As you may have noticed, I have personally witnessed the power of well-functioning teams time and time again. A climate of trust and engagement doesn’t happen on its own.
At one point during my time at Atea Sverige, I decided on an ambitious approach to see how far we could go in developing the management team.
I reached out to a senior psychologist to collaborate with her in preparing this transition and development of our leadership work.
Together, we decided to invite the entire leadership team to a several-day-long exercise with a focus on deepening and developing relationships. One of the things we did was to allow the psychologist to conduct in-depth interviews with each member of the group, with all others as active listeners.
To ensure maximum impact and vulnerability, I asked her to start with me and to be quite tough on me to set the tone. It turned out to be a few developmental days where we all gained increased understanding of each other, why we were the way we were. About our upbringing, siblings, parents. About our fears and motivations.
I will never forget one morning when one of my colleagues walked into the room, looked around, and said, “You know, I already like you all much more now…”
After this exercise was completed the business issues we were responsible for handling were solved in a better way. We acted more as a team and we became better at making decisions based on what was best for the company.
I want to end with an example of how well and smoothly our work had become:
We had a meeting where I started by stating that I saw some upcoming clouds for the economy , and that I saw a need to proactively reduce our costs to ensure continued good development and accompanying freedom of action.
Then I said to the members of the leadership team ”I want you to go home and think about what you can do within the framework of your respective areas”.
A week later, we met again, and I went around the team to listen to what each function saw they could do to meet the need to adjust the cost level. When I summarized the proposals that were put forward, I could happily note that on the first attempt, we had already reached the desired savings target, and we could calmly and smoothly approve the proposal without the slightest hint of frustration or sub-optimization.
This would not have been possible without our conscious effort to build the team. Another effect was that it became very enjoyable to sit in the leadership team, there was more room for fun and laughter.
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The picture below is from a fantastic management meeting we had in a authentic 19th-century environment outside Nordmaling in Västerbotten. We stayed without access to electricity and running water. At this management meeting, we discussed how we would adapt our salary model to fully support our desire to reward the TEAM and not the INDIVIDUAL – material for a separate chronicle.
How Atea’s management group became a TEAM…
