Innovating Leadership:
Co-Creating Our Future

Resources:

Bjørn’s website has more information on his work and the Diversity Icebreaker tool and assessment at https://diversityicebreaker.com. His company’s website is https://human-factors.no; it has more team development tools you can review.

Our host, Maureen Metcalf, posts a newsletter every week on LinkedIn. You can subscribe here.

Maureen’s latest book is Innovative Leadership & Followership in the Age of AI. You’ll find details about it at https://bit.ly/LeaderInAI, or check out the Kindle version at https://amzn.to/44buVz8. The audiobook version is available at https://amzn.to/4dTCleZ.

Her other 10 books are available on Amazon here.

Books we’re reading for fun or personal development right now include:

• Everyday Ubuntu: Living Better Together, the African Way by Mungi Ngomane. Hardback (https://amzn.to/48Doh6j) and audiobook (https://amzn.to/48YCRF4)
• To Stop a Tyrant by Ira Chaleff, on how leaders become tyrants and their types of followers, is in hardback on Amazon at https://amzn.to/3W5XDys and on Kindle at https://amzn.to/420Zvwc. An audiobook edition is coming soon.
• Take Back Your Power: 10 New Rules for Women at Work by Ancestry CEO Deb Liu, on how to overcome the obstacles women still face in the workplace – especially in tech. It’s in hardback at https://amzn.to/47OUO9E, and audio at https://amzn.to/3Y6EmOQ.
• Covert Cows and Chick-fil-A by Steve Robinson; it’s available in hardback at https://amzn.to/460LnmQ, on Kindle at https://amzn.to/3RVXhZs, and as an audiobook at https://amzn.to/3xPjBgn.

NOTE: As an Amazon partner, we may make a small commission from books you buy through these links.

Other episodes you’ll enjoy:

Guest(s):

Guest(s) Bio:

Bjørn Zakarias Ekelund: Norwegian business consultant. Psychologist (1983), Univ. of Oslo, Norway, MBA (1997), Henley Management College, London, UK. Studies in International Management (2006/7), University of Agder, Norway. He has been leading consultant organisations since 1987, at the same time doing extensive consultative work focused on interpersonal interaction, team analysis, innovation and cross-cultural challenges. Since 1993 he has been the principal owner and managing director of Human Factors AS in Norway. He is most known for creating the Diversity Icebreaker – a concept that combines the assessment of cognitive styles with an experiential learning seminar.

Transcript
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Maureen: [00:00:00] This is innovating leadership, co creating our future. I’m your host, Maureen Metcalfe, founder and CEO of the Innovative Leadership Institute, where we help leaders be future ready. Helping us in this mission today is Bjorn Ekowlund. He’s a Norwegian business consultant and principal owner and managing director at Human Factors AS in Norway.

And we’ll be looking at the global context of leadership. So Bjorn, thank you so much for being with us.

Bjorn: Oh, my pleasure being here. Thank you very much.

Maureen: In the late 90s, you presented at the Academy of Management on trust toward leaders comparing the U. S. and Norway. Tell us a little bit about your work in exploring cultural differences, specifically leadership U.

1. and Norway.

Bjorn: This started back in 1997, that was a time when I invited a cross cultural researcher from Canada and the U. S. to come to Norway. And she invited me back again to her institution at the University of Virginia. At the University [00:01:00] of Virginia, I met a lady called Ellen Weitner, who was doing research on trust, on trust towards leaders.

That was really fascinating for me, because I knew that Norway as a society at large is a very high trust society. At the same time, a few years earlier, I have been importing into the Norwegian context a personality assessment called Cattel 6 in PF version 5. And when we looked up on the norms in Norway, And compare that with norms in U.

S., we realized that the only dimension that was different between U. S. and Norway was the dimension called propensity to trust. The mean of Norwegians ended up in 85 percentile in the U. S. context, which implies that five out of six Norwegians, they had higher propensity to trust than Americans had. And when I met Ellen Weitner, I said, This must have implications for how people trust leaders, that we have that high degree of propensity to trust.

And then she said, let’s try it out. Let’s do [00:02:00] some kind of research. If you gather data in Norway, and I can gather data in the U. S., let’s test your hypothesis. And that we started to do in 1998, and in 1999, I came to Chicago, and for the first time in my life, I was presenting at an academic conference in a U.

1. setting, together with her. The results, where we tested out this kind of model for trust towards leaders. It was a fascinating experience I had. My anxiety in the body was extreme, but the results were really fascinating. I was wrong. Ellen Widener wanted to test, is his propensity to trust as a personality component?

Or is it the behavior of the leader that really mattered? And she had right propensity to trust was not significant, but the leaders of the behavior was a significant predictor of trust towards leaders. And her model from the U. S. context was confirmed fully. In the U. S. material, but only partially in the Norwegian data.

And that [00:03:00] really created a situation where we started to talk about what are the differences here? What are the similarities? The model she was testing, the leadership behavior she was focusing upon was a leader who took care, who was easy to communicate with, who had integrity, but also some kind of consistency in behavior, but also willing to delegate.

These were the five components. In Norway, we didn’t see the same kind of pattern on two of these kind of dimension. One was consistency, and the other was delegation, which has implications for how we understand how a leader should behave in a Norwegian context. The consistency dimension is what I normally say in US.

If you are acting the same way, independent of where we are, who we are talking with, then we can trust you. In Norway, we say, well, we would rather like to see a leader behave differently in different kind of contexts. That you talk differently with journalists than you do with the trade union representatives, than you do with the board, than you do with your employees.

In cross cultural context, this is a dimension that is [00:04:00] framed in what you call love context, high context. And Norway is a bit more high context oriented, and that was the reason. So that was a cross cultural example of illustration. What I also found very interesting was the differences on delegation and innovation context.

You know, delegation is not something that the leader in practice do towards those people to the employees that they think can be delegated some kind of responsibility and accountability. In Norway, delegation is something that is integrated in the organization. It’s an institutionalized thing. So, the leader doesn’t delegate.

It is not an issue very often for a Norwegian leader. And that’s probably very interesting because then you see how the organizational structure probably has implications for what kind of leadership behavior that is important in different kind of culture.

Maureen: As I reflect on leaders who I’ve coached or worked with who weren’t terribly effective at delegation, the other [00:05:00] lever could be changing the organizational structure.

Or the practices and processes that we build that in so they have less of an opportunity to withhold delegation.

Bjorn: And that’s also what’s in practice happening in a vision context, which implies that you have a situation where the employees themselves very often take for granted that they have to take charge.

And I will probably talk more about that later because I think that is, you might say, the employees attitudes of taking charge is probably one of the elements that is also different between the U. S. and innovation context around here.

Maureen: You talk about the study, and what kind of perspectives does it give you in understanding your own country?

Why care about cross cultural leadership?

Bjorn: The cross cultural difference is probably one of the more sticky differences. Cultural values is integrated in your body as a consequence of being brought up in a geographical area. People who come from different kinds of areas, they have different kind of value systems.

If you, as a [00:06:00] leader, have workers that are recruited from different kind of geographical area, or you work, for example, in sales or supply chain management in your own kind of context, you will meet people from other kind of culture. Not to be aware that there are basic differences that very often is unconsciously integrated in individuals behavior and value system perspectives.

I cannot imagine that that would be good for any given reason. For me, it’s one way of being aware that, well, you might not think like me. You have different kind of preferences than me. And how can I get to know your preferences? How can I get to know your value systems? In a way that makes it easy for me to talk with you, communicate with you, involve you, respect you, and build a cooperation.

that make both of us flourish. Not being aware of these kind of cross cultural differences is a lost opportunity for flourishing, lost opportunity for communication.

Maureen: That leads us into your [00:07:00] diversity icebreaker. And as you’re talking about cognitive styles and communication, so not diversity defined by physiological traits, but by thinking.

Bjorn: Share a little bit more about that. The concept diversity icebreaker is The concept that I’m most known for because it has been used in 80 countries by half a million people. And it’s the story behind is quite long and as you are. very correct. The diversity icebreaker is not about race, not about gender.

It is about what you call deep level diversity qualities, which is the same as culture to culture is a deep level phenomenon. It’s not a surface diversity issue. And cognitive style is also a deep level diversity. People are thinking very differently. A different kind of approach for how they treat information, what they prefer to communicate.

And my concept of diversity and icebreaker is around three basic styles, which in leadership theory will often be described as task, People [00:08:00] and change. Gary Euclid was writing about this in the 90s, especially. And my concept is mapping individual preferences for a more task orientation, which I call being blue or more people orientated, which I call red or more change oriented, which I call green.

But this kind of three dimension It didn’t evolve in my practice because I was reading Gary Uckel’s work. It evolves in my consultancy practice because I was asked to help 70 engineers who worked with energy conservation to talk with normal people. They could talk with other engineers, but they were not able to reach out to ordinary people.

So I gathered customers in focus groups and asked them to come up with good ideas for how an engineer could communicate effectively. The End. And they created a hell of a lot of ideas, and they sorted them for what looked alike and different. In all, Focus Group evolves three different kind of categories for communication.

And [00:09:00] then we decided to use these three categories. And we had to baptize them, so we baptized them red, blue, and green to make it easy. And then it worked very well. We were saving energy for five times as much as the whole kind of campaign cost. And I decided to write my MBA dissertation from a non effective communication to an effective communication using this kind of model.

And my MBA was my second master, and it was so elegant to use my two years of experience as a consultancy, putting me into theoretical work in my master thesis. But since this has been working very well, I was asked to do more research. I had to create a questionnaire. The questionnaire was picking elements from all things we knew about personality assessment, MBTI, Big Five, all this kind of thing.

But we were identifying the three different styles we called red, blue, and green. And it looked like the team role concept. How do you make people in team work together? How can they [00:10:00] utilize the different kind of perspectives? How can they distribute different kind of tasks? These are the issues when you want to run a team where you want to play with diversity of perspectives in the team as a strength.

When we started to see that it looks like a team role concept, we started to use it in consultation. We’ve started to put up seminars around this kind of thing. But since we have no own research around this kind of conceptual model, then we invited participants to come up with ideas. How does red look like in practice in your context?

How does blue look like in your context? I’m a psychologist, and in psychology I know that if you see things from an outside and inside, this is very different. And we started to play around with the ideas that when people have been filling in a questionnaire, they got some kind of scores dominant in blue.

We put blue people in one corner, and the red people in another corner, and the green people in the third corner. And we asked each of the group to describe themselves, which they did with positivity and pride. And then [00:11:00] we asked them to describe the others, which they started to also talking positive about.

But then they were touching into what they call maybe a bit politically incorrect perception of the other. So the blue people were sitting there talking about themselves being we are task oriented people, reliable. We know what to do. We deliver on time. We are well prepared. But when the blue people were looking at the red, they said that, well, you know, the red, they are clever at communicating.

They are the people people, but you know, they talk too much and there’s too much emotions going on. And then we had a situation where people were in groups describing themselves from a positive And when they looked upon the others, there were elements of negativity and politically incorrect. And when they shared this in between the groups, they laughed about their own kind of prejudice, in a positive way about themselves, but also about the other.

And was a bit ashamed for what they had been doing. But they realize that the other have been doing just the same. And then you get some kind of reconciliation [00:12:00] lather, where everybody felt, well, everybody understood that we are different. We have different perspectives. It’s very easy to have a very positive view of yourself.

Not that easy to have the same kind of positive view about the others. But if you are able to have a positive view of the other, and the other know that you appreciate this kind of thing, then it’s okay to work together. So, we basically created a concept of three different kind of colors that identify differences in the way of people interacting, but where everybody in the room understood that we need all these three colors when we are working together.

Maureen: I was in a conversation recently where our speaker was discussing the importance of gratitude and creating a place where someone feels respected and they get to win. And that getting to win causes different hormones to release. And the sense of abundance or flourishing, if I feel respected by you, I’m going to show up and interact in a much more constructive way, which is going to lead us to more constructive outcomes.

Bjorn: You are absolutely [00:13:00] right. I normally say that, for example, I’m green, green is a person that has a love affair for creativity, coming up with a positive idea about the future, everything. Always a bit change oriented, but I know when I’m standing in a green corner and I realized that I need the blue people to really be able to do the work.

I need the red people to be able to communicate. So everybody are integrated together in order to have blue and red people to work well with me. I have to acknowledge them, as you say, and if I understand that I acknowledge them, then they would like to be together with me in my corporation. And then I need to show that I acknowledge them.

And if they know, if they expect to be acknowledged, then they would like to be a partner with me in the interaction. And this is a reciprocal thing. So if I know that I need you and you understand that I understand that I need you, then it’s okay to be working together. And red, blue and green does not exclude anyone.

Everybody has some preference and for me, for example, I have green as a dominant [00:14:00]preference, but red is my number two and blue is my number three. So blue is the one that I really carefully has to ask. Shall I ask really for help? Can I learn something of that kind of perspective? Or do I need to systematically work together with others who are differently?

So the positive acknowledgement is important for interaction, but it’s also for personal growth. It’s the acknowledgement that each kind of person feels from the other that make you feel safe, make you feel at ease when you are showing off who you are. It’s okay to be blue if you know that the green people appreciate that quality.

It’s okay to be me if I know and expect the other people to have a positive view upon my qualities and not, as you mentioned, if I expect you to see all my negative sides, why should I enjoy being together with you?

Maureen: And to build on that, not only is it enjoying, but pulling from the ecosynomics and vibrancy constructs.

Unless I feel safe and appreciated, I’m not going to work with you. to my highest potential. It [00:15:00] does seem crucial and it’s not something we do innately and it’s not something in many corporate cultures I’ve seen.

Bjorn: Yeah, I totally agree. I like the word being fully who you are. Sometimes I see that these are words very often used around the concept of psychological safety.

At the same time, very often in organization, the contract between the employer and then employees. It’s basically an economic contract for delivering some kind of product, huh? Not a contract for being fully who you are. But, in my point of view, I think the organizations today, the good organizations today, they are more and more able to give space for individual flourishing.

Based upon who you are, your uniqueness around it. For me, this is one way of the, I think it’s important in the future that we have organizations that not only are delivering on economic contract, but also delivering on creating a space for human being to grow their [00:16:00] competence, to live a good life, competence, to interact with others that make others people have a good life and to have a decency and dignity in the work life context around it.

And for me, as a psychologist, it’s easy to have some kind of passion for these kind of dimension, because as a psychologist, we are a bit more humanistic oriented than economically oriented. And parts of my concept brings that humanity to people. It makes people aware that even though we are producing shoes, the way we are talking together, the way we are working together has a significant impact for the individual growth and wellbeing and the world will be better.

My point to you, if we are able to also take care of that kind of dimensions in the work life context.

Maureen: I may want good things, but my employment contract, my agreement with my employer or with my board is to deliver X results. And I think the thing that we’re really honing in on is it’s not just a nice to do.

There’s an absolute linkage between [00:17:00] creating these kinds of conditions where humans thrive in the workplace and the profitability that those are inextricably linked because employees can show up and do their best work.

Bjorn: I totally agree and you invited me into this kind of conversation. communication also, because I have been doing some kind of research, especially in the cross cultural area.

One of the differences between Norway and most, you might say, Western, European, American, England oriented organization are the dimension called task orientation, people orientation. It’s in Hofstadter’s work, he talk about femininity, which is a bit more people orientation. And Norway is a society that is relatively feminine in its orientation.

It’s very people oriented, while US It’s a very much, much performance in that kind of situation, a bit more competitive oriented, economically oriented in the way it’s being organized. So to work with the well being of individuals in a recent context has been a very dominant [00:18:00] character, you might say, for very many reasons.

We were talking about delegation earlier today, and when you are delegating to a person, you basically show them, I trust you, you have the freedom to decide how to do this kind of thing. With that kind of freedom, you are free to choose and act and be deciding for yourself how you are going to organize your own kind of work to deliver the product you want.

That kind of freedom fulfills many of what you call psychological needs for a human being. When the Scandinavian society, I think all. Both Norway, Denmark and Sweden in the 70s created some kind of laws for involvement that if you’re going to do some changes and it has effect on employees, you have a law that says that you have to involve, listen to them and have them into dialogue in order to craft how it should happen.

And that kind of law was based upon idea of psychological needs. What do a person need to live a full life as an employee? And autonomy [00:19:00] is part of that, which is the other side of delegation around it. And that kind of regulation law that happened in the Scandinavian settings in the 70s had huge implication for leadership development.

Because then suddenly the leaders were trained to, How do I involve, how do I give these kind of people freedom? How do I reinforce them when they succeed based upon their own kind of self managing, their own kind of work, etc. And I have to say that after 50 years, this is an integrated part, so much integrated that you can talk about a culture of leadership, where involvement and delegation, freedom for the individuals to craft their own kind of work is a must.

It’s essential thing. You cannot succeed in a Norwegian context without acting in line with these kind of ideas. And we see that very clearly when you get people from aboard getting into a managerial position. And if they come from societies who are a bit more top down [00:20:00] oriented, they are used to sending decisions by mail.

And if you send decisions by mail in Norway, we just put them in an archive. We don’t read them, basically. But we put them in an archive in case they ask if we have got some kind of message. Because we don’t take it seriously. Such kind of written decision making around it.

Maureen: Interesting, the origin of autonomy and why and how that was built into the construct.

Yeah,

Bjorn: it is. It’s also an illustration for different reasons, different causes for changing behavior in organization. Sometimes the regulations and laws became the norms. And over time, the competence of the leader will align with these kind of norms around, yeah. Other times you get leaders who like to think that they would like to lead people and through leading people in a good way, they can achieve results and then they are growing their own kind of competence for acting with acknowledgement and respect and taking care of their employees in an authentic [00:21:00] caring way, which creates a work life situation, which is much more related to the individual interaction between the leader and the employee.

Which is a contrast between Norway and U. S. where we see much more institutionalized regulations while we in the U. S. context see very much is dependent on what the individual leader is doing.

Maureen: You work predominantly as a practitioner and yet I’ve heard the thread of research through everything you’ve talked about.

Can you share a little bit more about that? that hybrid practitioner researcher role.

Bjorn: Yeah. What I’ve been very keen on is that we need to develop a shift from the research where academics have some theoretical questions, and then they ask for practitioner coming with, you may say, data and empirical thing.

I fancy the idea that the practitioners have some kind of work going on, which is interesting. And then the academics, they start looking upon what are they doing in a practice that is new, but is [00:22:00]interesting. One example of how I, as a practitioner, have been able to bring this kind of tradition more contextualized into academic research happened just recently.

You know, I love to be at conferences like ILA conference we are here today, but at conferences I sometimes listen to people present something. And last year there was a guy from Canada named Rob Elkington. He was presenting his ideas about writing about the African philosophy Ubuntu. And now he wanted to write a case book on that.

And Ubuntu is, in short, I am because you are because we are, which implies that the humanity of individuals is really evolves through the social interaction. And when he told about this kind of thing, I recognized that back home in Norway, I had an African consultant as a client who was running my diversity icebreaker concept combined with Ubuntu.

And I went to Rob, said, well, if you want to write a case book on Ubuntu, maybe you should talk with Kwame in Norway. He has been doing that for 2000 [00:23:00] people. Rob was open for that idea. So we created a Zoom meeting. He got to know Kwame and he said, this is probably the world’s largest organizational developmental process with Ubuntu.

I need to do research, Rob said. So he got funded, uh, research activities interviewed 25. of the employees and the leaders two months ago, and now he starts working on the results. And the results shows up, followership came up as a very essential component here. And I started talking with Rob, do you think that followership was an idea that evolved from Norwegian employees?

Well, Rob said, at least that’s the way we understood it. But there’s no concept on followership in a Norwegian work life context, I say. So this is a really an external, American oriented perspective on the practice you see in a Norwegian context. In Norway, we talk about employeeship, not followership. And the employeeship is when an individual take responsibility for his work context, take [00:24:00] care of the results for the organization, and their colleagues, but also the leader.

Because they have an idea that they have the responsibility to deliver due to what the organization has promised society to deliver around it. This is an interesting, very interesting research we are doing here. It’s a good dialogue between Rob and me involving the practitioner that really stirs this kind of idea.

But it also illustrates one of the components that I find interesting in international research. When I realized that followership is an extremely essential part of all kind of leadership thinking for the time being in the U. S. context. And when I get home to Norway, no one has heard about followership.

It really made me trigger to try to write something what’s happening in the Norwegian context. Employeeship is one of those kind of cultural, you might say, feeling of accountability that each kind of employer have that is [00:25:00] contextualized in the culture with delegation, in the culture with trust. And I started to say, I need to publish something on that.

And then, uh, Accidentally, Vernon Press visited one of my presentations in Brighton for a conference there, and they asked me whether I could write a book based upon what I presented. And I said, I can write a book about Norway. I said, at last, I can write a book about Norway. What are we doing in Norway?

We don’t have followership, but employeeship. We have a society with high trust. Who have women on boards, who have been taking the lead on some of these elements on the women around it. Who have a society where individuals probably flourish more in a normal context than you find in very many performance oriented society.

So I asked Vernon Press Do you mind me editing a book called Look to Norway, storytelling about interesting leadership practices, organizational practices, that we in Norway think is important to tell, because you think that the international audience would appreciate it. And since I’ve been going back and forth to the U.

[00:26:00] S. 25 times, and I’ve been visiting most European countries, I thought I could have the idea of trying to be an editor for people in Norway, Could write about what I thought could be good stories, good examples, good understanding on servant leadership, on employeeship, involvement, flourishing of people, humanistic perspective in organization, et cetera.

So for the time being, I have six months time where I invite everyone in Norway to come to me, suggest chapters, and then we will have a public dialogue around what kind of chapters is valuable to be presented here. Do we have some kind of chapters worth telling? Do we think that there will be people outside Norway who want to read?

Well, Norway and Norwegians are looked upon being a very humble people, humble society, who doesn’t stand up and brag about themselves. We are, do not talk that very much, etc. So it’s, it’ll be nice to write a book where we talk loud about what we are doing. And maybe it also can inspire people in [00:27:00] Netherlands to write a book, Look to the Netherlands, because in Netherlands, they are doing quite interesting thing.

And maybe the community oriented development in Italy can be also presented in a book called Look to Italy. So, my idea is to make each kind of country proud, to identify their own kind of unique practices, but also take responsibility to share these kind of practices for an international audience, in order to promote exchange of learning in between countries.

Maureen: I may look to Norway and say this is what they do better and this is what Italy does better and I try to grab those things without understanding the decades long context.

Bjorn: Totally agree with you. And one of the things that I have done wrong is that I try to use my tools just the way I did at home when I went abroad.

I did that first time in Bosnia, then I tried it out in the Middle East, and I did it in the international organization, et cetera. And then gradually some people started to use my tool. And today, most of the seminars being held [00:28:00] around in the world is held by other people than me. But now we are in the stage where people in other kind of culture see that your work and your model beyond.

can help us solve the problem we have here in our country. Your model seems to be able to transform the way we are working, addressing the needs and the challenges we have here that you do not see from a Norwegian context. So for example, these days I’m working together with a lady called Joanne Barnes, who say that I would like to see how this kind of communication interaction can be used when we are addressing power issues in the area of D.

1. B. Because there are some elements or norms of respect for diversity, respect for differences. And the idea of an equal understanding in your concept, but in the DIB area, we have also power differences. If you can train people to be more clever to learn across differences with your model, then we probably can develop competence for addressing microaggression [00:29:00] and power use and power misuse in an American context.

This is an example of what you say. She is, uh, heavily contextualized in that kind of setting. And then she asked, how can I use your model in my set? And that is probably the only way that our concept can flourish, not by copying what we are done in Norway, but being an element in the growth or change in the different kinds of contexts around it.

Maureen: Thank you. How would our listeners find more about you and your work?

Bjorn: They can go into the homepage called diversityicebreaker. com and then they will see what is written there. This kind of assessment, people who are leaders who want to use it can just buy it on the shelf from diversityicebreaker. com.

Maureen: Bjorn, thank you so much, and I also want to thank the International Leadership Association for making this interview possible.

Bjorn: Thank you very much.