The power of trust and mandate to lead

A few days ago, I stumbled upon an article in a local newspaper, the author stating that the Covid pandemic would act as a photographic processing on our daily life, society and the world. Through the lens of the corona virus our image of the world get distorted and new things are revealed: What really matters to us, how fragile we are as humans and how dependent upon the just acts of others around us we are. The society as we know it is breaking apart in an unforeseen way. Several of my friends have lost their jobs and income and are struggling to get by; several have experienced a forced leave from work, albeit fully paid, using the welcomed time-off to experiment with sourdough baking fermenting and other activities that takes time. Other have had a boom in activity, increased revenue and new business opportunities. In almost the same random way as the virus hits you - from having a light cold to severe and life-threatening disorders - the downturn and upturn of the economy cuts through and across whole industries, making yesterday’s profitable and sound businesses extinct, while paving the way for new one to come.

Simultaneously and illogical, the housing market have had one of its biggest booms in a very long time. These are strange times indeed…

Through the aperture of the Covid-lens and almost halfway through my professional career, I took a moment to reflect upon our human capabilities, and what we can achieve when are allowed to.

I have built me a career of being the person you go to, when you have an urgent need of realizing an idea, a vision, a strategy or an ambition. This has not been a deliberate choice. But somehow the role of the pioneer, that travels through uncharted terrain and managing obstacles by creative and analytical thinking, and with a never-ending belief that you can always find a solution, fits my temper pretty good. I have been one of the lucky individuals, where I have had a senior, a boss or a sponsor that have believed in me. Believed in my ability to pull it off, to realize the grand plan, to succeed with the complex transformation or exiting business endeavor.

I am honored of having worked with Mikkel B. Rasmussen in the Danish Ministry of Economic and Business Affairs, while trying to unleash the innovation potential in the historic, and by nature, conservative organization.

MindLab as the department was called, was designed by two Danish artists, with the "egg" - an oval meeting room with whiteboard walls and ceiling as one of its prominent features. Together, we coached and helped more than 200 governmental projects and project groups to get off from a good start and to build world-class project teams. Mikkel taught me the craftmanship of navigating in a bureaucracy and political organizations, and the invaluable art of writing proper memos. Mikkel stopped after a few years in favor for starting the well-renowned consulting agency ReD Associates. 

And if it would not have been for Gitte Andersen at SIGNAL architects, I would not have had the opportunity to drive, develop and write a program for the future of hospices in Denmark. Today, four hospices are built based on the program, and this project truly encapsulates a meaningful task for me: To create the best possible surroundings for people in really hard times. But how can you understand what is at stake, if you are not dying yourself? Apart from deep interviews, observing the work carried out at hospices in Denmark and abroad, I got a permit of staying a night in a hospice bed. That way, I could come close to the sounds, smell and the special energy (life?) of a hospice and its temporary visitors and professional workers. I have never worked with building programs or architecture before, but Gitte believed I was the man for the job and encouraged and supported me.

Every person in Denmark has an opinion of the Danish Broadcasting Corporation. Too left-wing, too conservative, too entertaining, too yesterday and boring, too modern and avant-garde. Here I met Thomas Hammer Jakobsen, a man with a task. This was back in the early 2000’s, where everything was about “portals” (now everything is about “platforms”, but that is another story). Some person in the vast bureaucracy have gotten the brilliant idea of gather all culture content that was produced on TV, web and radio, and present it to the public on a common portal. That way, you could easily browse through and experience the often pretty brilliant content that was produced, on demand and directly from your computer. But there was a few caveats; first there was no content management system (which is the backbone for any website, unless you really enjoy HTML coding). Secondly, the internal production processes were not optimized for distributed production, and that’s for an obvious reason: TV production was about producing for the TV-format, radio production was about producing for the FM-band and that’s it! And then it was the internal culture disagreement between the programs and formats. Radio was obviously much more “cultural” than TV (which was for the broad masses).

This is a problem if your portal is dependent upon having the various programs to produce for radio, TV and for the web at the same time. And then it was the little detail of ensuring rights to re-use the music featured in a program (say a radio show), when the show was streamed online. Being more or less fresh and green university, I embarked this crazy journey and by the help of god almighty or some other superpower we actually managed to create internal alignment, redesigned the internal working processes (“BPR” was a hot topic back then), programmed our own content management system (since the “official” one would be ready for deployment more than a year later than we needed it) and exactly six months later the portal was launched.

Later on, the visionary Charlotte Münter, former CEO in the Danish Agency for Governmental Management (a pretty funky title!), contacted me to hear if I could help out in changing the way the agency thought about and worked with its customers. You have to remember, that talking about the institutions you served as “customers” was really brave. As a governmental agency with a de-facto monopoly on your services, no-one could in reality choose not to use and pay for your offerings. But this was exactly Charlotte’s point: In order to support sound budgeting and fiscal management in the state of Denmark, you, as the service provider, has to have a true curiosity and intimate knowledge on how your systems were used in reality. What was the issues your users (“customers”) dealt with, and what their true needs if you bother to ask? It sounds so simple and rational to agree upon, but the really exciting part comes where you should try to operationalize and transform the internal culture to always think about your customers – from the way new projects were conceived and developed, to the way your support and other feedback systems worked – and not least – how your IT systems managed (or not!) to talk to each other.

Thanks to Charlotte’s vision, we redeveloped the agency’s innovation model. We created our own CRM-system (“customer relationship management”), that for the first time in the agency’s history could extract real-time data on our customers, across all of the major internal IT-systems at our hand. Pretty powerful!

The prerequisite was to make an agreement across all the agency’s departments of what the definition of a customer actually was. Because how could you work together with others on serving your customers, if there was no common agreement of what a customer actually was?

One day at work, my telephone rang. A voice asked me, if I had heard about the project where a waste-to-incinerator plant was to be built, with a ski-slope on its roof? Yes, I had seen the visualizations, and then thinking about it, I had seen the post for the position as project manager, thinking to my-self: Wow – that is a crazy project, and good luck to the poor chap who would be in charge of it!

Well, it turned out, that they haven’t been able to find the qualified person (I told myself afterwards), or probably more correct: They haven’t been able to find a person daring (or crazy?) enough to take on this massive challenge. This is how I met Ulla Röttger, the former CEO of the waste-handling company ARC. Ulla were in charge of the plans for building Copenhagen’s new waste-to-energy plant, designed by the genius and notorious BIG, complete with Denmark’s largest and all-year round open ski-slope on its roof, located less than 2,5 km from the queen’s palace. And what a project! I remember my first day at work very clearly, asking for all background material, visualizations, budgetary projections, business case calculations and so on. And got amazed to receive a very small dossier of papers, which took me only a few hours to read. This was the real McCoy!

Quickly understanding that this beast was so unknown and complex to deal with, I decided to drive the project like a policy-development project, heavily inspired by Charles Lindblom’s doctrine of “logical incrementalism” (which is a fine way of saying: break everything down into smaller steps, alter course along the way and organize and orient yourself on multiple and interrelated issues at the same time).

Apart from having the habit of singing to her workers at the yearly Christmas party, Ulla (she sings well!) gave me complete freedom to pursuit the grand vision. Backed by her trust, I was given free hands to challenge, develop and refine the initial proposal from the architects. And since it was my responsibility to raise the capital needed for the recreational facilities the roof, she backed my relentless focus on the highest quality in terms of user experience.

This is THE reason why we have chosen only to work with the best advisors and the best contractors.

The surface lift comes from MND ropeways in France (yes, it was expensive, but boy, it runs like a charm!). The moving carpets are from Sunkid, Austria and are the best money can buy.

The ticketing system is from Axess and is the same system you know from the alps. We traveled the world to find the best artificial ski-surface there is (it comes from Italy and is called Neveplast, a firm founded by two skiers).

The world’s tallest climbing wall is designed in collaboration with Walltopia, Bulgaria, and later built by some of the toughest and friendliest guys I have ever met, hanging on the façade, 80 meters up in the air, while working with massive steel columns in the harsh Danish winter weather…

For the architects, this is a building project. For the skiers, well, obviously a ski-slope. For the engineers, the construction is an engineering marvel. And of course, all of them are correct in their way. But for me, as the responsible for driving this massive and hugely complex project into completion, within time and budget, it was innovation management at play. Every time I visit “our” mountain, or Copenhill as it is called in English, my heart beats warmly when I see all the happy guests; kids that are playing around, elderly people strolling slowly up through the gorgeous fauna designed by the brilliant landscape architects SLA, the skiers that use the facility for play and serious training and of course, not to forget the daredevils that are trying out the multi-pitch and 80 meter long routes to the top on the climbing wall. This was the core reason for why we realized Copenhill!

Apart from Ulla, I am thankful for my professional board, Christian Herskind, Erik Lyngsø, Conny Wagner Christophersen, Lars Seeberg and Otto Christiansen for embarking the journey with me. And not to forget, the four private trusts and five municipalities that dared to believe in the project and helped us with the financing.

Without you all, Copenhill would not exist!

So, what have I learnt from twenty years of managing crazy, ambitious and innovative projects?

Well, for one I would say, that great results always start with a dedicated leader, that dares to delegate, to trust and support you. That believes in you, and no matter how many challenges you will encounter, always have your back. This is where the power of trust and mandate to lead comes into play. I am proud of my achievements, but I am also aware of, that no-one is irreplaceable. The trust you have been given needs to be treated with respect.

The results I have created could have been created by many others. The difference is whether you get the chance or not. I believe that we as humans are capable of way more than we believe in. I also believe, that most of us wish to do good, to create results, to make our bosses proud and to make the world a better place. But how many of us do really get the chance?

I can recall the sensation of not being given the opportunity, the job that went to someone else, the sensation of finding your deepest call, but not getting the possibility to pursuit it, and the feeling that you were not invited to play with the others (you know who you are!). It breaks you down, instills uncertainty and delusion.

How often do we as leaders remember and dare to really trust others? To delegate, not in order to get rid of the tedious tasks, but to let others have the chance to grow, to shine? To insist on quality, fairness, good behavior and joint solutions. How often do we dare to make the odd choices, and seek managers and peers that is not a replica of yourself and “how the industry works”?

Halfway in my professional career and the covid-pandemic, I will make this promise: To make my utmost to pass on what I have learnt from the managers and sponsors that have believed in me. The people that have shared with me the power of trust and mandate to lead. Great things can happen when you let your workers free!

I am looking forward to my next endeavor and wish you all a safe and fruitful 2021.