Daniel Ek - CEO of Spotify since co-founding it in 2006

It is easy to fall into the myth that CEOs and managers must be extraordinary people. There are so many
inspiring leaders such as Elon Musk and Shantanu Narayen who encourage their followers to stand up
and follow them when things get tough. There are also a lot of leadership books that focus on being a
great visionary, storyteller, and inspiring person but not everyone needs to be a leader like that. Daniel
Ek is exceptional, he is just a different type of leader. This Swedish entrepreneur created one of the
world's largest music streaming platforms, Spotify, with believes that streaming is the future of music,
has done the differences with his team.

Although he was wealthy enough to need a job by owning Advertgo, 23-year-old Spotify founder Daniel
Ek enjoyed indulging his passion for music, founding the music streaming service in 2006. Daniel Ek has a
hope that he can make it legal for everyone to have access to all the world's music. And he finally did it.
Today, Spotify has 140 million active users and has raised more than $2.5 billion in venture capital.
Daniel Ek has been called "the most important person in music" by Forbes. He has become one of the
most inspiring CEOs with his participative leadership style.

First, Daniel leads by empowering the team to take charge and make as many decisions as possible. He
always stresses the importance of being clear about your role in meetings. Daniel Ek noted that
meetings are not only a key optimization point but also where knowledge workers end up wasting
valuable time. What makes him different from others is that he did a psychological study of his
employees, which prompted him to decide to take a different approach and let the team members hold
meetings rather than himself. Instead of being a “decider-in-chief”, Ek has learned to become more of
an “editor” of Spotify’s vision. He keeps its principles on track by asking many questions such as “Why
does this matter?” and tries to offset complacency, even when it makes things harder. He has said that
he is not an inventor, and he just wants to make things better. Meanwhile he has the belief that these
questions increase the critical thinking of his teams and lead his teams to meet more opportunities to
innovate their ideas. Daniel Ek wins his team’s heart.

Secondly, as an introverted person he uses his innate personality to become an effective and successful
leader by becoming more adaptable and flexible. This is because all organizations would go through
various stages such as start-up and scale-up. And a good leader needs to imbue different leadership
styles for those various stages. He tried to learn again as many leadership skills as he could because it's
quite different between managing a small team with 8 individual contributors vs managing 8 managers
each with their own teams. He founded and gone with Spotify for 8 years, not only that, he also led the
music industry to see Spotify as the top streaming service around, yet Spotify “has done little to address
the lack of contemporary music from a diverse collection of major artists when their albums are
released” (Singleton 2016). That is a great journey to prove his leadership.

And the last one, Daniel Ek offers his employees one of the most encouraging work environment
cultures. He focuses to build a transparent working environment where his team’s failure and constant
iteration are welcomed, and this will turn Spotify into a “learning organism” that keeps improving at an
ever-higher pace. For example, Daniel Ek made a risky and daring decision that he was pouring $50
million into the music streaming service of Spotify, with his belief into his teams. And finally, that action
is driving its stock price up by more than 3% to a high of $108.98 per share during regular trading hours.
The momentary rise which means his reverence and respect from his teams also increase.
Overview, I think that Daniel is not only a great manager, but also a respected leader in the music
industry because of his leadership style that seemed to prefer his team freedom from choice. Moreover,
his actions such as empowering the team to make as many decisions, becoming more adaptable and
flexible, and a transparent working environment into a failure welcome space differentiate him from
other managers.

References:

Fisk, P., 2022. Daniel Ek - Peter Fisk. [online] Peter Fisk. Available at:
<https://www.peterfisk.com/leader/daniel-ek/> [Accessed 4 July 2022].

Sinclair, T., 2021. Leadership Lessons: Spotify Daniel Ek. [online] TOBY SINCLAIR. Available at:
<https://www.tobysinclair.com/post/leadership-lessons-spotify-daniel-ek> [Accessed 4 July 2022].

Memod.com. 2022. What makes Spotify’s Daniel Ek a different kind of leader…. [online] Available at:
<https://memod.com/MrBusiness/what-makes-spotify-s-daniel-ek-a-different-kind-of-1398> [Accessed
4 July 2022].

Bertoni, S., 2022. Spotify's Daniel Ek: The Most Important Man In Music. [online] Forbes. Available at:
<https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2012/01/04/spotifys-daniel-ek-the-most-important-
man-in-music/?sh=509b04bf64ca> [Accessed 4 July 2022].

Techcrunch.com. 2022. TechCrunch is part of the Yahoo family of brands. [online] Available at:
<https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/06/daniel-ek-50-million-spotify-stock/> [Accessed 4 July 2022].

Fleicher, R. and Snickars, P., n.d. Discovering Spotify – A Thematic Introduction.