CHAPTER 1

THE MINDSET LEADER

I was in the middle of a terribly hectic and demanding phase in my company, and it was getting hard to see clearly what was going on. When you are caught in the whirlwind of a fast-growing business with numerous challenges, you sometimes need to stop whatever you are doing, take a step back and get some distance. And I did.

‘Don’t forget to breathe,’ my yoga teacher said to me, and that’s pretty good advice. Without breathing, we will not live. And without ‘taking a breather’, and pausing for reflection, we will not learn. While motivation is the first step on the way to becoming a leader, the crucial next step involves spending time thinking about your actions and learning from the results. Leading starts with learning. That is also why throughout this book you will find reflection points, at the end of each chapter, to help you learn.

This chapter is about thinking about your leadership – and how we all can be leaders.

#001 The Mindset Leader (TML)

The difference between the Formal Leader and the Mindset Leader.

I’d like to start with a very simple concept that is a key foundation for the philosophy of this book. We are all leaders. And if we are all leaders, what does that mean for individuals and organizations? Ask a random sample of people whether they consider themselves to be leaders and you will probably get at least three different kinds of answers. ‘Yes, I am a leader’, ‘No, I’m not a leader’ and ‘Maybe I’m a leader, I’m not sure; what do you mean?’

There are several reasons why you might not consider yourself to be a leader:

• You don’t have a formal leadership role. For you, someone else is a leader.
• You don’t want to be a leader. You’re just fine being ‘led’ by others.
• You don’t know what it really means. Leadership is just a buzzword.

Furthermore, if you think you have a leadership role, like being the managing director or the ‘head’ of something, you might be confused by the idea that everyone is suddenly a leader. What does that mean for your hard-earned authority?

The answer is in the difference between the leader with a formal role and title on the business card, and the leader who has adopted a leadership mindset. You can call them Formal Leaders (FL) and Mindset Leaders (ML).

Let me show you an example to illustrate the difference between Formal Leaders and Mindset Leaders. Imagine an online marketing agency. The typical work at this agency is to manage ad campaigns to advertise products that the client company sells online. You will find three different roles: A – The Sales Manager, whose job is to sell a new project to new clients. When the new project is sold, enter B – The Campaign Manager, who takes over to set up and run the campaign, and deliver results to the client. The client is also assigned C – The Key Account Manager, a contact person who will ensure that the project runs smoothly while trying to sell more services to the clients.

Now, who is really responsible for the client – A, B or C? One made a contract, another is delivering on the contract and the third is supposed to develop the relationship. All have clearly defined roles in the work around the client, but who is ultimately responsible? They can all be Formal Leaders, if that is their defined role in the organization. One of the three roles A, B or C, could be assigned formal overall accountability for the client, for example the Key Account Manager. There might be a department head who is officially accountable for the clients. Or another person, for example the CEO, can be the Formal Leader, i.e. the person in charge and accountable for the clients and the results.

But by making just one person accountable, the others might feel less responsible.

What if there’s suddenly a problem outside the formal role? Wouldn’t it be good if they all felt responsibility for the client, and could react on whatever issue arises? Wouldn’t it be even better if they could proactively identify opportunities and act on them? Wouldn’t it be good for you, as the client, to know that all of your contacts at the agency felt responsibility for the success of your campaign? Wouldn’t it be great if they all were proactive, instead of the Formal Leader pointing out issues to react on? In a company of Mindset Leaders, it’s up to each and every one to assume leadership. The Mindset Leader would be there not only to deliver more client value but also, by thinking like a leader, identify opportunities for the company, support her colleagues and take initiatives for her personal development. Imagine the company where all people are Mindset Leaders.

But if everyone is responsible, nobody is accountable, right? There is a balance between Formal Leaders and Mindset Leaders. Formal Leaders who are too authoritative will diminish the motivation of the Mindset Leaders to act autonomously and proactively, leaving only a few who feel responsibility. You know that you are in a more traditional culture when you hear: ‘Please let me check that with my manager.’

Yet an organization with strong Mindset Leaders, where everyone independently exercises individual leadership, could risk undermining a useful and clear structure and the roles of the Formal Leaders. At one extreme you have one almighty leader who everyone obeys (the old model) and at the other extreme everyone is a leader with equal input and power, a ‘boss-less’ organization. The current reality is somewhere in between – all around us there are Formal Leaders with various official responsibilities. But regardless of the level of Formal Leadership, everyone should be Mindset Leaders.

Can anyone really be a leader anywhere?

The concept of leadership for all might work well in one kind of organization and be more of a challenge in another. Traditional hierarchies will have a harder time accepting the idea, for example, and a lot can depend on the type of industry and on cultural considerations in different parts of the world.

The tech sector is fast moving, which means that it needs a more decentralized leadership. The pace is so fast that decisions must often be made on the spot. Who has time to wait for the CEO to digest all the relevant information and make up their mind? And the CEO does not have all the answers anyway.

The belief that everyone can be a leader is not a result of cosy equality and democracy. Rather, it is a business necessity to deliver results in dynamic industries that are more like battlefields: those closest to the action are in a better position to make decisions from on-the-spot information than superiors far from the front lines. We see this approach in action in elite military units such as the US Navy Seals, even where on the surface the organization looks like a traditional hierarchical structure with many ranks and levels of command. Facing demanding and rapidly changing conditions where the stakes are very high asks for a balance between Formal and Mindset Leadership.

Leadership is not a position, it’s a mindset. And it is a mindset that is open to anyone who cares to adopt it, regardless of place, industry, job, situation or other circumstances. The only obstacle is really yourself. Once you start believing that you can be a leader, your attitude towards the world around you will start to change.

#002 Your Inner Motivation (YIM)

Finding your why.

Just because someone tells you that you’re a leader, you won’t automatically be one, or even feel motivated to be one. First, you have to believe that you have every right and opportunity to be a leader, and to take action as a leader. Second, you need to find your motivation to be a leader, your why.

As Daniel Pink states in his book Drive, the best motivation comes from within, not from external carrots and sticks, such as an extra bonus, or the threat of being sacked. Without the inner motivation to lead, you will get nowhere.

Where you get that drive from will be personal, and particular to you. It might be a professional interest, a new and demanding role, a wish to take control over your life, intuition, curiosity or anything that prompts you to lead. And as I say to my children: ‘If you don’t have anyone to lead, you can always lead yourself.’

If you’ve ever made a New Year’s resolution to lose weight, then you’re in for a leadership challenge. If you’ve ever been promoted to a job that involves responsibility for people, you have a leadership challenge. When you are growing a company, developing a team, wanting to deliver quarterly results, raising kids, needing to get on the plane when the check-in is closed, dealing with a colleague who is upset or with someone who is rude to you – you have leadership challenges.

In the movie Remember the Titans, the newly appointed African-American coach Herman Boone has a strong motivation for leading his football team, a mixture of black and white players in the southern United States in the early 1970s. He wants his team to win, both over the competing teams in the Virginia state championship and over racial prejudice. It is the combination of personal and professional passion and commitment that drives him and his team to succeed.

I can tell you what motivated me to become a better leader. For most of my professional life I have worked with technology start-ups. But I don’t know much about technology. I don’t program code and I don’t really know how technology works. I have a degree from a business school, which means that I don’t know much about anything. Nothing wrong with business schools, but after graduating I felt like a generalist with a general knowledge about economic stuff. However, I have learned a thing or two about how to make ideas come true, raise venture capital, build organizations and make companies grow. That is part of my job as an entrepreneur. In short, I start companies and build them.

When I started a new company in 2005, it was business as usual: to make an idea come true. Idea work is nothing glamorous, just a hard job. Then we grew the company, were hit by the financial crisis in 2008 and were forced to cut costs, all of which are typical management tasks. Having sorted out various financial troubles, I came to the conclusion that to take the company to the next level, we needed to improve our leadership. There was a very specific leadership challenge – to make the new management team work together better.

We declared that the annual theme would be ‘Leadership’. That meant that we were trying to be better leaders at all levels. And as we started to reflect on our leadership, I also started to jot down notes for this book.

I have worked with many demanding management teams, with high requirements on the leadership. I usually get more or less direct feedback when it does not work. Without people to tell you what they think in a direct way, you will never develop; you’ll just live in a bubble of your own, detached from reality.

With the team I was now facing, I realized that only by being a decent leader, by being continuously better and more useful to my colleagues, could I earn the respect of my teammates. They already respected me as an entrepreneur, I guess, but my ‘people skills’ were poor. I realized this from both direct feedback from colleagues and how my words and actions could sometimes let people down. This, maybe more than anything else at the time, was my motivation to improve as a leader: to be as good as my colleagues, or at least to build on their strengths and not let our various individual shortcomings get in the way.

I wanted to develop from being a somewhat egocentric entrepreneur driven by my own ideas to begin to think like a leader who could support colleagues and create a positive energy in the team. Note that I choose not to say ‘I was forced to change’ because part of the process was to adopt a proactive and positive mindset. To be motivated from within.

Whereas management is an assignment that can be handed out, leadership is something you have to earn. Noticing that my efforts to improve my leadership were beginning to have positive effects, my scope and ambition widened to make everybody in the company a leader. Then it broadened to include my family, and trying to be a really good father to my three children, another formidable leadership task. And finally, I took on the challenge to lead myself in a better, even ‘world-class’, way. My focus shifted from ideas and management to people.

At one off-site session, our management team read and discussed Patrick Lencioni’s The Five Dysfunctions of a Team and concluded that, despite our efforts, we were probably pretty dysfunctional. ‘Artificial harmony’, ‘destructive conflict’ and big egos were among our challenges. At last we could recognize our shortcomings and talk about how to improve ourselves and our working relationships, realizing that so long as the top management team works well in a company, everything potentially works. We tried to be better together, spreading good leadership around us, and the energy in the company improved and ultimately resulted in growth, revenue and profits. We did this by adopting a common framework that we agreed on. Acknowledging that there are problems is the first step to try to solve them. For example, we realized that healthy conflict is good for creating commitment (everybody gets to give their opinion before deciding on one direction that all will stand by), while negativism and criticizm can create a destructive conflict that would tear us apart instead. Also, we practised how to give and receive open feedback. Later, when the climate in the team deteriorated again, the whole company was affected.

The focus on leadership prompted me to scrutinize my leadership style, reflect on my actions and the responses they triggered. I started to practise every day to be a better leader in various ways. I kept a leadership journal. The point here is not exactly how I learned things or what I learned, but that I started to reflect and that I was motivated to do so, by both internal drivers (to be a better leader) and external ones (to make the company more successful). It relates back to my motivations and finding my ‘why’.

There are basically two ways to check that the leadership functions well. One is to take a measure of the general morale of an organization. Is there a positive, constructive and motivated atmosphere around you? Or is there a climate of complaint, whining, destructive conflict and back-stabbing? Observe how people around you act and react, and you get a measure of your leadership. That is also why open and unfiltered feedback from others is key. You need some external reference.

The second check is performance. In the business world, the purpose of leadership is to produce good performance and results. Sometimes excellent morale does not go hand in hand with performance. You might have a super atmosphere around you, with everyone getting along fabulously, but poor financial results because your team aren’t motivated to help the business grow.

Equally, your teams might be miserable and dysfunctional, but achieve great results anyway. For example, you might succeed thanks to favourable market conditions – which may change at a moment’s notice, leaving your unmotivated teams unable to adapt. I would argue that there is a high probability that any organization that practises good, active leadership at all levels is more likely to produce good results.

#003 Spread Good Leadership (SGL)

Your good leadership will automatically make others become leaders.

If you define yourself as a leader, would you then:

If your answer is 1, maybe you are more like a Formal Leader, a traditional boss. Most leadership books are actually about how to make you a better Formal Leader. If your answer is 2, this book is for you – but also for the Formal Leader who is open for a new perspective on leadership. The ultimate goal for you is actually to make others better leaders by improving your own leadership. The whole point of your leadership is to spread it and create virtuous circles. Think about that for a while and let it sink in.

Building a team of leaders is not just a possibility or an opportunity, it is something that you should make your goal to achieve. The great thing is you don’t have to educate people or tell them what to do – just take care of your own good leadership and it will spread automatically. Good leadership fast becomes a benefit for everybody. It is very contagious.

Good leadership spreads, and the same applies to bad leadership. What is bad leadership? One way of looking at this is to think that there is no bad or good leadership – only bad and good behaviour. If the behaviour is ‘good’ (whatever the frame of reference), it’s called leadership because it makes you into a role model. If the behaviour is ‘bad’ (measured by the same reference), it is simply bad because it triggers bad behaviour in others.

With this in mind, you will have a very different approach to your leadership. It will not be about leading, but by the sheer force of your conscious behaviour transferring leadership skills to others so they can lead themselves. The moment you realize that and actually start to reflect on your leadership and act as a leader, good things will happen. You will notice why some things work, and others don’t. You will notice when you cheer people up, and when you piss them off. You will notice your strengths and your weaknesses. You will notice when you perform and deliver results and when you don’t.

Let’s look at a simple example of leadership. You get an angry email. How do you reply? Do you send an equally angry email back, or do you pick up the phone to sort it out? Angry emails can create destructive loops of misunderstandings and can perpetuate negative feelings. Once I stopped replying to angry emails and started to call or meet in person to sort it out instead, I gradually found that I didn’t get destructive emails from colleagues any more. Good practice, in the form of direct and non-confrontational communication, had spread, and replaced the bad practice of destructive communication.

In the decision not to respond in kind to an angry email, you have realized one of the key ideas behind good leadership – that you always have complete control over two things: your interpretation of reality and your responses to it. (Please also see Interpretations And Responses #021 IAR.)

An angry email isn’t necessarily a personal attack; it could be the result of someone having a bad day. By reacting in a humane and respectful way, you are able to address the problem behind the emotional outburst and also encourage the sender to feel safe in communicating with you directly and respectfully as well. Leadership is, ultimately, about compassion, and the ability to put yourself in others’ shoes.

To make the diffusion of leadership more hands-on, and encourage Mindset Leadership, there are at least four ways you can spread it and help create a culture of all-leadership.

#004 Learn To Learn (LTL)

What do you think about the way you think?

Do you have an insight into how you learn? One of the amazing things about human beings is our ability to think about how we think. Do you learn by doing, by discussing, by reading and reflecting, by meditating, by travelling, by listening, by watching, or any other way?

Personally, I learn by doing, analyzing the outcome and conceptualizing. I have done many stupid things in my life, and I hope that I have learned from them. I appreciate people who do things, whether they are crazy or serious things, if I can also see that they actually reflect and learn from their experiences. I try to have the mind of a beginner, formulate my ideas and act on them. I take notes, trying to boil things down so that I understand them myself.

Based on my reflections on my own leadership, I began to specify my findings in short, coherent statements, such as Control Upset Emails (#020 CUE), to highlight in this case the trap of anger, frustration and loss of energy and time in destructive email exchanges. So whenever I got an email that smelled of trouble and a potential destructive dialogue, my brain would remember ‘Control Upset Emails’, thus prompting a smarter response. I estimate that this simple practice has saved me hundreds of lost hours and tons of lost energy.

When you start noticing your own behaviour and listen to the feedback from people around you, you will also start learning about your leadership. A good practice is to keep a Leadership Journal, to make notes about your observations. Maybe you will formulate your own TLAs about what works and what doesn’t. My journal was the foundation for this book, just as I have a Tennis Journal packed with insights on my forehand and footwork for improving my game. However you learn, reflection and discovery are central, but motivation and joy are essential.

#005 All Are Leaders (AAL)

Living the vision.

Thinking about my own leadership role, how to build growing companies in fast markets, how to create modern organizations, and about my appreciation of all the talented people I worked with, I had an epiphany: One leader is good, 100 leaders are better.

Having started to improve on my own leadership, I began to think about how the whole company, all the people working in a company, could develop and benefit. Was it possible somehow that everyone could adopt the mindset of a leader? Well, the ultimate way to turn ideas into behaviour in any organization is to incorporate them into the culture.

At the company where I was CEO, we ran a set of cross-organizational workshops in the company with people from all departments to discuss the company’s culture and our core values. We called it the ‘Pizza Group’ because we met in the office after working hours to have pizza and beer and talk about what was really the foundation of the company. We talked about the values behind our behaviour, and the essence of our company culture.

One of the core values that emerged in our discussion was that we were all leaders, at every level of the company, capable of solving any challenges that arise in the business. It’s one thing to say this, of course, but another thing entirely to create an understanding about individual leadership. It is also a challenge to make this value explicit in the context of an organization because – as I’ve suggested earlier – there’s an official structure of Formal Leaders.

Even if the company is ‘flat’, non-bureaucratic, informal, non-hierarchical, with fast decision making and a democratic culture, it usually still has a board of directors, a management team, department heads, team leaders and other structures and routines that imply hierarchy. All that structure means you don’t see your job as a leadership role if you feel that you’re at the bottom of a pyramid. That also means that any culture or organization that nurtures the image of the pyramid in the form of a classic organization chart (with a few people at the top and many people at the bottom) is an old and traditional organization which might not be perfectly suited to a modern business. You don’t have to tear down the pyramid, but you should turn it upside down. If you are the Formal Leader, like the CEO, place yourself at the bottom to show that your work is to support the people doing the real work in the organization, at the front line.

People will not become leaders just because you say so. First, the motivation has to come from within. Second, it helps if you can show how it’s done and inspire, and empower. But the real obstacle is probably the everyday whirlwind of work. At the front line, you’ve got a lot on your plate. You are pressed to deliver results, work long hours, meet deadlines and generally keep things moving in your job. The management and board point out the plan and direction, and you are happy for the information. You see yourself as a cog in the machine, not a leader. Also, people tend to be closest to themselves and their wallets. Why care for the company, my colleagues, other departments or the greater good and big picture? I have my bills to pay.

I’ve often noticed that monthly meetings and other gatherings where the purpose is to involve everyone in the bigger picture (results, numbers, plans, strategies, news and other things you imagine would be motivating to learn about) usually end up becoming monologues to a more or less passive audience. Ask yourself: How can I step back, so others can step forward?

Finally, in a well-functioning company the focus is on revenue (financial confirmation that clients want to buy what you sell), growth (a sign that the company is on the right track) and profits (a healthy financial balance between the cost of what you do and the return on these costs and investments from sales to real customers). If a company is focused on results and customer value, it’s focusing on the right things. However, that makes it easy to focus most of your discussions in a company around topics such as revenue, growth and profitability (which are typical management issues) and forget that it’s actually people who are making it all come true.

If you grow yourself, then automatically the people around you, and your organization as a whole, will grow with you. And given the aggregate potential effect of this mindset, then the economy as a whole will grow and create prosperity for society. That’s how leadership is connected to the well-being of many. Developing a culture in which everyone steps up to lead is a way to make that happen.

Say that you want everybody in your company to follow your new strategy. Now you have a choice. Do you tell them to act upon your directives, or else? Or do you communicate your vision in such an inspiring way that the organization follows you because they are motivated to do it from within? The latter is the approach that Jan Carlzon used to turn around Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) in the early 1980s to make it the most admired airline company in the world at the time.

SAS was reinvented in the early 1980s as the ‘Businessman’s Airline’, focusing on the needs of the business traveller. Communicating this mission to the organization, and discovering what it meant in practice in terms of offerings to the customer (such as frequent departures) and preferences (for example, the importance of departures on time), created a new internal mindset. People at the front lines could act independently and proactively from their own understanding, and not on directives from the top. The baggage handler became a Mindset Leader who loaded bags on the aircraft more efficiently to enable the flight to depart on time since he knew this was essential to the customer – and not because a Formal Leader had told him to ‘work faster’. The culture at SAS was based on the belief that the front-line people, ticket agents, baggage handlers and flight attendants were in the best position to discover the needs of real people. Promoting leadership and letting the front line take the initiative also meant changing much of management from control to support, thereby establishing new values throughout the organization.

Communication and information were at the core of the SAS culture. Jan Carlzon famously said: ‘An individual without information can’t take responsibility. An individual with information can’t help but take responsibility.’

However, for Jan Carlzon there was still one leader and the job of the leader was to communicate strategy and objectives, and then let the people take over. The purpose of the leader was not to manage the business himself but to create an atmosphere and establish the values so people could do their work. However, they did not go all the way to state that everybody is a leader, with equal opportunities to shape the company. Nevertheless, the ideas at SAS in the early 1980s were ground-breaking and changed forever how we view an organization. Implying all-leadership, and finding a new productive balance between the ‘management’ and the people at the front line, Jan Carlzon was a leadership innovator. His book about the re-invention of SAS was called Moments of Truth in English, but the title of the Swedish original, in translation, was Tear Down the Pyramids.

#006 Be In Charge (BIC)

Everyday life is a perfect training ground for leadership. You are in charge.

You’re in a pub in London and there are glasses on the floor and everybody keeps tripping over them, crashing them, until somebody decides to take care of the problem and remove the glasses. That’s leadership. You are always in charge, if you want to be.

I was once sitting with my children in the sunshine at an outdoor restaurant. It was a lovely day. The waiter came by. My children wanted ice cream and I ordered apple juice. ‘Sorry sir, but we’re not serving food,’ the waiter announced rather unexpectedly. ‘But ice cream isn’t really food, is it?’ I tried. ‘Yes, it is,’ the waiter insisted. ‘Ok … Why aren’t you serving food?’ I asked. ‘The kitchen is closed, so we only serve drinks.’

My children gave me a look that said: You solve this!

‘But since it doesn’t involve cooking anything, maybe you could just bring out a couple of dishes of ice cream for me?’ I tried lamely. ‘No, that would create a problem,’ the waiter carried on. ‘What problem?’ ‘Then everybody would get the impression that we’re serving food here and start ordering.’

I contemplated that problem for a while, that they would suddenly have a lot of customers. Then I tried again.

‘What if you put the ice cream in a glass as a drink?’ I suggested. ‘Well …  we actually have milkshakes on the drinks menu,’ replied the waiter after giving it some thought. ‘Excellent. Put the ice cream in a glass, call it a milkshake, serve it as a drink!’ ‘I guess that could work … milkshakes and apple juice coming up!’

It happens every day that your expectations don’t match the outcome. Imagine an everyday situation like buying something at a grocery store, getting a bus ticket or checking in at a hotel. If there’s a problem, even a very small and ordinary problem, how do you solve it? Do you see yourself as the passive victim of events, or do you instinctively turn on your leadership radar to turn the situation around? If you proactively identify yourself as part of the solution, you are simply a leader. Practise everyday leadership in common situations. All you have to do is to keep a cool head, adopt the leader’s mindset and help your fellow human being to find a solution.

When you think of a leader you might think of the CEO of the fast-growing company, the prime minister during a war or the football coach in a dramatic final directing his players on the field. But we are surrounded by opportunities for leadership all the time, in even the most banal of situations.

Whenever you’re interacting with other people, you can lead people and you can lead yourself. You sometimes hear that you have to be a ‘born leader’ or ‘born entrepreneur’. Many people seem to think that leadership or entrepreneurship is hard-wired into some people’s nature and can’t be learned or acquired. I think this is wrong. Everyone can be a leader.

Jörgen Oom is a Swedish psychologist who, based on his experience from sports and business life, specializes in motivation and attitude change. Through working on mental training with athletes, including Olympic gold medallists and top ice hockey teams, he has created methods for establishing winning attitudes and great performance. Jörgen taught me at least two things. First, it’s all about the Right Mental Attitude, your RMA. If you’re negative, negative things will surely happen. If you focus on the positive in any situation, the outcome is more likely to be positive. Second, if anything is going to happen at all, it depends on you. As Jörgen says: ‘If it’s to be, it’s up to me.’ I think that’s a great way to define leadership. The moment you decide to take action, you turn into a leader by definition. And that’s the magic – it’s simple!

Jörgen also taught me not to say ‘Have a nice day’, but instead to use the more proactive ‘Get yourself a nice day!’ It’s up to you.