they would make more effort in public communications, in hindsight.

Similarly, several of the stories highlight how the leaders have excelled in communications outreach and how this has brought benefits in terms of strong public support, stakeholder buy-in, political backing, talent recruitment, and more.

The need to be an effective communicator through media, public relations, and marketing efforts only increases in time with the accelerating attention economy. As it becomes constantly harder and harder to gain attention, the more deliberate, systemic, and calibrated your communications effort must be in order to reach the groups you need for your successful delivery. It is a job you cannot just leave to the communications staff, because you are the main spokesperson for the work you do. Whether you like it or not, it comes within the package of your position.

You should be the chief communications officer if you want to be an effective digital government leader.

The Team Will Determine How Far and Fast You Can Run

This is truly common management knowledge but the key success factor for any leader is to build the best possible team around you. Finding the right talent is hard for everyone, as you see from the interviews in the book. However, the interviews perhaps also give you hope that it can be done after all. Your mission and you yourself will be the attraction factors, especially once people start seeing delivery and can see that change is indeed doable. Bright and hardworking people will come to join you if you are worth joining with.

You might have to be resourceful and a bit innovative in tapping into the talent pools already in your government. Most of the effective leaders have also been very visible, vocal, and constantly out there in the wider digital or technology community around them, sometimes even globally. That is another reason why an active communications effort (see previous lesson) is very valuable.

Once you start to have right folks in the team, there is quite a bit more to be done in order to get the most out of their potential. You can empower them with enabling management style and routines, instill a needed culture and values, watch out for their well-being, and so on.

You should be the chief recruitment officer or chief talent officer if you want to be an effective digital government leader.

Work for Lasting Change—Every Day

All effective digital government leaders know that on one good (or bad) day their time in office will be over. That is why they consciously pay attention and actively take steps to make the changes they start in their governments to have a chance of lasting. This is important because organizations (especially governments) can be quite resistant to long-term change and fall back to previous ways if the counterforces have not become strong enough.

Some of the leaders have had a very acute understanding of the need to lay the ground for enduring change if their working context is a hostile or unstable one, or if their terms have a natural limit because of their political masters. They are then even more carefully and actively taking care from day 1 in their office that the way they do things could continue without them there.

Most lasting change potential naturally stems from building up strong and mature teams that can keep going without prior leaders, from leaving behind a strategy for the next years, from building up a culture that is different from what was there before.

However, you can also take concrete steps to instill the change a bit more into the machinery of government. Policies, standards, laws, institutional arrangements, or international donor assistance deals: there are several ways to make it harder for successors to immediately uproot previous changes.

In addition to such defensive moves, there are also proactive ways to facilitate continuity. You can make the transition smoother by choosing your own successor or laying out the tracks for the successor to come in and have an easy time to just continue, for example, by properly handing things over in documentation and leaving behind recommendations. You can also invest into building the tools and platforms for digital services in a way that make it easy to continue iterating and maintaining them.

At the end of the day, the best way to ensure continuity and make the change last is delivery—creation of digital government solutions of a new quality that meet people's needs. If users get value from the services you built, if agencies get value from the platforms and tools you provided them, they will be the force behind keeping these services and platforms going. The better your delivery of actual results that improve lives, the more likely the results will be sustained. It does not make sense for rational successors to override policies that work well.

There is no special chief officer role for ensuring continuity; this is part of what any chief officer should do. Simply keep in mind that you will likely be leaving someday and manage for enduring change every day in your job to be an effective digital government leader.

The Job Is Hard—Be Ready for It

You have seen from the interviews that this job can be exhausting. The harder the context and the more backlash there is, the more it will squeeze you. Or you will feel lonely at times, especially at start of the journey. Everyone in the book has gone through some tough fights along the way. At the very least you will have some battle scars to show.

If you want to keep delivering and achieve any impact, you should watch out to keep your own stamina and a clear mind. These will keep you going through the hardships of building the team, or when political support wanes, or backlash from stakeholders arises. Keeping your mental and physical health, happy family and other relations outside work, a balance of work and life—all these have their important part in it. Make sure that you do not lose yourself in the work, especially as several leaders in this book do remind you that there is a life after the job, too.

You should be the chief wellness officer for yourself if you want to be an effective digital government leader.

Fix Your Sight on the Users—The Impact on Citizens and Businesses

In face of hardships, the effective digital government leaders maintain their perspective and the bigger picture by reminding themselves what it is that they are doing—the mission and vision. It means mostly keeping their sight on the users and the impact they make on their lives, for example, on how digital services can improve the life of citizens and businesses.

The reminders of purpose can serve as a powerful re-energizer for yourself and the team. It also gives you boldness to try things again or differently, again and again. That is why so many leaders have some of their mantras or team values framed around citizen-centricity and the user focus. One practical trick is to keep reminding yourself and the team that you are users and citizens, too. At the end of the day, you are doing things better for yourself, too.

Fixing the sight this way also ensures that you are actually delivering for impact, not just for the sake of delivering something. It often happens that you are the lone or main voice of people as users in the government—at least at first, if this has not been the practice before. This should empower and embolden you.

You should be the chief customer officer if you want to be an effective digital government leader.

Your Effectiveness Is in Your Own Hands

If all the previous recommendations make you doubt your own ability to do this kind of job, do not worry.

First, all these different “chief officer” roles highlighted in this epilogue, all the relevant know-how and skills, can be learned and gained. None of the twenty leaders had all of it innately. Be encouraged that effectiveness comes from nurture not nature mostly.

Remarkable leaders have learned the necessary things along their career and studies, mostly through practical exposure and experience. From both successes and failures, as always. Several of them have been keenly observing and picking up practices from peers from around the world. All of them say that they kept learning on this job itself and even speak about the importance to consciously keep learning. Entrepreneurs have to learn government ways. Technologists have to learn the management and networking ways.

The list of useful or even necessary skills can be long, because it is no easy job you have. But here you have twenty stories about how the job can still be done, and with incredible impact. Nobody was born ready for it.

There are a few necessary innate characteristics. For example, you should love or at least be able to handle challenges. If you fear them, you probably will not consider the role anyway. Similarly, you must be at least moderately a social person. If you fear or dislike work with people, there are other jobs out there.

Second, there is no one career or learning path to becoming an effective digital government leader. Even if many of the twenty people in this book have a technology background, this is not a requirement. Sure, you need the appreciation and understanding of what and how the digital tech effects transformation. This can be picked up along your way, if you are curious and willing.

Entrepreneurs with a deep private sector history can excel in a top government role, even if the adjustment does not come naturally at first and they need to learn the new operating conditions fast. Similarly, civil servants can be effective if they are entrepreneurial enough.

You also do not necessarily need to have decades of experience to be effective. However, the more relevant experience you have, the more effective you will be and faster. This is logical for any role.

Therefore, if you need to run very fast in this role or the context for your work will be a tough one, do build up the skills and experience for it as fast as you can. You will be able to be so much more impactful. But you do have in this book shining examples of how people with shorter levels of experience can excel just as well—with the right mindset, their overall ability and energy, plus some courage.

Therefore, it is mostly your mindset and your approach that makes all of the difference. Mindset and approach can be cultivated; these are in your own hands.

Adopt the examples, insights, and tips from this book into your mindset and approach, and you shall see how much quicker and stronger your government starts to excel digitally with you in the lead. Good luck to you on this learning and leading journey!