What is the role of leadership in tomorrow's organizations? Find out what Kenneth Salonius learned as he led the Leadership in a Digitalized World panel at SHIFT Business Festival.
How to lead organizations through disruption? In many regards, this question is more current than ever. I had the pleasure to host a panel on Leadership in a Digitalized World at SHIFT Business Festival, a two-day event in Finland’s former capital of Turku. 3000 people attend SHIFT to hear how rapid changes in technology are affecting business and society and to share ideas on building a successful future.
Over the past years we’ve had the opportunity to work with a number of companies in the healthcare industry and beyond on transformation programs that enable more customer-centric and agile ways of working. Just as building the right ways of working, good leadership is an integral part of making successful transformations and scaling business.
Here are some of the key takeaways from the Leadership panel, which set out to discuss how to drive organizations through disruption and most importantly how to reconnect humans and technology creatively to drive future growth.
🔹 Leadership starts with vision and purpose: People need to understand what their organization’s lighthouse is, and their role in steering the ship towards it
🔹 Dialogue, and a genuine interest to welcome and consider alternative opinions and ideas, is a requirement
🔹 Transparency and trust go hand-in-hand. Naturally, not everything can be shared, but if there is a feeling that you are not sharing as much as you could, you will never achieve full trust from your team
🔹 Dare to build a culture with your own values. Each workplace, and each individual, is unique. Values are worthless if they’re just words on a wall, intranet or website, it’s the actions and the behavior that count, and your team needs to be able to stand behind them
🔹 Only spoken words are heard. Communicate actively and make yourself clear. This is becoming more important by the day, as hybrid and remote work is here to stay, and we don’t meet each other in person like we used to. We cannot use all our senses in video calls
🔹 Bad leadership does not change by itself. Be prepared to work with your organization and your own leadership skills
I want to thank the panelists for their incisive, insightful remarks:
🔸 Carl Haglund, CEO at Veritas Pension Insurance Company
🔸 Henna Niiranen, Chief Business Officer at Vincit
🔸 Niko Kyynäräinen, Director of Business and Economic Development at the City of Turku
🔸 Taneli Rantala, CEO and co-founder at Lifted
Finally, I’d love to hear about your own experiences – what builds a solid foundation for successful leadership in moments of disruption? Get in touch with me using my contact info below!
P.S. Thanks for the photo Julius Töyrylä!
