by Therese Johansson

When I was a young junior leader, I had a pace that was indescribably high. At that time I was privileged to try crazy innovative ideas and I thought myself unstoppable. I was naturally pitted against older senior leaders who had an ironic smile when they had the courage to let me try things that had not been successful before. I like to be efficient and one way for me to become even more efficient was to copy the experiences of others. I did this by looking at which male and female leaders were successful and who had a leadership style I admired. What is so great about really good leaders is that their passion lies in developing people and their resources, this made it easy to get a yes to the question if they wanted to be my mentors.

Multicultural experiences

The years go by and with it comes experience, today I have come to the realization that my senior leaders had been through a few twists and turns and to use a worn sports stick, they knew which "balls" were worth running on and which were better to let go and see how they evolved. My strong conviction is that if we mix young and older skills, the development will be magical. We thus use the strengths of the generations where you try and question seemingly old, proven ideas with experience and competence accumulated over the years. I am a little surprised when we have to work hard to bring diversity into our organizations. When I worked internationally with people from different parts of the world, it was not a question of gender, religion or ethnic origin, it was a question of competence and function.

There are advantages in the differences

In differences such as backgrounds, skills, experiences, talents, personalities in an organization, there are incredible advantages to be gained that create added value in the organization. Woman, man, young, elderly, heterosexual, homosexual, originally Swedish, new Swedish - together our differences become our strength. Develop your leaders to be able to take advantage of the strengths of diversity, create a competitive advantage. The topic I wrote about is; Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), with a focus on the area of diversity. If you have the knowledge, motivation and persistence to develop CSR to become part of the company culture, it increases profitability. There are companies that are good at this, so use the "copy function".