Situational Background

Christel Heydemann, CEO of Orange since 2022, leads with engineer’s clarity, inclusive tone, and focus on service quality. She values simple rules, visible follow-through, and respectful accountability. Distinctive for calm, principled leadership in complex systems—equally relevant to any service-heavy organisation. (Orange)

Practical Leadership Principles

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1) Make reliability your promise.

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Trust is built on consistency.

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Behaviours to model:

• Publish a few service standards in plain words.
• Review performance with the same cadence, win or lose.
• Explain outages and fixes promptly.

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2) Inclusion with decisiveness.

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Hear many voices; decide on time.

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Behaviours to model:

• Invite frontline input before big calls.
• Time-box debate; commit and move.
• Share why you chose the path.

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3) Simplicity over noise.

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Remove friction people actually feel.

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Behaviours to model:

• Cut one step from a core journey each month.
• Replace jargon with everyday language.
• Retire low-value work publicly.

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Call to action

Choose one service promise to make—and keep—this month; publish the metric and the owner.