Modern Leadership: When Ignoring Ranks Moves Everyone Ahead

I’ve previously written articles about the icon work at Microsoft, which focused mainly on the design thinking and the icons’ representation of the future vision for our products. And in terms of product excellence, it was exciting to see how ten icons became a sophisticated system of over a hundred diverse yet connected icons—but what has really amazed me about this effort are the people behind it.

Projects like this are exemplary of a new way of working at Microsoft and this video is a mere token of our appreciation for everyone's contributions:

I also wanted to take a moment to share some observations and thank the many, many people who made it all possible.

First, the observations:

Modern leadership emerged. We saw a non-hierarchical village of self-organized individuals who came together to ask, “How can I help you” and then made it happen. Leadership materialized, not because we created a hierarchy, but because people stepped up when something needed to get done. It was a living, breathing example of an open collective working in a federated model and I couldn’t be more inspired by the people I work with. Which leads me to the second thing…

Our company values on full display. And not because anybody told someone else to do it, but because a group of people just deeply believed in connecting things together, building on each other’s work, and raising the bar for our customers. Of course, there was support at the executive level, but we truly saw this at the individual level.

Individuals who, by the way, keep me on my toes by reminding me that our work still isn't done!

And now, the gratitude:

At companies as large as Microsoft, the unfortunate reality is that efficiently collaborating with people who aren’t on your direct or neighboring teams can be difficult. It takes a lot of work to get people with different priorities all on the same page at the same time, so thank you Burns Montgomery, Nando Costa, Paul Cooper, Christina Koehn, Annice Jumani, Shamus Grubb, Colin Day, and Tony Lew for leading your respective design teams to get it done. Hats off to Phil Evans and Jason Custer for driving consistency and cohesion across all the teams to our Fluent Design System. And Becky Brown, you ignited the fire by designing the initial core ten Office icons.

We also had our brand and marketing partners volunteer their expertise to drive that cross-company cohesion. Thank you to Sven Seger, Ron Sasaki, and Bo Smith for leading that arm of the effort. And thank you, Chris Capossela, for holding up a mirror to the work for everyone’s betterment.

Projects at this scale often don’t succeed. Jeff Teper, thanks for being our executive cheerleader. Panos Panay, thanks for the spiritual and philosophical guidance. Tracy Childers and Margaret Song, thank you for starting us on the right foot. Lauren Keckley, you took us across the finish line! And thank you to the countless number of other designers, PMs, researchers, and partners in brand, marketing, research, legal, trademarking, engineering, and many other extended teams who came together and truly lived our Microsoft values.