Insight & Inspiration

Who is the victim when you as a leader do not succeed? What happens to you as a manager when you do not deliver on the overall target figures, KPIs that have been set? There are little tricks that are needed to make you a LITTLE better leader.

Many good cakes are eaten at workplaces in Norway. Not every day, but we often eat cake at work to mark something we’ve achieved together. But would it sometimes be better to eat cabbage? Learning is like nutrition. It may not always be the taste we want, but it makes us better.

The American management guru Cary Hamel has studied and developed organizations all his life, and in an interview with Dagens Næringsliv in 2021, he describes a clear need to reduce bureaucracy and leadership in organizations. Motivated by the global challenges, declining productivity and the human consideration, he encourages managers to unleash their employees as “creative problem solvers with their own initiative, who get to use themselves”. This is of course demanding for many managers.

A long-term ambition is challenged throughout by conditions over which we have no control. The labor market changes, competitors attack, technologies emerge and small and large events occur without us being able to predict them. We have to deal with that, but with our eyes on the goal.

– 6 out of 10 managers feel that their employees are unable to free up time for the most important goals in the organisation, a manager survey from Purpose AS showed in January. With such a starting point, it is extremely time-consuming to implement strategies and achieve goals through motivating leadership with a high degree of accountability, as many managers want.

The founder of Purpose AS, Kenny Hognestad, has for more than 20 years helped many managers with goal management, and in recent years he has become particularly fond of the OKR framework as an instrument for maintaining focus and creating interaction.