Cases
We work in real-time to let new behaviors lead to new outcomes while learning is grounded in reality (look below for cases). This way impact is usually obtained on three levels:
Leadership capability
Future leadership mindset is translated into new practices and behaviours.
Business impact
Performance is lifted by having more people take on more responsibility.
Cultural change
Building a culture of leadership across the organisation.
Cases
Facing the need to double the capacity, Global Distribution & Logistics made a conscious choice of pushing decisionpower to their frontline people to build capacity, speed up change and strengthen agility.
Step by step they have achieved spectacular progress, revolutionizing how they collaborate with suppliers and customers, as well as speeding up new distribution centres with more than a year, while at the same time meeting all targets.
Like other NGO’s, the Danish Heart Foundation had experienced changing market conditions over the last couple of years and needed to adjust to the new situation.
This meant they needed to be more focused on where to make a difference, rethink and prioritise how they used their resources, while at the same empower their people to drive progress and results.
We worked for the CEO to assist in setting a clear and compelling strategic intent, building commitment, changing the organisation, and set up initial training for leaders and key people to nurture and facilitate the change.
Making strategy implementation the next leadership development program
Building on the idea that leadership is best trained in daily practice, this program aimed at making strategy implementation their leadership development program.
Approximately 150 leaders were leading strategic projects from strategy to realisation, while step by step being exposed to relevant theory, tools and training.
As advisors we were part of the design team with one clear succescriteria: that every project should be noticeable by the citizens of Copenhagen.
After a number of years with significant growth, Danish Hospital Clowns needed to make a shift from being small and entrepreneurial to become established but still entrepreneurial.
We assisted in the transformation as an advisor, coach, designer and facilitator from defining a new paradigm, build understanding and commitment, adjusting the organisation to help implementing the changes in a little more than a one year.
Support change management to prepare for scaling
Uniting more than 1000 people across 3 continents and numerous facilities requires a clear strategic direction, a very clear set of choices, to makes it possible for people at all levels to make aligned decisions.
Executed through a series of sprints they have step by step been rethinking vital business processes to be more customer focused and agile
Building NRK’s capacity for change through projects.
This Master Class Program was designed to support the biggest projects within media production as well as internal projects to be more innovative and effective in implementing for sustainable effect.
Being a part of the design team we assisted in designing it as an action-learning program involving senior project leaders in applying learnings to their current projects while being exposed to cutting-edge thinking, cases, theory and practice.
Facing the challenge of being closed due to competition from low-cost countries, this facility endured on a journey of becoming ”Most Wanted”.
Involving all employees on how to achieve peak performance, they managed to reduce cost per unit with almost 50%, reduce cycletime with more than 80% while at the same time increase employee engagement with 30% and cut sickleave by half within 18 months.
Eventually they became “Most Wanted” and given the responsibility for setting up and producing Novo Nordisk next blockbuster device (Award Winning Project).
Creating a clear and compelling strategic intent and empowering 35 leaders to take action.
Experiencing how market and customer needs gradually changed, AIT needed to find a way to bridge how to be operational effective while at the same time staying ahead of the industry curve.
Creating an ambitious strategic intent and empowering 35 leaders on how to get started, AIT embarked on a journey that have led to significant financial growth, established an Innovation Hub, almost doubling their number of employees and successfully introducing new business models.
Building strategic thinking for 380 leaders across the organisation, this leadership development program focused on reducing the distance from top to bottom, strengthen strategic thinking on all levels and increase a collaborative leadership approach.
The program brought 380 leaders across all levels and areas to build a more cohesive and aligned focus, resulting in, among other things, major savings without service reductions as well as innovative ways of interacting with both the political system and the citizens of Gentofte.
Setting the guiding star for Training & Leadership Development in Product Supply.
We helped Training & Leadership Development to set a new ambition for how training and development should add value to the Product Supply, including how to include new learning technologies, bring learning closer to the shopfloor, make learning and training part of daily practice etc.
Aligning a management team on what is most critical can unleash unlimited resources of initiative and collaboration. This team came together around a very clear objective: to become profitable within one year. To do so, the team needed to substantially change the way they collaborated, prioritized, communicated, and executed. During frequent touchpoints focusing on progress, challenges, and commitments, the team succeeded in creating spectacular progress, accomplishing what they committed to three months ahead of time, and have now fundamentally changed the facility's trajectory for the years to come.
Operating in an extremely promising yet very immature industry requires constant focus to be adaptable while at the same time being ready to scale up once the industry matures. This global management team, deeply committed to transforming heavy transport from fossil to green energy sources, needed a way to stay aligned and coordinated in highly unpredictable circumstances across three continents and four locations. By building a leadership mindset and a structured approach to align, collaborate, empower, and move forward, they have focused their efforts and are now well underway to position themselves for substantial growth.
Growing a consultancy is one of the hardest tasks: partners need to assist clients while developing their own people, being attractive to new clients, and building a business based on highly personal competencies. This requires extraordinary focus and collaboration skills for the partners to avoid becoming lonely riders. By taking bold steps to overcome the barrier of becoming their clients' number one choice, insisting on putting their people first, and raising the industry's standards, they have managed to build a team of bright and talented individuals who can help them grow their business and fulfill their purpose of being a human-centered, highly skilled consultancy that builds long-lasting relationships with their clients.
Can a company grow without leaders? This company can. Experiencing high demand for its product, this company was reluctant to grow as they valued being able to run the business without too much formal management. However, as the demand increased, they wanted to explore how to grow without management layers, KPIs, and endless meetings. Over the last three years, they have tripled in size without adding any formal management structure, yet everybody knows what their job is, what is important, and what needs to get done. Their client list includes global brands within industries such as pharmaceuticals, furniture, automotive, and manufacturing, and they are growing steadily while maintaining a completely flat organization.
Navigating an organization through a multi-stakeholder landscape between government institutions and private businesses risks leading to complexity paralysis and stalemate. When dependent on stakeholders with conflicting interests, you risk being pulled in different directions making it hard to make real progress. This management team came together to break the stalemate, look through the complexity, and make their bet on what they believed could help them navigate through the challenges. Once they decided on their priorities, they could work on creating clarity for the rest of the organization to align their resources and get things done.
Building a company where you have faith in your people, trusting that everybody takes care of the business, is a tempting approach but it also comes with considerable risks. While you might work on great projects, you risk losing your margin due to a lack of quality compliance. This management team wanted to stick to their belief and at the same time needed to build a quality baseline that reduced the risk of unpleasant surprises, helped the company identify and mitigate possible risks early, and made them less dependent on individual performance. Step by step, they built a shared framework for how they execute projects, monitor and mitigate risks, and create a better business for themselves and their clients.
Running a cleaning company means you are operating on small margins: contracts are won mainly due to price competition, making effective daily operations a prerequisite for success, while clients most often only recognize when things are not done properly. This often means that attention ends up being on day-to-day operations, surviving from day to day, at the expense of developing and building your client relationships, thereby strengthening your business. This company recognized that to do so, they needed to help management from the frontline to the director level reconfigure how they were doing business, allowing frontline leaders to be more involved in client agreements while senior leaders would have more time to nurture and develop future business.
Feel free to call me at +45 20 64 24 19 or drop me a mail at hk@kongsbak.plus.
I'm always up for an informal chat.