I hope you all had relaxing holidays and had possibility to spend time with your families and friends.
I have been able to spend some of my time to study leadership and try to understand my own leadership style. The more I have spent time the more complex and challenging the topic has become.
You often hear the phrases that people are the biggest value, coaching is important, teams are fundamental units in a business, innovation is key stay ahead, etc, which are all true. Challenge is that how we make this happen and how we really make a difference.
I have been exercising this year with my team how to change the team from a “group of people” to a “real team”. It started by sharing and understanding our behavioral styles. Continued by building trust so that team has a willingness to be vulnerable with one another and everybody having confidence among team members. This enables us to have constructive conflicts, in fact we seem to have continuously constructive conflicts within our team nowadays. Result of that is that we share openly our ideas and we are able to have faster common commitment to the topics. We have also agreed a clear team goals and follow-up. After couple of months I must say that at least I’m more motivated and inspired working in the team and the team is clearly more innovative. I would rank us a cohesive team on a way to high performance team.
Other topic leadership that I was last week inspired a lot by the Valmet’s on-line training sessions. I have played one video tens of times. Video is about “changing face of leadership”. It’s about leadership change from “I’m going to controlling things” to “inspiring people to contribute towards a mutual goal and a mutual vision”. It also highlights the fact that “innovation is essential to successful business today”. “I you can’t innovate you cannot adapt and you are going to be left behind to your competition”. This video has given me a lot new aspects to think about.
I also believe that all what is said about leadership is not only true for leading own people or teams it is very true for customer work as well. The deeper collaboration you create more leadership is needed as well.
I encourage everybody to spent time with the topic of changing face of leadership needed in todays and future business. It will have a payback to all of you.
Mikko Tani VP, Sales EMEA, Valmet
EMEA Sales Team at Valmet has participated a Five Behaviors of Cohesive Team Development
Program (Patrick Lencioni) with Milestone Coaching & Consulting. For more information about how to build high performance team, please contact Milestone HQ, +358 20 773 9630, postia@milestone.fi