With her dual background in law and psychology, Hanne Jessen Krarup combines leadership and management to create a change leadership toolbox with a Nordic twist.
From the preface: 'As I went into the meeting with my team of legal colleagues, about to explain why yet another acquisition had failed to reach its full potential, our biased and one-sided approach began to dawn on me. Being lawyers our sole focus was on the factual and management part of the organizational change initiated by the acquisition. We were blind to the softer leadership side of change. I set out on a journey to understand the people side of organizational change. As an initial attempt I invited organizational psychologists to join a team of transactional advisors. Unfortunately, they did not speak our language, nor did we speak theirs. I soon realised that we had to include management as well as leadership to succeed in the M&A business I was in. I decided to build the bridge between law and humanities - management and leadership - and bring them together in a change leadership toolbox inspired by the Nordic leadership tradition because leadership and management are equally important.
Organizational change is not a spreadsheet exercise. We need more messiness in our approach to change management. We need to embrace the reality of organizational change. Organizations are populated by human beings, and human nature is neither rational, linear nor predictable. How can we develop a comprehensive theory that embraces the mess of reality? We cannot. Boxing the messiness of organizational change into a neatly defined change management theory is a contradiction in terms. But we can structure the way in which we go about the mess and begin to accept the paradoxes and the contradictions in terms.
Leading Change Management with a Nordic Twist is not about one unique thing, two minutes, three boxes, four secrets, five gears or six belts. Nor is it about seven habits or eight linear steps.
Leading Change Management with a Nordic Twist is about the single most important tool in change leadership; the leader. In addition to self-awareness, it is about leadership awareness and organizational awareness. I will guide the reader through the Nordic House of Changes and propose a Nordic inspired approach to leading change management. The Nordic House of Changes has three interdependent parts, none of which can be ignored. Take out one element, and the house will be uninhabitable and may even collapse.
One of my first hands on change leadership experiences was the spin-off of the enzyme producer Novozymes from the Danish based insulin manufacturer Novo Nordisk in the late 1990s. I was working for the Copenhagen based law firm handling the legal matters of the spin-off and became a member of the on-site team heading the spin-off. We were a diverse team of many different nationalities, professions and personalities, and a lot of different opinions were voiced and heard. My Novo Nordisk secondment laid the foundations of Leading Change Management with a Nordic Twist. After my Novo in-house experience, I returned to the law firm, an environment in which my take on change leadership was challenged. The meeting described in the opening paragraph of this preface took place some years later and started my journey into the field of leading change.
Any leader gains leadership awareness and self-awareness and begins to involve employees will soon experience a boost in employee motivation because the most important tool in change leadership is being calibrated; the leader.'
About the author: Hanne Jessen Krarup is an internationally trained lawyer and holds a Master's degree in Leadership and Organizational psychology. She has worked in M&A and organizational change for two decades in the cross field between leadership and management. Hanne lives in Denmark with her family and works as a lawyer, leadership consultant and keynote speaker.