Over the years, you've found your own model for giving feedback to your employees. Can you tell us how you help people around you to grow without focusing on their areas for improvement?

One thing I have learned in my professional life is that I get the absolute most and best out of my employees when they know what is expected of them, feel appreciated, and are reassured that they are doing a good job and contributing to the whole. We humans grow from appreciation and praise. If you, as a manager, focus on what is good instead of development areas, that is, pointing out what you think the employee is doing wrong or should improve, I am convinced that you get more out of each individual. Not everyone can be good at everything. But if everyone is given the opportunity to become their very best self, I believe that it leads to doing more of what they are good at (and are appreciated for) and less of what may not be so good.

If an employee has acted in an incorrect way, this should of course be addressed so that it becomes clear what applies. But this should be done immediately, not wait until a performance review. It is also important to distinguish between actions and characteristics. It is incorrect actions that you as a manager have a responsibility to highlight and correct, not an employee's character traits.

My leadership philosophy is therefore to boost strengths and at the same time adapt leadership to each employee's differences and needs. I believe that focusing on creating opportunities for our employees to develop their strengths would have a much greater impact than improving weaknesses.


In your current role, you manage the communication of a company that for many is associated with sustainability and the circular economy. This has not always been the case. Can you elaborate on how you work to "change" both internally and externally?

For 25 years, FTI has been responsible for collecting packaging and newspapers throughout Sweden so that they can be recycled as much as possible. This means that in practice we have been working for a circular economy long before the concept was invented. We are very much a sustainability company, but our daily business is mainly logistics and transportation. Many companies are trying to find new ways to work with sustainability, but in our case, our entire core business is sustainability work.

What we are doing now is to highlight in various ways the fine and important sustainability work we do to some extent change the image of ourselves, both internally and externally. We are more accessible and more visible in the media, we try to highlight the importance of recycling in campaigns and we invest a lot in spreading knowledge. For example, we have made a great investment in children of preschool age where we built a whole new world, Material World https://materialvarlden.se, which is about teaching children about recycling. Our goal is that everything we do externally should also build pride internally.

Now that it is Corona time, you work mostly from home. How has your leadership changed to create commitment and motivation in your team when you work remotely?

My leadership is not really that different from how it was before, I just do a little more of the same. I have more frequent dialogues, more regular check-ins, try to pep up more, be clearer and more available when a question needs to be answered. I also think we need to be a little extra generous with praise in the situation we are in now, an extra pat on the shoulder in the form of a gif or a smiley in the chat. It is easy for the meetings via Teams to be shorter and more efficient, which can be good, but we also need the social part and that is probably the biggest challenge. The work works beyond expectations and in principle all tasks can be performed with just as high quality remotely. But we also need to meet, laugh together and feel part of a team and a community. To meet this need, we have scheduled daily check-in meetings with video. It's important that we see each other even if it's via a screen. When I ask my colleagues, it is these meetings that are the most important. We can talk about work stuff, but also what we're doing this weekend, how the house renovation is going, or anything else we might have talked about at the coffee machine. So even though remote working works well, I'm very much looking forward to when all this is over and we can start meeting as before. Because no matter how good digital solutions are developed, I don't think anything will ever surpass the human encounter.