Service leadership
80% of the global economy is services. Most public sector spending is on service delivery. But in a traditional operating model no one owns services end-to-end or their overall performance.
For large organisations it’s more likely that their org design originates from manufacturing. Services are split across directorates, functions, and sometimes even other organisations. Dividing those who set requirements and those who do. It isn't how you would arrange things if starting from scratch today.
As the saying attributed to Arthur W Jones goes, ‘all organisations are perfectly designed to get the results they get’. Or its recent corollary, from Mike Fisher in his Substack newsletter Fish Food for Thought, “If we keep doing what we’ve been doing, we’ll keep getting what we’ve been getting”
So if the current results for your organisation aren’t all they could be, consider shifting leadership models from a culture of separation to one of end-to-end accountability, coherence, and stewardship of optimal service performance.
Design for the whole, to be greater than the sum of its parts.
The job of service leadership is coherence
Services are how organisations achieve their mission or deliver on their remit. That requires leadership that can intentionally design the environment for coherence and have accountability for measurable outcomes. Not just from the perspective of what customers or users see or interact with, or just from technologies, or operations, or finance or 'the business'. But the results of all of it, whether that’s end-to-end, as a whole or a circular lifecycle.
What whole-service leadership does
Whole-service leadership has proven most valuable when it has real responsibility and accountability in the following areas.
Setting and holding the overall vision and direction for a service, providing anchoring for the many teams across it.
Taking accountability for performance and transparency as a whole: outcomes or results, running costs, the impact of hand-offs and gaps, and sources of friction and failure.
Using the many influences from external and internal sources to corral this into a meaningful direction for teams, negotiating to protect the vision and priorities.
Managing the flow of work to bring and protect coherence for how the service is changing and why, knowing how that change can be delivered operationally.
Communicating outwards and upwards. Sharing the wider context, setting ambition and expectations, proactively engaging with stakeholders to tell the story about the 'why', not just the 'what'.
Refining types of teams across the service(s) and ways of working. Designing an environment that empowers teams, or at the least, supports optimal working within constraints.
Being responsible for most decision-making for the service as a whole, within agreed parameters that keep it safe for everyone. With a bias towards coaching and empowering teams to be able to make more of the right decisions.
This needs proportionate support from other specialists and others willing to create and maintain a constructive environment.
Skills and competencies
This is not a generalist role or activity that anyone or any team can do well, off the bat, without experience. You need people with experience or relevant traits, including being open and curious enough to learn and adapt how they work. This can rule out some otherwise very experienced leaders, if that’s not for them.
You’re looking for people who:
Show good instinct and judgement, actively developing contextual awareness. Not biased towards one background or profession over another. Trusted and relied on by others across disciplines for these reasons
Lean towards collaboration without relying entirely on others to make the hard decisions. Calls it out constructively when folks are going against guiding values and principles
Understand and have awareness of contemporary approaches to delivery and modernisation, as well as how to avoid making decisions that conflict with this. Can clearly articulate the difference between a programme/project/waterfall approach and one that is designed to test, learn and iterate, while recognising the messy reality of large organisations that do both
Have self-awareness of their impact on others, with some commitment to ongoing learning
Act as a coach to others, able to question and challenge teams and people as a critical friend to help them be better able to make the right decisions
When or where do you need it
You won't need hands-on leadership for every service. This is about proportionality, not uniformity. As a general rule, leadership is most valuable when a service meets one or more of the following criteria.
Importance. It is fundamental to that organisation’s existence and remit; the main service, or one of them.
Large and complex. It is large or complex enough to benefit from ongoing, active management. In terms of users, volumes, finance, people, multiple teams, functions or organisational areas involved
In-house control. There is enough within its control to usefully influence, direct and steer. That means it’s not entirely outsourced or run 100% by third-party software. There are some teams in-house to build, operate, and change it.
Major change. There is significant change planned or already underway, whether that's through enduring teams, a portfolio of projects and programmes, or some combination
Valuable or critical problems. There are significant problems to solve, opportunities to go after, or risks to assess and address. This could be after assessing current performance and opportunity cost, or by agreeing the ambition and direction of travel. In the current context, this might include the window of opportunity for how to design for - or deal with - increasing use of AI agents, and how best to use agentic AI to deliver the service.
Options
Leadership of complex services has to be multidisciplinary and collaborative. How to choose the right model depends on your setup. Here are some of the most common patterns.
A single individual who serves as the leader of the entire service. Who must therefore understand, have grip over and be trusted by peers across all areas, including strategy, policy, operations, digital.
A multidisciplinary leadership team of 2-4 people who work extremely closely together, as if they were one person.
There is another pattern, which is a working group or council of the right people who understand enough and meet regularly enough to give direction and coaching to others. However, this pattern carries a significant risk of being a ‘talking shop’ with too many voices resulting in inaction, or of being knowledgeable voices that aren’t listened to by others in charge. It's a transitional starting point, rather than an end goal.
The organisational environment
You can’t just add leadership of whole services without also changing the status quo; the environment inside the organisation. Giving more decision-making and authority to people and teams working across the service will affect existing dynamics and challenge some default models. If this isn’t acknowledged or addressed, the model can be deemed 'not to work here' - a fallacy of correlation, not causation. Doing this successfully means being prepared to have difficult conversations, clearly articulating the ‘why’ without expecting full agreement with the ‘what’, and being willing to make role changes or re-clarify responsibilities.
It can require other work to clarify decision-making types, parameters and responsibilities at a more granular level than likely exists today. You organisation might require a single accountable leader, but your service context could point to a multidisciplinary leadership team. If so set parameters and responsibilities for different kinds of decisions and objectives. Can you nominate a role of being the 'lead from among peers' on certain aspects, while making sure there is co-decision making and transparency? The goal is to ensure the quality of the whole is going to be greater than the sum of its parts.
There’s more to shifting to a service model than leadership alone. The transition alone can reveal previously hidden gaps and blindspots in the way things work today.
How this relates to product and product leadership
If your org is shifting to or considering the product operating model and wondering what the difference is, this isn’t in conflict. The unit of delivery is still multidisciplinary teams that discover and deliver, whether they’re more focused on products, entire services or other kinds of work. In the product model, product leadership sets the vision and strategy, and assigns work to product teams. The intention is to maximise the chance of good outcomes.
When there are multiple products and technologies that underpin a wider service, that vision - and leadership - is needed at the whole service level, e.g. Trainline as a whole, mortgages and house buying services, or getting and using a passport.
Cross-cutting products, platforms, and other capabilities may also need clear direction on how they support services or make trade-offs, e.g., ticket-booking platforms or GOV.UK Notify. It depends on how your organisation chooses to deliver its mission and, often, on the scale it operates at: a growing tech startup vs a national or global service provider.
The messy reality of similar-sounding roles
There’s an array of other job titles that, while sounding similar, are often profoundly different. Service owners who focus on digital transactions or technology. Customer journey managers who focus on customer-facing interactions and touch points. Product managers for technology, including AI-powered products, platforms, systems, as well as some things that aren’t products at all. Product owners who may represent stakeholders' requirements. Leads, owners and architects of different verticals or capabilities. For historical reasons, all of these may have been very necessary, and can still be so - the nature of complex organisations needs plenty of people who can see the bigger picture, spot patterns and do sensible things about them.
The goal here is to apply the principles to shift more leadership to cross-cutting services and empower the teams that deliver value across and within them.
The value
This isn’t about adding bureaucracy. It’s taking a hard look at how leadership, accountability, and direction currently work, usually the result of historical decisions. Plan to change it if you want different results from the ones you see today. The model you use depends on how your organisation delivers its mission, but at the end of the day, teams that deliver and operate are what deliver the value in nearly any organisation.
The value of whole-service leadership lies in the combined expertise and traits that bring coherence and better quality outcomes. The clarity of good judgement, strategic context and direction, and the ability to garner what’s needed from the rest of the organisation. So that everyone else can get on and deliver not just what’s right for them, but what’s right for the organisation, its users and customers, and the overall mission.