I am a 50 year old (or young) leader who my entire proffessional life have worked in roles that requering me to develop individuals and organizations.

 

My first 15 working years I spent as an officer in the Swedish Armed Forces. Main focus during this period was naturally to train conscripts and prepare them as units for war or armed conflict. When I left I was ranking Major. During my Army years I developed my leadsrship skills to a point that I do not have to think in every situation how to behave, it comes natural. This have in my future carrer been very important. My job was very diverse, I served in the Infantry but also as a specialist on Combat Vehichles, Artillery Tactics and NBC warfare.

 

When I decided to leave the Army I fortunately found myself at Volvo Cabs in Umeå. This was a perfect workplace to start my civilian carrer. Here I got an excellent example of how a well functioning organizaion would look like. I started as a Production Supervisor on the Cab assembly line but ended up inthe same position on Dashboard assembly. My three years at Volvo gave me a great insight in working Management system, Quality system but also the problems and challanges a company faces.

 

Just about when I was starting to ask myself what to do next I got the chance to change workplace. I was Headhunted to Armstrong World Industries, a global company designing, producing and selling flooring and cielings. Armstrong turned out to be something completely different from Volvo. Although staff and operators was very highly skilled, the systems at Volvo that I valued so high was not present. A lot of activities had been started to put supporting systems in place but vertually nothing was operational. This made the business hard to grasp and very hard to manage and follow up results. Also, for the first time I worked with Management located abroad, something that I soon grow to like and actually got quite good at. After three years it was time to  move into "the corner office", I was appointed MD.

The complexity of the role as MD have made me huble to my co workers skills and knowledge. I would say that it is vertually impossible to be successful leading a mid or large company without a highly skilled staff on all levels. I early realized this and made it my priority to work with my employees to make sure to retain all talent as well as develop people internally and let anyone ready for it grow and take on more responsibility and accauntability.

 

Despite everybodys efforts, in 2010 we got the message that the plant was to be closed down due to strategic reasons. One of our key markes would no longer sell our products and the remaining volume was simply not enough the run the business. My last big job as MD was to close the plantincluding everything from laying all staff off to selling land, buildings and fixed assets.

A few of our employees was given the opportunity to stay with the company to support a greenfield start up of a new plant in Shanghai, China. I was included, as a member of the Project leadership I was responsible for all training of employees in the plant. After about 10 months I was given an additional task as Operations Director. This job mainly was focused on supporting and mentoring the local Leadership team, mentor the new Plantmanager and support implementation of managment systems in the plant. The big challange was not the tasks in themselves, more the fact that the job was done in an unfamliliar culture and alongside collegues with five different nationalities. I have never learned so much in such a short time!

Once I was back in Sweden I continued to work as MD for the small sales force in Sweden (something I had doen remotely while beeing in China) until Feb 2015 when I founded DESCITE

 

More details about my carrer you can find here.