The question every leader should ask: what do we need to unlock?

What’s the question anyone in a leadership role should ask if they truly want to transform an organisation?
For me, it’s this one: what do we need to unlock?

“What do we need to unlock so a team can think with more freedom?”
“What do we need to unlock so an idea can find its way?”
“What do we need to unlock so creativity stops being an accident and becomes a habit?”

Throughout my professional life, I’ve discovered that creative leadership starts with this question. It has helped me understand problems that seemed complex and identify where the real friction was, so we could build spaces where people can bring the best of what they have.

At YOUNG, this question has become our own guiding thread, because it connects our decisions, our projects, and our culture.
In the coming months, I want to share, from the inside, how we’ve refined this leadership model while building an entire ecosystem from scratch. Today felt like a good day to begin with a recent story: how my own way of leading has changed since YOUNG was born.

I remember perfectly the moment I realised we needed a different approach. It was an April afternoon in Workspaces, in a conversation that wasn’t meant to be important but, looking back, ended up being so. One of the teams was stuck with a decision, and even though everyone had pieces of the solution, no one was able to assemble the whole picture.

That situation made me ask myself the question again: what do we need to unlock?
And the answer was clear: there was too much pressure to get it right and too little space to explore.

From there, we started changing small things. We let ideas be shared earlier, even when they weren’t ready. We adjusted the way we worked between Spain and the Netherlands so conversations became starting points, and we began treating every hypothesis as just that, a hypothesis.

What’s curious is that this small change opened doors we weren’t seeing.
Projects like Runners, the evolution of Workspaces, or our new Young Coffee emerged in everyday moments. With a quick coffee, a comment during a commute, a question someone asked without knowing it would become key.

That’s when I understood that creative leadership requires something simple and demanding: knowing how to listen to weak signals.

Over time, this question began to accompany me in other areas:
How do we unlock collaboration between countries?
How do we unlock clarity when the daily pace becomes too intense?
How do we unlock trust so people can propose before they validate?

I deeply believe that a leader doesn’t have all the answers, but they do create the conditions for answers to appear.
That was also the logic behind how we designed our work processes: less control, more coherence; less bureaucracy, more clarity; less fear of mistakes, more room to iterate.

And although we’re still learning, the results are already visible.
Our way of leading has allowed us to accelerate ideas that used to take months to move, attract talent that values real autonomy, and build ventures born with an exploration-driven DNA rather than blind execution.

At YOUNG, this is happening every day.

 

When I look back, I realise that the question “what do we need to unlock?” has often been the compass that helped us move forward when everything felt uncertain.

And, as usually happens with important questions, its impact becomes clearer with time.
I’ll keep sharing more of these learnings, stories, and moments that have helped us build the leadership that sustains YOUNG today.

Because, in the end, big changes often begin with a good question asked at the right moment.

Follow the journey. Join the movement. Be part of YOUNG.