Student Event 2024
Student Event 2024
A dream came true when People Heart Business arranged an event gathering students from Handelshögskolan i Stockholm, Kungliga Tekniska högskolan, and Psychology students. We believe this was the first event of its kind. Or to be honest, other companies have probably gathered these people before, such as Tinder, SATS and Sturehof, but it is rare in a business context. Despite Kahneman winning the Nobel Prize in Economics for psychological research over 20 years ago, these perspectives remain fairly siloed in business.
The world faces both significant opportunities and challenges that will shape our future. Business leaders must address complex problems, contributing to a better tomorrow and successful businesses. These multifaced challenges require diverse perspectives for CEOs to navigate effectively. The students collaborated in diverse teams by advising a CEO in a hypergrowth or stagnating company, impressing us with their insights, teamwork, and joy of working together.
In a panel discussion with executives passionate about top performance, leadership, and wellbeing, we gained valuable insights from their experiences and impressive achievements, but also from showing vulnerability as leaders.
⭐Tom Englund, COO at Instabee, discussed the transformative impact the company has had on last-minute deliveries and people’s lives, reducing the need to wait for packages. He shared how Instabee’s bold CO2 emission targets put pressure on competitors to do the same, resulting in a visible reduction to Sweden’s overall emissions. Tom also candidly addressed the personal and organizational achievements and challenges of managing hypergrowth.
⭐Emma Korn, Chief Transformation Officer at Djerf Avenue, highlighted how the company has challenged the fashion industry with the ambition of creating a safe space online. She praised founder Matilda Djerf’s genius as a designer and entrepreneur, her integrity in never compromising on values, and the continuous effort to ensure every customer counts. Emma emphasized the importance of speaking one’s mind and remaining open to challenges, sharing how these values have been crucial to her own success.
This event showcased the power of uniting perspectives to solve complex challenges. We are inspired by the insights shared by the students and panelists and look forward to fostering more of these collaborations in the future.
Impactful solutions at scale – Developing 16 leadership teams simultaneously
Impactful Solutions at Scale – Developing 16 Leadership Teams Simultaneously!
The situation
Having successfully built a high-performing top management team, the CEO at a leading company within a traditional, transforming industry recognized untapped potential across the rest of the organization. Yet the financial slowdown had largely affected the industry and the company. Even if the needs were big – the resources were scarce. The norms in the business world further emphasized a high focus on cost cutting, not seldom at the expense of investments in people.
Together with the CEO, Head of Strategy, and Head of People we identified critical challenges and opportunities for maximizing the organization’s potential and enhancing its alignment with their vision and strategic goals.
The corporate strategy had a clear focus on increased cross-functional collaboration to leverage synergies and thereby increase client value. Furthermore, it was critical to transform the highly valued friendly culture to increasingly adopt multi-dimensional feedback to strengthen performance. Managers also highlighted the need to develop their management teams by increasing motivation and collaboration, but also to break down the strategy to be actionable for their part of the organization.
To balance the critical business situation, client needs, and untapped potential in the organization we crafted a tailored solution together – Management Team Development at Scale. A service aimed at increasing business performance through building 16 high performing teams simultaneously.
In recognizing the importance of boldly investing in leadership development, even amidst a financial turndown, the client is also a pioneer when it comes to challenging industry norms by staying true to their high focus on people.
The results
Midway through the project, we are already witnessing:
- Enhanced holistic alignment within and across leadership teams.
- Clearly defined purposes and goals for the leadership teams, roles, and responsibilities, facilitating strategic focus and collaboration.
- New insights into strengths and development areas at team, leader, and organizational levels.
- Increased engagement and ownership in leadership and team development.
- Higher levels of psychological safety and openness. Strengthened communication, team culture, and collaboration.
The task
Implement a scalable solution to develop 16 high-performing leadership teams simultaneously in a cost-effective manner, emphasizing self-management and distributed leadership.
Desired outcomes
- Enhance holistic alignment across all leadership teams by clarifying team purpose, strategic direction, operational methods, and culture
- Increase the performance of all leadership teams and amplify their contribution to strategic achievements and overall business success
- Develop the organization’s capabilities, including managers, leaders, and People Partners, to build high-performing teams
- Boost culture and leadership across the organization
About the company
- A major industry leader with over 10,000 employees and a turnover exceeding 30 billion SEK.
- This targeted business unit consists of approximately 3,000 employees.
- Operating within a traditional industry facing transformation, significantly influenced by the current financial downturn.
- A strategic imperative to unravel silo-oriented ways of working and leverage management team potential to ensure strategic achievements and contribution to business success.
The solution
An innovative, customized solution to drive impact at scale, designed and executed through co-creation and collaboration between People Heart Business, the client project team, and pilot leadership teams.
- Broad communication about the initiative and a workshop at the strategy conference to foster alignment, engagement, and collective understanding of the significance of high-performing teams for business success.
- Insight reports for all teams, addressing strategy, culture, purpose, ways of working, leadership, and overall team performance, serving as a foundation for the team development journey.
- Assessment of all leader's potential and their strengths and development areas in relation to the critical success factors.
- Insight meetings with leaders to discuss team-specific challenges and opportunities.
- A comprehensive insights report presenting data from all teams, identifying common challenges and opportunities across the organization, and providing recommendations for senior management.
- A digital toolkit comprising 7 workshops and 20 different exercises anchored in the fundamentals of building high-performing teams.
- Leadership coaching to support all leaders in their quest to build high-performing teams capable of strategy realization while also engaging in personal leadership development and self-leadership.
- "Train the trainer" workshops and coaching sessions for the People Partners to foster self-leadership, enhance skills, and strengthen internal capabilities for leading team development.
- Evaluation of team and leadership development to generate new insights that guide the ongoing journey.
- Booster plans to identify ways each leadership team and manager can sustain progress and ensure continued development. Booster plan on organizational level to prioritize coming investments.
- Implementation of structures enabling continuous development
Sustainable Impact at a UN Initiative
Sustainable Impact at a UN Initiative
”Maybe you know of Kofi Annan?” – was how a call we received in December started, initiating a collaboration with a United Nations initiative.
Ever since the inception of People Heart Business an important part of our DNA has been to dream big. Working with our long-term ambitions is not an exclusive piece of work for an executive management team, but for all of us at People Heart Business, and naturally integrated into our daily operations.
Being a newly founded company with aspirations to make a real impact on the business world in new ways, there is no ’off-the-shelf’ value proposition. It takes time to formulate and re-formulate what it is we are doing and who we are doing it with.
We have had extensive discussions on who our core customers and dream customers would be. Early on we decided to partner up with CEOs and Executives who share our values of collaborations enabling real impact. People and performance centric customers have always been on our list of dream companies to collaborate with, as well as organizations with strong purposes who shape the future. Already from the very beginning our team has said “Our dream is to get a call from UN saying, People Heart Business, we need your help”.
Imagine our surprise when the phone rang in December.
“Maybe you know of Kofi Annan? In 2000 he launched a United Nations initiative for a sustainable business world. Based on 10 principles for responsible business, this is today the largest corporate sustainability initiative in the world and has been critical for the global business community’s contribution to the 17 SDG. The focus has been high on this initiative within the UN and hence the work continues to scale.
I am calling on behalf of the person who runs this network in Sweden. They want support to secure scaling the success in a sustainable way. I am not sure if this is what you do, but I have followed your work and through contacts I have come to the conclusion this might be something for People Heart Business?”.
I don’t think we need to explain our reaction.
A few weeks ago we signed an agreement and we couldn’t be happier about this partnership opportunity. A dream for sure has come true.
It would be easy to say we will work extremely hard or do everything in our power to succeed with this incredibly important ask. But we would rather say – we will give it our best and practice what we preach to enable top-performance in a sustainable way!
To everyone involved in the matchmaking and realization of this collaboration, from the deepest parts of our hearts – THANK YOU!
Life at People Heart Business
Life at People Heart Business
Do you have to choose between pursuing your personal and professional dreams?
I’ve never stopped dreaming about spending several months traveling to new places, exploring different cultures and the natural wonders of the world. However, as a performance-oriented person truly enjoying work, with an urge to grow and make an impact in the business world, it hasn’t always been easy to follow those dreams. It is easy to get caught up in projects and tasks and years pass by focusing on company and client needs, and it is seldom a good time to ask for a longer time off, especially when having a central role in a growing business.
Fortunately, Klara Ljungqvist, the CEO of People Heart Business looks at this differently. Ever since I joined People Heart Business, I have had the opportunity to talk openly about ALL of my dreams. Even better, People Heart Business has encouraged me to dream even bigger and since I shared this dream with the team, it’s been followed up on many times – when is it time for your trip?
Yet, despite People Heart Business having a holistic perspective on life and happiness as a part of sustainable top performance, and one of our core values is dreaming big, it wasn’t easy to ask for 2.5 months off to go on adventures ”just for fun”. What about the team? What about our clients? What do I signal and how will this affect my role and my career?
Finally, during the fall, I decided it was time. I wanted to live in line with all my values and follow the dream of going on a 2.5 month long trip to South America with my husband. And what happened at work?
I received a tremendous amount of support and encouragement and was called a role model for living sustainable performance. During the trip I was forced to check out completely, with the team stepping up and taking over all my responsibilities.
I have myself, my team and our culture to thank for one of the best adventures of my life. I found that the support and opportunity to fully check out was the best medicine to increase my passion to contribute to work when coming back. For a person like me the problem isn’t motivation or loyalty – it is balancing high motivation and loyalty with other aspects of life to maintain it as years pass by. I want to be a role model showing that top performance in the business world can be combined with values of traveling, family, and doing other things you love.
I was welcomed back in the best way possible. I was surprised with flowers and heartwarming messages, but best of all – a prepared ”dream boarding”. People Heart Business wanted to learn about my experiences, insights, and dreams but also about my perspectives on the company having been away and coming back.
In summary, I’ve been positively reinforced and challenged to fulfill my personal dreams without having to worry about leaving the professional dreams behind and instead finding ways where these dreams can influence and reinforce each other.
Grateful for a lifetime – thank you! ❤
Felicia Grosin
COO & Management Consultant
Person
Decoding uniting a unicorn
Situation
How to decode and spread the success DNA of one of Europe’s fastest-growing companies while running even faster?
The founders and management team realized that to secure future success while still growing its business rapidly across multiple markets. There was a need to define and scale the success DNA of the organization.
The company had grown to 3000 employees, and the pressure on key players in the organization to both deliver on their growing promises, onboard people, and stay alive and sound was often an unsolvable equation. High performers joining the company had a similar hard task in offloading these key people since they were under high pressure to deliver. The mass of the organization did not know the core purpose of the company and therefore mistook the company for any traditional player.
The founder had wanted to do this earlier but had had a hard time finding the right support, and this was too important to fail with and all of a sudden, instead they were 3000 people in great need of support.
The Task
People Heart Business were invited as partner in this situation. A situation with a great need of support and yet many conflicting priorities. The task was as often in the partnerships jointly defined. To leverage the potential in the organization there was a need to stop running and prioritize defining the success DNA to further scale and professionalize the organization for future success. The task to both define and align around purpose, culture, add strategic focus areas. People Heart Business was equally focused on getting the right things in the fancy power points as building a movement for the success DNA, and therefore the work to a large extent relied on co-creation with the organisation.
The solution
- Through a 6 months co-creation project, gather the management team, leaders, and employees in the organization to analyze, discuss, and define critical aspects of the Success DNA.
- Define external trends that will impact the organization going forward and, in this context, contribute to strategic organizational learning and development of relevant direction and expertise.
- Build trust within and between organizational units to better understand and collaborate around strategic priorities.
- Build a framework for “the company way” including purpose, culture, and strategic focus areas while simultaneously strengthening leadership capabilities, and most importantly ownership for the realization of the Success DNA in both senior management, earlier bottlenecks and employees out in the organization.
⭐C. Mikael Mattsson, CEO of svexa and Senior Researcher at Stanford University, spoke about the need for individualization in optimizing performance. Svexa has supported world class elite athletes. Mikael highlighted how personalized schedules can enhance productivity in the business world, noting that, some surgeons or executives might perform better at different times of the day as an example. As technology becomes more affordable, personalized optimization will become accessible not only to privileged people focusing on longevity but hopefully to make modern organizations fit for people.