Leadership at SumUp
At SumUp, one of our core values is having Founder’s Mentality – and in part, that means everyone is expected to think and act like a leader, regardless of their role: taking ownership, driving decisions, and making SumUp’s vision – a world where everyone can build a thriving business – a reality.
And for those who formally lead people and teams, the responsibility runs even deeper. People leaders of course shape what SumUp does, but they also shape what SumUp is. They uphold and reinforce our values and are, in many ways, the living embodiment of our Organisational Vision. Their decisions influence the lives and livelihoods of SumUppers, the health of the organism, and ultimately the value we deliver to our merchants.
It is worth saying: people leadership is not the only path to a successful and rewarding career at SumUp. Many SumUppers have built exceptional careers as individual contributors and domain experts. We value both deeply, and we do not conflate seniority with leadership. Leadership at SumUp is not a rank to be obtained – it is a responsibility to be earned.
Leadership Qualities
The following qualities form the inner foundation of what we look for in leaders at SumUp. Our goal is to develop these qualities in all SumUppers – and we expect people leaders to model them consistently.
Drive
Great leaders at SumUp have a genuine passion for our products and our mission – the kind that is contagious and raises the ambition of everyone around them. They bring urgency to their work, take initiative, and hold themselves accountable for outcomes good and bad. They learn from failure, and they do not wait for permission to pursue the next opportunity.
Pragmatism
We operate in a fast-moving, complex environment and we do not have the luxury of overthinking. Great leaders at SumUp communicate with clarity, understand our products from the customer’s perspective, and know when to act and when to pause. When faced with uncertainty, they move – and they bring their teams with them. They consistently choose progress over perfection.
Strategic Vision
Leaders at SumUp hold two things simultaneously: a clear-eyed understanding of the task in front of them and a view of how that task connects to SumUp’s broader mission. They prioritise ruthlessly both for their team and for SumUp as a whole, and they collaborate actively across teams and tribes to ensure individual ambitions serve collective goals. A leader without a strategic vision is just a manager. We are building something more enduring than that.
Servant Leadership
We believe a leader’s primary role is to inspire, enable, develop, and empower. Servant leaders at SumUp listen actively and coach generously; they are genuinely invested in the growth of the people around them. They create an environment where people feel safe to speak up, take risks, suggest bold ideas, and give honest feedback - because they know that’s where the best work comes from. They are not afraid to hire people more talented than themselves, and they measure their success by what their team accomplishes.
Leadership Expectations
In his book Good to Great, Jim Collins describes an “entrepreneurial death spiral” that ambitious companies often stumble into as they scale: rapid growth outpaces systems and planning; professional management brings order but kills creativity; the entrepreneurial spirit fades; the best people leave; the company slides toward mediocrity. The antidote, Collins argues, is a culture of discipline – one that does not suppress the entrepreneurial spirit but channels it. As he writes: "When you put these two complementary forces together – a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship – you get a magical alchemy of superior performance and sustained results."
This is what we are building at SumUp. The expectations below are not bureaucratic constraints; rather, they are the discipline that protects what we have built and keeps us building. As a rule of thumb: the more responsibility a leader carries, the higher the bar.
Master the Fundamentals
Before anything else, leaders must have complete command of the basics.
Leaders know SumUp’s vision, mission, and strategy well enough to explain them clearly and connect them to their team's daily work. They understand how SumUp generates revenue, what our main costs are, and why regulatory obligations such as KYC (Know Your Customer) and AML (Anti-Money Laundering) are critical to our operations. They use our products regularly and engage with merchants directly; there is no better reality check, and many of our leaders actively maintain relationships with a handful of merchants they have personally onboarded or supported.
Leaders take collective ownership. If they see something is broken – a bug, a misalignment of priorities, an issue unrelated to their role – it is on them to help fix it. The SumUp organism belongs to all of us. Leaders also represent SumUp beyond the boundaries of their team – every interaction is an opportunity to recruit, to learn, and to build our brand.
Manage Talent
No other responsibility carries more leverage than the decisions leaders make about people. Who they hire, how they develop them, how they recognise their contribution, and how honestly they address underperformance shape the health of SumUp more than any strategy or product decision. The main responsibility for managing talent sits with the leader – not with People Partners, who are there to support and advise.
Build for talent density. When composing their team, leaders think in terms of skills rather than headcount: what capabilities does the mission require, and where are the gaps? They conduct this exercise regularly. They also resist over-hiring in anticipation of growth; overhiring is costly financially and corrosive to team morale. They avoid unnecessary reporting layers - lateral leadership through influence is worth more than positional authority. And they resist overspecialisation – flexibility and integration matter more at this stage of growth than perfection in any single dimension.
Hire with rigour. Hiring decisions are among the most consequential we make, and leaders approach them with prudence. A hiring mistake is unfair to the individual, disruptive to the team, and difficult and costly to reverse. If a hiring mistake becomes apparent, leaders acknowledge it early – for the individual’s sake as much as SumUp’s.
Give feedback constantly – and write it down. The single most important tool a leader has is feedback: specific, honest, timely, and radically candid. Leaders give it in the moment and follow it up in writing. And they seek it actively for themselves.
Apply the Keeper Test (made famous by Netflix). Leaders ask themselves often: if this person were to leave tomorrow, would I fight to keep them? For team members who do not pass this test, it is an early signal – a call to action and leaders use it to start a conversation, understand what is not working, and determine the right path forward.
Manage underperformance actively and humanely. If a team member is not meeting the expectations of their role, it is the leader’s responsibility to act. They understand the context, are clear and direct in their feedback, and provide a genuine path forward. If that path does not lead where hoped, they ensure any transition is handled with fairness and care. Every SumUpper we part ways with is someone we were once excited to hire; we owe them that same consideration on the way out.
Invest in careers and enable movement. Leaders support each team member's development actively – through formal reviews and also through regular, honest conversations about growth, aspirations, and challenges. They create an environment where movement between teams is seen as a sign of a healthy organisation. It is better to lose a top performer to a different part of SumUp than to a different company.
Deliver Value
Ultimately, leadership exists in service of delivering value to our merchants. The following expectations speak to how leaders create the conditions for that to happen consistently.
Create clarity and prioritise ruthlessly. A team’s ability to do great work depends on understanding why their work matters. Leaders connect the dots between daily efforts and SumUp's mission – regularly. They prioritise on behalf of SumUp as a whole, not just their team, and when priorities shift – as they will – they help their team adapt without losing momentum or morale.
Lead with context, not control. Micromanagement is expensive. It erodes trust, suppresses initiative, and slows everything down. Instead, leaders give their team the context they need to make good decisions independently. They establish principles rather than rigid rules, and create enabling constraints that guide judgment without removing it. The goal is a team that operates confidently in a leader’s absence.
Communicate openly and with discipline. Transparency is a responsibility. This means leaders share context from leadership discussions with their team; respond to messages within a working day; and start and end meetings on time with clear outcomes. They practice radical candour – upward, downward, and across – and they write things down: it clarifies their own thinking and reduces the risk of misunderstanding for everyone else.
Make space for constructive disagreement. Disagreement – focused on ideas rather than people – is one of the most productive forces in a healthy team. Leaders create an environment where assumptions are questioned, decisions are stress-tested, and no one defers simply because of hierarchy. When conflict becomes toxic, they address it directly – leaders are held to a higher standard in how they show up in moments of tension.
Spend with discipline. SumUp spends a lot of money each year, and every leader must take personal responsibility for what is spent – within their own team and with a view of SumUp as a whole. They co-own the Capital Allocation Agreement process – questioning spending, challenging trade-offs, and treating every euro as if it were their own.
Simplify relentlessly. As SumUp grows, complexity accumulates – in our products, our processes, and our teams. Leaders fight complexity continuously – removing unnecessary steps, challenging meetings that no longer earn their place, and resisting the natural instinct to add rather than subtract. Complexity is the enemy of speed – and at SumUp, speed matters.
Aim higher. Leaders set ambitious goals for themselves, their team, and SumUp. They seek to be challenged by others and actively challenge in return; the four-eyes principle reflects a simple truth: that more perspectives make better decisions and improve outcomes. When in doubt, they assume something is possible until proven otherwise.
Collective Responsibility
Much of the above distils into one principle: we are all responsible for all aspects of the SumUp organism. Political behaviour – lobbying, proxying, avoiding accountability by escalating decisions unnecessarily – corrodes the culture we are building. Leaders are expected to eliminate it, starting with themselves. Transparency is the antidote: by following our co-create, consult, and test approach to decision-making, we keep decisions open, inclusive, and grounded.
Disciplined people, engaging in disciplined thought, leading to disciplined action – this is the virtuous circle that keeps SumUp healthy, growing, and building toward something enduring.