Speaker 1: 0:10

Welcome back to transformative change. Today's episode is going to be around leadership. We haven't really touched upon the topic too much in the past episode, but it's a really important one, especially when it comes to self-leadership. Though my thinking was that I'd make an episode where I tell you a little bit about my own leadership journey A boat from a leading team's perspective so the managerial part of things into leading and driving vision, so leaders of leaders and try to distinguish in between in my own journey and reflect and analyze and dissect. This episode is not going to deep down into the theories behind it. It is going to give you insight into one person, one individual's own journey and perspective of leadership. So welcome to transformative change, the podcast where we try to dissect cross-cutting topics, because when it comes to transformative change, we want to inflict real change in the world and we want it to be long-lasting, aligned with our values. Or else it's important to put the right tools in your hands and it's really about making no distinction actually between real world or your own private world and the professional world, because there isn't a clear distinction in between. And what I want to get to with all of this is that we can live life to the fullest. We don't have to distinguish. We will try to be aligned with our own values and drive a positive impact to the world. But back to today's topic of leadership.

Speaker 1: 2:05

My purpose with leadership initially never was to lead and manage people. Early on in my career I was an expert in the topic in the fields, but I had my mind really set to being at the top. I wanted to climb the corporate ladder. I wanted to be up there where the real decisions were taken. Maybe naive, but I don't think it's something that many people wouldn't align with, especially not early on in your career, when you're fresh out of university. You want to climb, you want to make career. You don't. Well, if you do, congratulations. Then you come quite far, quite fast. You don't really reflect on the why, because that's what you're taught to do. You go in school, you climb the classes, you make grades, you get feedback that this is the right path, and the same thing usually is true for the corporate world.

Speaker 1: 3:05

What is important to distinguish here is there's a big difference between managing people and leading people. I did not know this difference Initially in my career and for many years I didn't have a team to lead. I was never a team manager until quite late. I think it was around 2017 or 2018, something like that 2016. Who cares, it was quite late in my career, given that I started working in 2006, 2007, something, and I managed team, of course, but mainly of consultant, cross-functional, and always as the expert. In these teams I was always pointing towards the solution and setting the direction. I never took care of the HR topics. I never had to manage when somebody was sick. It was all about the results and I think I was really good. At that point I started seeing where we're going and I outlined that.

Speaker 1: 4:17

So when I became a manager for the first time, I jumped straight into a world of unknowns. I had this manager early on in my career and we were discussing in one topic and I said, oh, I want to try becoming a leader or a manager Can't remember exact words and she just looked at me and said really, I don't think you do, I don't think you know what it means and I don't think you do. I, of course, at that point, had no idea. I just want to be clear. She was completely right, but I didn't realize it at that point. I, of course, became annoyed, because I'm a type of person that think, well, I can do anything. Well, ten years later I was proven wrong and I realized today I don't want to manage people. It's not what I'm good at.

Speaker 1: 5:09

So the first time I had to deal with those things face to face, when it came to people having their own personal issues, I had a really hard time with that. I was very stuck early on in my career that your professional life is your professional life and your private life is your private life. I made a very clear distinction, not that I didn't talk about my private life, but it was rather when I work. I work and I always worked pretty much all the time. So I had such a hard time when people came to me as a manager saying, hey, I got a trouble with this specific thing or my kids are sick and well, just saying this makes me sound very cynical, very black and white.

Speaker 1: 5:58

But I was. I was immature, I didn't really care, to be honest, because I wanted to make a career, I wanted to be the best, I wanted to provide everything. So those lines really didn't exist to me at that stage. And that was hard because I couldn't get the results I wanted by using the tools that worked on me, because I know myself very well. So I was frustrated. I couldn't get to that point, so I started doing the work myself.

Speaker 1: 6:31

When people were cutting or giving, given slack or they were slacking off, I did it. They might be fired or they might transition away. I picked up the slack and I worked even harder, more, provided the results that we needed to get where I wanted to be. And, to be honest, it was not even a manager setting targets on me, because I had very high demands on myself, but I wanted to reach there. I just want to say I was a terrible manager.

Speaker 1: 7:02

Here is the saying that you can, if you want to go fast, go alone. If you're going to go far, go together. Man, was I fast. Of course, that's implying that I always went alone. Terrible at building teams, I did not like going and having team meetings or team building exercises, but man, was I efficient. But that's not how you build a team. Look at the world of sports. Okay, if you're playing one on one and if you don't need a team, yes. But if you have a soccer or football team depending on where in the world you're listening in on there are 11 people on that field and they can't all be rock stars going in their own direction. They need to work together.

Speaker 1: 7:51

And I did not realize that I was too individualistic and I saw so clear where I thought everyone should go. I didn't communicate clearly. So when I got the chance to redo and retry when I started H&M, I realized it's so much more. I should not be a team leader Absolutely not. Sometimes I had to when there was too few people, but then I had to work more on those skills. Fake it till you make it right. It's not faking it, but it's being realistic about what is needed. You need to build a strong team to go far, to go from one person doing everything really quickly into a well-oiled machine that can deliver world class. Never going to be as fast as that individual and in my field of AI, in the beginning speed was essential. But if you're targeting and working with large organization and enterprises, it needs to fit into the large machinery and there are ways of addressing that how to get that machinery to work very well but that's going to be another topic, another podcast, of course, but I started realizing this. So what I worked so much more on was the progression.

Speaker 1: 9:24

At that stage, from managing to leading, I realized I can't be the person following up. How many hours have you worked? Did you clock in? Because I would be crazy, or I would go crazy is a better definition of it. It was important to do what I do best, which is communicate. I told you earlier I could see so clearly how to solve the problem and where we should be, so I targeted, instead of defining a vision, a vision where people didn't need to go to me constantly on how to do things. Of course, I could try to be an expert leader, which is a type of leader which potentially knows the field the best, that knows all the details, but that also means that everybody needs to go to that person. That's why it's bad. That's why it's not scalable.

Speaker 1: 10:31

And if you want to go from five people into a high performance team, into hundreds, if you see that there's value, regardless of its software engineering, marketing or data science, ai doesn't matter you can't scale up by having individual experts being the point of contact for all decisions, the same way as you can't have managers being the decision makers of all decisions, because if somebody is going to be central bottleneck, it will go so much slower. As soon as there is centralization, speed goes down and it doesn't mean that quality goes up either, because sometimes it's just opinions and I started realizing that I need to remove myself from the decision making equation, communicate the vision and strategy in broad lines and then let talented people grown ups People have been doing this as long as me, or longer, or is talented and is just learning. Make them take the decisions, make them give the answers, because if I come from a field where I know everything, then it will be slow and time was of the essence. So transitioning myself from being this manager into a visionary communicator was key to succeeding in building up high performance, individual, autonomous decision making teams that provided software and AI solution faster than anything I've encountered myself. That also meant that I needed to start disconnecting, that I had to be comfortable with not knowing everything, and if you are a person that burns for technology like I am, and AI and the solution and the improvement of overall, but what really trumps, that is not the best algorithm for me. I realized that I had to convince myself that really what was important for me was to see the results, because during so many years I had been a part of exercises which didn't really produce results. I must admit, as an expert and executor, for many years I spent more time on producing power points, proof of concepts that said, hey, look at the value you're missing by not deploying AI. I had to take an ounce of pragmatism to delivering solutions. Yeah, shut GPT. Super cool and there is such a big future for that. But let's be realistic.

Speaker 1: 13:51

The hardest thing you can ever do in a large organization is to change existing processes. What you need to do in order to be able to do that is proper change management, and it's easy to get influenced and inspired by the possibilities. That's why you need to be a visionary leader within your organization if you aim to lead and drive proper change. And this comes down to leadership. This comes down to yourself not being fully taken away by all the possibilities and then get disappointed when the organization says no, change doesn't happen overnight, it takes a long time and it takes really, let's say, therefore, leaders, because if you have an organization today, you have an established business model, you have shareholders, potentially. Why would they change? They're making money, probably making good money. Why would they go and take a risk? They see this chat GPT. What's the potential. Are you gonna innovate? Are they gonna change existing processes?

Speaker 1: 15:18

You have to establish, you have to set a vision and you have to sell that vision and get Everybody to align to it. Then, and only then, can you call yourself a visionary leader. You have to see the future and you have to make sure people get behind you. Super easy, right? It's not. It requires you to have a full toolset. It requires you to have your ear against the railroad and here when the trains are coming. And that's easier said than done. But I also think that it is easy today for people to go out on certain social media platforms and Say and proclaim their experts without any real background, and I think we got it all wrong and People are potentially downplaying some of the experts and saying they don't know what they're saying or doing, they don't see it. But we have to find some sort of middle ground. There has to be a flexibility About what the future. No one knows what the future is. That vision is a picture of the future that we strive for and personally I found it very hard To try to do that. But it requires us to have a good understanding and sense of direction. It requires us to formulate and see what are the potential threats, opportunities, weaknesses. It requires us to formulate a plan around this topic and then my favorite communication around it.

Speaker 1: 17:00

We created a vision for AI when I was at H&M group and I called it the fountain head after an, a book by an American, russian author which was around, an architect, and that architect was doing a lot of new Styles and he was rejected by the traditional architecture community until he could really Showcase that these are better architectures. So we called the AI strategy the fountain head and we called it and started formulating how do we build capabilities, reusable components, how do we increase the speed of change? How do we pick better use cases? How do we get all processes in H&M to be amplified by AI? It was a daring vision, but it was a vision. Bell built on best practices with scale in mind and it was so Cool and we did all this marketing material and we communicated and communicated and what we could see was that it became more inspirational for people to, to listen to, to see, because they were material.

Speaker 1: 18:24

It was visual, compelling, there was a storyline behind it, there was a futuristic, it wasn't just a roadmap. So when we did this area presentations. We could stand there and be inspirational and people get like we want to go this way, and then the other presentations could really be also around, not from areas, roadmaps, budgets, plans. You all seen this. What makes you inspired? What makes you want to go to work the next day? For me, it was that telling a compelling vision and getting people inspired and getting them to execute, and then talking about it and communicating over and over again, because the first time the person in the audience if you're working for a large organization hear this might be the 30th time. You're telling it and you're selling. You're constantly selling as a visionary leader.

Speaker 1: 19:20

And this was my conclusions and my reflection to all of this is you don't know what you don't know. You have to have an open mindset, you have to find these tools and you have to identify what are your strengths. Some people love working with people, the closeness, the HR topics, making sure people are at peak, person by person. Others, love is still in the vision and driving the change in organizations. Who are you? What do you want to do? Or do you want to continue being an expert, which is fine in itself? We need all, but most importantly, we need to know ourselves and have proper self-leadership, because you can lead without a title which is a title of a very good book I read a couple of years back.

Speaker 1: 20:25

Leadership doesn't automatically come with the position. Authority might come with the position, but leadership getting people to follow you, take charge and lead yourself that's something completely different and that you can do, regardless if you're an expert, If you are manager of a small team or if you're a leader of thousands, it boils down to you. It boils down to making sure you know how to manage yourself. So that was today's episode around my journey within leadership. I hope you enjoyed it, and there are definitely a couple of topics within my own journey that will pick up at the later stage, and maybe some theory as well at some point. If you have any questions you want to reach out, feel free to email me at infoarallse. It's been a pleasure and I look forward to recording the next episode shortly. Until then, take care.