Nordic Leaders

Natal Dank is the Co-founder of PXO Culture, Chief Trendwatcher at the HR Trend Institute and named one of the Most Influential HR Thinkers of 2022 by HR Magazine. 

Recognized as a pioneer of Agile in the people profession, Natal hosted the first London-based Agile HR Meetup in 2016, which has since grown into a global movement reshaping the L&D and people profession. Helping to make workplaces the kind of places people want to be a part of.

She is co-author of; Agile HR: Deliver Value in a Changing World of Work & author of recently released; Agile L&D: A Toolkit to Improve Organizational Learning and Drive Performance. 

In this energetic, insightful episode, the discussion delves into the core elements of Agile HR, the importance of experimentation in a complex, modern business environment, and the challenges of integrating agility into HR and business practices. 

Natal shares examples and insights, emphasizing the value of continuous learning, evidence-based approaches, and human-centric solutions. 

A valuable listen for anyone interested in performance and continuous improvement, in modernising business and HR practices and in fostering a more adaptable, collaborative and inclusive work environment.

• Learning and Failure – Natal recalls the importance of testing and avoiding going too big, too fast at times in her career. She offers a practical question for all of us, "How could I have tested or experimented first?" By establishing guardrails and gathering sufficient data, organisations can mitigate risks and make more informed decisions.
• Agile HR Explained in 3 steps - In brief, understand your customer; add value incrementally; manage risk and test understand of the business environment
• The best way to talk about Agile to the business, ‘for me, it's never about going Agile’.
• Experimentation and Prototyping in HR and a valuable example of building a leadership development programme applying Agile principles. Asking the question, what are ‘the reasons why you might want to work differently?’
• What politicians could learn from taking an Agile approach!
• Learning and adapting together. Natal touches on the concept of the "squiggly career" and the implications of living longer, referring to "The 100-Year Life." Managing transitions through different careers is becoming increasingly important. In order to adapt and evolve skill sets, Agile methodologies can play a pivotal role in facilitating these transitions by promoting a mindset of continuous learning and adaptability.

Enjoy this excellent episode!

Dr. Nicholas Samstag is a psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist based in New York City. With a diverse background spanning theater to ancient Greek and Latin studies, his journey into psychology and psychoanalysis has been influenced by a range of experiences. 

In this episode, Nicholas discusses how his varied path shaped his approach to psychoanalysis and leadership, and offers elegant insights into human nature and leadership, reflecting on:

🎙️parallels between theater and therapy, emphasizing the importance of feeling secure and playful in both settings, as well as in the work environment;

🎙️the intersection of psychology and leadership, highlighting the importance of recognizing one's humanity in a professional setting;

🎙️how leaders should prioritize understanding their own psychology and their own stories and experiences, and how they can impact the dynamics within their teams; 

🎙️how fostering a culture of curiosity and psychological awareness can create environments where people feel valued and secure, ultimately leading to better collaboration and innovation;

🎙️how leaders can develop the power to notice more, be present, and be aware of their own and others' dynamics in the workplace.

Overall, a great conversation packed with valuable insights into the connection between psychology, leadership, and creating supportive work environments.

Immerse yourself on a journey of discovery in this conversation about Paradoxical Thinking and Leadership with author and philosopher, Ivo Brughmans.

Get ready to challenge your own assumptions and self-perception.

Ivo delivers an insightful message about embracing the ‘power of both sides’ of our personalities. Reaching out for the side of our personality that we don’t see or use, or even like that much is truly challenging.

As a ‘very serious person at work’, Ivo describes how he managed to combine both professional and playful, in order to reach more people and be more effective.

He also focuses on the paradoxical challenge for organisations who struggle to live up to their values and how to be more authentic and effective in that regard. For example, how can a company ‘double the profit and halve the footprint’ at the same time?

Ivo introduces his 8 step approach to understanding our paradoxes more deeply and offers personal examples from his own life and career, including;

🎙️The Courage to trust our intuition in difficult times.
Using our fundamental beliefs and our mission as a ‘compass’.

🎙️The Paradoxical Challenge.
Using the power of both sides to reach more people with our message and our work.

🎙️Accepting our shadow sides.
For every characteristic, we also have the opposite in us. Despite their negative  appearance, what is their positive intention?

🎙️Reshaping corporate values in terms of polarities
How to innovate and create stability? Double the profit, halve the footprint? Ivo identifies how companies can do both at the same time.

🎙️AW & AI
How to AW (Ancient Wisdom) to manage and master one of our current big question marks, AI ?

Discover more about Paradoxical Leadership and about Ivo, here:
https://paradoxical-leadership.com 

Enjoy the episode!

🗨️"Create habits that create a good life."

In this episode we catch up with Taneli Rantala, CEO of Lifted, and dip in to highlights of Taneli's journey from a strategy consultant to a visionary entrepreneur. 

Taneli´s philosophy emphasizes the importance of leadership style, organizational culture, personal development, and taking hard decisions to create successful, resilient leaders. Listen in to get insights into

🎧Enhancing organizational culture and productivity.
🎧Creating a consistent, coherent leadership approach.
🎧Developing team "coffee and success" practices for a positive growth culture.
🎧Facing business challenges and adapting strategies.
🎧Learning from failures
🎧Balancing professional identity with personal life.
🎧Being the architect of one's life and the power of habits in shaping a fulfilling life.

🗨️"We have this habit in our company... We write two positive things about my actions and two feedbacks about how I could improve... It's so great. People share things that they don't necessarily have time or space to share in normal working life."

🗨️"I go through this practice [thinking about something I'm excited about today] and I become more excited about the day... I create habits that create a good life for me because those are pretty easy."

🗨️"I realise that my life is in a good place. And I don't have to identify myself through this company... I have other things in my life as good cornerstones... understanding that yes I also have to keep them strong."

A warm and polished performance from Dutch organizational theorist Fons Trompenaars, recognized around the world for his work as a motivational speaker, consultant, and author of several books on culture and business.
He spent over 30 years helping Fortune 500 leaders build meaningful connections to manage and solve business and cultural dilemmas to increase global effectiveness and performance.
Recognized by Thinkers 50 as one of the most influential management thinkers in the world, Fons was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2017 alongside Peter Drucker. 

Don’t miss this action, learning and wisdom -packed episode, we discuss; 

•Connecting opposite perspectives to understand and master cultural and political difference - ‘Integrity is creating wholeness through the integration of opposites.’
•The four ‘R’ s of culture; a model for navigating the world of diversity gracefully. But how do you, 'Recognize, Respect, Reconcile, and Realize'?
•‘Killed by our own values’, how companies can be their own worst enemies, and what they can do about it
•'human beings all have the same dilemmas, but it's our culture that guides us one side or the other’. Fons describes exactly how this plays out in the ‘pedestrian dilemma’

He talks candidly about humour, failure, learning moments and much more!

Celine Pasula has over a decade of leadership experience in top mobile gaming companies including startups and bigger companies. Today, as the Managing Director of Ubisoft RedLynx, she's working with experiences on all platforms, mobile, PC, and console. Celine is not only an expert in leadership, finance, legal and business development but also in building a great company culture. She is a fast-thinking leader with a big heart for game development. When it comes to gaming itself, she is one of the most competitive players you are ever going to meet!

This episode revolves around the need for organizations and individuals to be adaptable and forward-thinking in order to achieve and sustain high performance.

 Celine speaks about how Ubisoft RedLynx, as an organization, thrives through creating a supportive, flexible, and innovative work environment where individuals feel psychologically safe and motivated to perform at their best.

1. Psychological Safety: Creating an environment where employees feel secure and unthreatened is crucial. This allows them to share ideas, question norms, and suggest improvements without fear of retribution. It cultivates a culture of innovation and performance.
2. Time Management and Thoughtful Planning: Celine emphasizes the importance of deliberate time management, such as setting aside slots for thinking and having clear goals for meetings. These strategies ensure that employees are not overwhelmed and can focus on tasks effectively.
3. Role Modelling and Leadership: Leaders play a vital role in high performance environments. They not only guide and inspire employees, but they also model the behaviours and values that lead to success.
4. Alignment of Personal and Organizational Values: High performance is achieved when there is alignment between an individual's values and those of the organization. When employees believe in the mission of the organization and feel that their work contributes to that mission, their performance levels rise.
5. Work-Life Balance: Finally, maintaining a balance between work and personal life is crucial for sustained high performance. By integrating games and other personal interests into their routines, individuals can stay motivated and avoid burnout.

"Music attracts luck" - Nitin Sawhney

In this episode we have a warm and uplifting chat with Nitin Sawhney, musician, producer and composer, known around the world for his  albums, film scores, DJ skills, and collaborations with Paul McCartney, Sting, Jeff Beck, Ellie Golding,  Annie Lennox, Will Young, Bob Geldof, Andy Serkis, Mira Nair, Anushka Shankar, Nora Jones, Herby Hancock and David Gilmore. 

In a wide ranging conversation on music, intuition, collaboration, leadership and learning, Nitin references Beethoven, Pythagoras, Johannes Kepler, Einstein, Michelangelo and Nelson Mandela. This episode is fascinating, packed with positivity and downright good fun. We were thrilled to have such a lovely chap on our show, thank you Nitin! Below some tasters: 

Changing your attitude to change your fortunes

• When I let go and stopped fighting, and stopped being angry and frustrated, and instead looked at what I could do to positively to change things, then everything shifted. 
• And it shifted really fast. Within a matter of weeks, I got a new record deal and went from playing to 100 people at the Jazz Cafe, to filling the Royal Albert Hall and playing to 5,000 people, and then touring with Sting.
• It was a change of attitude. I focused on what I could positively do rather than what I could retain from the past. I just went what can I do? What are the things that I'm capable of? What are the things that I could do to change my situation? What do I have control of? 

Intuition 

• If you follow your intuition, the universe has a habit of taking care of you. 
• You have to train your intuition and work on it to the point where you feel able to trust it. 
• The more you follow your intuition, the more you end up in a place where you are able to be a medium for possibility.

Collaboration 

• John Coltrane said that improvisation was like a bird that you catch in the air … that lends itself to the idea of discovering rather than creating music; it's what Michelangelo famously said, that the statues were hidden in the stone.
• Listening is a prerequisite of finding a collaborative voice with anyone.  
• It comes through discovering each other's thoughts and processes and of what goals we might have, or whether we want to just simply explore a possibility rather than focus on the specific goal. So, it's just kind it's about seeing how people want to work and being open to that.

Leadership and learning 

• You can always learn. There is always something that you can find. And so, the idea that you are thinking of leadership in the fluid way in your interactions, I think is also really important. 
• Anyone can be a leader at any time. I've spent my whole life playing the guitar, but I might meet a guitarist who's actually only played for a short time, but they could teach me something. It's very important that you can give way to them and allow them to lead a situation so that you can learn from it. 

And here is a link to artists, musicians, composers, who have worked with Nitin talking about  how he has enabled them to be more than what they imagined themselves to be. To go a little bit further. To let go.   Nitin Sawhney

You’ve probably heard of Hal Gregersen… A global name in leadership and academia.

An author and senior lecturer in leadership and innovation at MIT's Sloan School of Management, a former executive director of the MIT Leadership Center, and ranked in the Thinkers50 global ranking of management thinkers in 2021.

 His latest book, Questions Are the Answer: A Breakthrough Approach to Your Most Vexing Problems at Work and in Life  is based on 200+ interviews with catalytic questioners such as Elon Musk and Orit Gadiesh. 

Hal begins by talking about his lifelong passion of photography and a significant moment of failure with the camera.

Hal knows about questions! And in this episode we find out what are the most important questions in our lives and how to create a culture of fearless inquiry, including: 

1.  The power of Inquisitive Creativity
2.  Fearless Questions and Hal’s work with the no 1 ranked Thinkers 50 Amy Edmondson, pioneer and champion of psychological safety
3.  The Question Burst Process – a game-changing tool to help us tackle our own most challenging projects and dilemmas. 
4. What questions give you energy what questions take it away, key stone and shadow questions
5. Many leaders are only asking, ‘What do we do?’ ‘How do we do it?’ They might be missing something
6. ‘Call-to-Action' questions and the power of  'What if' questions. 

Hal gets us thinking about our relationship with questions, for example the role of authority figures in our childhood (at home, school, first job) and how they responded to our tough, challenging questions, and how that shapes us; right through to how we use questions in the workplace. 

We hope you enjoy this warm and engaging conversation as much as we did: please consider smiling, following us, and perhaps a 5 star rating! 🙂

Now here’s a conversation we can all relate to, on the nature of working life today and how to navigate people, tech, and change, gracefully. 

 Johanna is co-founder of RELEX Solutions, a huge success story and the world's coolest provider of retail planning solutions!

 Johanna describes what it’s like navigating the ‘hard skills’ world of engineering, data and tech, and at the same time sharing her experiences of collaboration and leading people and teams through change. 

 In our experience it’s rare to talk to somebody who is equally skilled at both the so called ‘hard and soft’ side of working life. Enjoy a warm-hearted conversation from someone ‘on top of their game’. Topics include

1.      How to work with humans, ‘the enigma for everyone’. You can never know other people fully and perhaps not even yourself completely’

 2.      How to: 

• apply your Intuition to identify what’s urgent/ important, and ‘fake emergencies’
• think about things, (‘thinking is so underrated’)
• use notifications effectively

 3.      Defining success for yourself, without peer pressure. When you get an impulse to do something, step back and ask, ‘Is this something I really want to do? & how is this gonna make me happier?’

 4.      In a world that’s never done, Johanna describes how she creates ‘progress’ everyday

 5.      Competing is ‘kind of irrelevant’, ‘but I am ambitious’

 6.      On leading people, ‘you should never fall into that trap of assuming that you kind of understand things. It's better to be explicit and ask. That's one lesson I've learned. 

 7.      Confidence and public speaking, ‘A big change for me was finding an area where what I'm saying actually adds to the knowledge of the world.’

 Enjoy this conversation with Johanna! J

Fail Smart: Lessons in Leadership & Life

 The brilliant Charles Jennings covers everything you need to know about life and learning in way less than an hour: 

 Recognised as one of the world's leading experts on building and implementing learning and organisational performance strategies. He’s led pioneering work with the 70:20:10 model for 20 years + and led learning and performance improvement projects for multinationals, government agencies, not-for-profits, and more, for over 40 years.

 Included in this sparkling episode:

 1.    Navigating change; understanding the power of ‘changing minds’ before ‘changing things’ 

2.    Applying the 70.20.10 Model; ‘even more important today’

3.    Operational excellence v developing people - ‘not a trade-off, you have to do both’

4.    Three important steps to create true learning organisations:

• Pyschological Safety is crucial and starts at the top.
• Think organisational and team-learning first, then individual
• Move away from competencies towards critical tasks 

 5.    Support learning in 4 steps: Rich Experiences, Opportunities to practice, Networks, and Reflection moments

 6.    ‘Communityship’ to support and encourage people & teams

 7.    Reflection Moments & 3 key questions to ask yourself, and the power of reflection in business and in tennis

 8.    Trust: people only trust you when actions connect with words.