Our Leadership Principles set a shared standard for how leaders operate at Gearset, as we support teams and customers operating at scale.
Our Leadership Principles set a shared standard for how leaders operate at Gearset, as we support teams and customers operating at scale.
As Gearset has grown, leadership has taken on greater responsibility and wider influence across the business. Our Leadership Principles set a shared standard for how leadership works at Gearset, giving clarity on what good looks like as we scale. They build on our values, guiding how leaders think, make decisions, and support others in a fast-moving, collaborative environment.
Each principle sets an expectation for how leaders at Gearset make decisions that support teams and customers operating at scale.
Gearset’s strategy exists to focus our efforts on solving the challenges that will yield the most success for Gearset (and when Gearset wins, we all win). Everyone should be able to connect how their day-to-day activities meaningfully contribute to achieving Gearset’s goals. Leaders can use their experience and context to help people stay motivated, aligned and working on the highest-impact tasks for Gearset.
It’s beneficial for everyone to optimise for the success of Gearset over their immediate team or their own agenda (Gearset, team, self). When leaders practise this, it greatly amplifies the positive effects. Leaders have a broader understanding of the whole system; they can identify tradeoffs, see how local decisions affect other parts of Gearset and help others see it too. They’re better placed to work with their peers in other functions to coordinate how work is prioritised to achieve the best outcomes for Gearset as a whole.
Contributing through a group of people scales your impact. The more highly performing that group, the more Gearset can accomplish. You’ll be key in determining how effectively your teams function by managing the individuals, the team itself and the environment they operate in. You’ll influence what the team works on and how they do it. This is why your success as a leader is measured by your teams’ successes.
When leaders create growth opportunities, their team can deliver even more value in future. Delegating important tasks and broadening the responsibilities of others frees you up to do other valuable stuff. Productivity gains realised by improvements to the team’s capabilities and working practices are preferable to those found by increasing the team’s headcount.
Intellectual honesty helps you work more effectively – it allows you to question assumptions, admit what you don’t know, learn from mistakes and ultimately solve the right problems faster. A foundation of trust and psychological safety is vital for a group of people to be intellectually honest with one another. Only leaders can build that, through role modelling these behaviours, encouraging others to do the same and leaning into a healthy feedback culture.
Openness and authenticity build a lot of trust with those around you, but sharing too much can be counterproductive. Leaders are exposed to a lot of uncertainty. The way they react to situations influences others. By being mindful of your audience, you can get the best outcomes for everyone.
Leaders influence how significant decisions are made, the outcomes of those decisions can have huge ramifications on how Gearset operates. The best decisions aren’t made with perfect information, complete certainty, or no trade offs. They’re made through deeply understanding the problem (JTBD), involving the right people, getting aligned, considering consequences and moving forward (all as quickly as the circumstances allow).
Innovation comes from an iterative loop of learning and improvement, and decisions drive us forward through each iteration. Momentum is the rate at which we can complete these cycles. Curiosity, intellectual honesty and effective delegation make each cycle more effective. By getting this right, we’ll build a more effective company and a better product faster than our competitors.
As a leader you have a lot more control of how you and your teams spend their time — maximising it means focussing it on the things that matter most to Gearset. That focus means saying no to other things. As those other things are often quite appealing, it can sting to do so. This means you’ll need to be ruthless when making your choices.
As change is a certainty, you’ll need to continually assess how you’re spending your time and why. As a leader, your broad context and influence means you’re well-placed to understand competing asks, make trade-offs and adjust priorities when plans change.
Gearset is fast-paced and there’s a lot going on. A dynamic environment like this has a bunch of benefits (and it can be fun) but not if it becomes chaotic. Leaders are conduits of information across Gearset, so it’s crucial that they communicate this information clearly and accurately – it’ll help everyone understand what’s happening and why.
Having a shared understanding means we can all make better decisions and commit to the decisions of others. It helps us stay aligned and focused on doing work that contributes most to Gearset’s strategic goals. It helps us navigate change smoothly, while avoiding ambiguity and knowledge silos that will inevitably create friction and confusion.