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Lasse Bolander: Here are my five most important management experiences
FeaturedTasks of the ChairmanMy 5 most important management experiencesTop management interview
08/06/2022
683
Chairman of the board of COOP Danmark, Lasse Bolander, says that it is crucial to create a well-functioning board that, outside the board meetings, you must remember to take time to turn professional or personal matters. "You have to remember that a board is not a machine. It a collection of people. And therefore it must be treated as such”. Here he shares his five most important management experiences with Økonomisk Ugebrev's specialist editor Peder Bjerge.
First of all, Lasse Bolander, chairman of the board of COOP Danmark, emphasizes that he will not comment much on operational management. On the other hand, he has a lot of experience from his time as a professional board member and chairman, which he takes as a starting point here.
1. Focus on getting the board to function as a team
“The first thing I want to mention is that a board is a team that must work for the whole.
But those you want on the board are often people who are successful in one way or another. And typically these are people who are used to making their own decisions. And all of a sudden they sit on a board, where you have to work as a collective and even at a distance from the day-to-day management, because you are quite obsessed with not having your fingers in the dirt. Making such a team work requires constant work because leadership is about people and behavior where we come into the boardroom with different points of view.
When you make evaluations of your work, the board typically rates your efforts very highly. You tend to think that you are better than the other teams. They can be very different. In some boards there is a lot of talking, in others less. Here you have to be aware that a board is just a group of people. It may well be that there are a lot of formalities, rules that must be observed, but it is not the rules that determine how the work is done. It is the dynamic between the people who are members of the board.
When you join new boards, you have to find out if the dynamics are good or not. It is my first management experience, namely the realization that a board is not something where you can check boxes, where you just have to ensure diversity or one, two and three. It is very difficult for an ordinary member of a board to change the dynamics of a board. That is the chairman's responsibility. I myself have had very good experiences of having some activities with the members outside the boardroom. In my younger days I was executive secretary, where I worked up to the board. My impression at the time was that when the board went on a trip, it was almost a bit pampering. But I've changed my mind after coming over to the other side.
The reason is that board work is characterized by all members walking in through the door exactly when the meeting starts. After that, you have an intense agenda with short breaks before everyone leaves again. But you don't get to know each other or the company from that. If you don't know each other, you won't make a good team either. Here it means a lot if you go out to eat together, or even better if you are together for a few days. Eg. we in COOP Danmark's board take a bus around Denmark to look at a few shops. It may not sound like anything special, but it is good for cooperation on the board. You get time to turn professional or personal things around, and that means a lot.”
2. It is the privilege of the energetic to fail
”I think this very heading is quite important in all forms of management and business operations. You have to make some decisions, and you have to accept that some of those decisions end up being wrong. In a board context, you can very easily end up in a situation where you express concern or create an atmosphere where, every time the operative management makes a mistake, you react by saying that it is too bad, or that it must be investigated why this happened wrong. The only thing you achieve with that is that the management is not motivated to make decisions because they are afraid of being spanked by the board.
In this connection, it must be remembered that a board must be able to make decisions on an incomplete basis. If you don't have the skills to make these kinds of decisions, you don't fit in on a board. When you sit on a board, you make decisions based on information from the executive board and your own experiences.
As chairman, I am very concerned about whether the members have the will to make decisions on an uncertain basis. It requires that you as a person have an analytical capacity, because you are faced with complicated issues where you have to quickly get to the essence.”
3. The board must not be clones of the management
"The board must not be clones of the management. At the same time, broad competences are preferable. If a board is to provide value, it must come up with new insights and other points of view. It does not help that there are people on the board with the same background as the executive board.
In those situations, it happens that you become a kind of competitor: is it the executive board or the management that is skilled? It is not constructive. If you do not think that the management is capable, it must be replaced. But the best board members are those who have experience from slightly different industries or from sectors with similar issues. My other experience under the same hat is that it is important to have board members with a broad experience instead of narrow and deep experience. When I believe that broad competences are better than narrow ones, it is because on a board you are faced with an extremely large number of different issues just in a single meeting. If you have a narrow expertise, you risk only being able to contribute one or two percent to what goes on at the meetings during the year. And then you are not a good board member.
4. A chairman is more than a chairperson
”Now you have asked a couple of times if this and this is not the chairman's responsibility. And yes, it is. Of course, the chairman is a person who has to lead the meeting and say good morning and goodbye and make sure that everyone gets to speak. But that is only a very small part of the responsibility that lies on a chairman's shoulders.
The chairman is also the boss of the boss. The CEO's boss is the chairman of the board. And when you are the boss of the boss, you have to conduct employee interviews and coach the person in question. You have to be willing to take on that task. After all, a director is not a superhero who can handle it all by himself. He too needs someone to talk to. You have to take on that role. At the same time, the chairman's task of ensuring that the team, i.e. the board, is functioning well cannot in any way be underestimated. Therefore, it does not help if the chairman is not interested in group dynamics.
It is a very important part that you spend a lot of time on. Although a board is a collective, all my experiences show that the chairman sets the tone.
In addition to this, the chairman is also a spokesperson. If things are going well in a company, the management takes care of the communication. But if there are problems in a company, it is the chairman who must step forward. Therefore, as chairman, you must be willing to communicate.
Finally, the chairman is also the decision maker. It's a bit like a judge in court. When you have heard all the points of view, there is someone who has to draw the conclusions: Should we buy that factory or not? Here you sit all alone as chairman. There is no point in putting it off until the next meeting or taking a break.”
5. Always remember who is in the driver's seat, but don't forget who chooses the driver
"By that I mean that board responsibility means that boards move closer and closer to the company in these years. The boards also become more professional and make more strategic decisions in the companies. But it is absolutely crucial that they remember that they are not day-to-day management. The board must not interfere in the operation, and here one must have a very well-developed sense of not stepping over that line.
To illustrate the delicate balance, I use the image with a car. The driver is the director, while the chairman sits in the passenger seat. They drive out there. At one point the chairman of the board says that they should drive to the left, but the director drives straight ahead. A little later he says it again, but the director continues straight ahead anyway.
Then, as chairman of the board, you must not grab the steering wheel, because then you will end up in the ditch. If, in the same way as the board, you are not satisfied with the management, the answer is not to move closer and ask for more meetings and more analyses. If you are not satisfied, you must ask the driver to pull over to the side and get out of the car, and then you will find another driver who will turn left.”
Peder Bjerge
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Front pageYear wheelStrategyTop managers must let go and release the employees' energy
Top managers must let go and release the employees' energy
FeaturedStrategy
01/06/2022
477
Over the years, many top managers have dreamed of appointing a direction and then sitting back and watching the skilled and committed employees do the work. In a rapidly changing world, it is a vision worth pursuing because it creates a flexible and dynamic organization. But the vision never reaches an end point – the top management must constantly adjust the basis from which the employees start.
If anyone can remember as far back as 2019, people were talking about how rapidly changing the world had become. We also wrote about it here on the pages. Much of it was fundamentally about digitalisation. Partly in the form of new technologies that changed industries and consumption patterns, partly in the form of social media, which was an incubator for new currents; from the short-term shitstorms to long-term agendas about e.g. climate and diversity.
The years since have reminded us that major events of a more classic nature – first a pandemic, then a war – can turn companies' conditions upside down to an even greater extent. The recruitment company SpencerStuart writes in a guide that these new experiences simply give even more weight to a rethinking of top management, where the top managers are to a lesser extent a bottleneck in the specific activities, and thus also do not inhibit the flexibility that is needed when the outside world change.
This line of thinking is far from new. There has always been a recognition that in large organizations there are many who feel a responsibility, and they often have a passion and also take responsibility. These are resources, all else being equal, the value of which is limited when decisions have to go past the top management and fit into boxes.
The dream, or perhaps rather the utopia, is that top management simply sets out a direction and then lets the "machine" do the work. In recent times, this vision has e.g. been referred to as value-based management.
But of course it is not that simple. The top management will always have to have an active role, and it will also have to do more than just convey the message of what the company is for. SpencerStuart lists four points that must be in place in order to achieve the optimal decentralized and flexible organization:
Clarity. There must be a clearly formulated mission and direction, which is made concrete through vision, strategy, purpose and description of the desired corporate culture.
Priority. The critical resources must be available and strategically distributed in order to maximize output.
Vitality. The employees from top to bottom must be inspired, and attention must be paid to ensure that they maintain their energy so that they can and will get involved.
Link. It must be continuously ensured that all departments work in the same direction and that there is a common understanding of the changes in the outside world that are occurring.
With this in place, what is the role of the top executive? Basically, the answer will vary depending on which of two situations the company is in: Either there has been a major change recently that affects the company, or there hasn't been. The train of thought is arranged after the first is the case. In that case, top management must concentrate on aligning the organization as the most important thing. Coherence in the company must be ensured in the changed world. Perhaps new strategies or cultures need to be formulated, and perhaps the prioritization of resources also needs to change.
But after all, the world is no more changeable than the fact that many companies also experience long quiet periods. Where some companies e.g. have had enough to do with adapting first to the pandemic and then rising commodity and energy prices in the wake of the war, the two world events for many other companies have led to little more than mundane management tasks.
If there is calm in and around the company, it is important to be aware that the dynamic and flexible organization with a high degree of decentralization does not unreservedly lead to a happy land where you act optimally.
On the contrary, calm also means that there is a sense of harmony in the organization, down to the individual employee. They often settle for doing "the usual", and, in light of the good times, all the while cutting a slightly bigger piece of the pie for themselves.
For top management, it will be a challenge to tackle this organizational inertia. It is much more difficult to change something when everyone feels that things are going well than when there is an obvious need to change course.
Sten Thorup Kristensen
