Annicken is former Chief Culture Officer Tandberg and Culture Ambassador Cisco, an author, keynote speaker and culture & leadership Strategist with 20-years’ experience of building inspired, high performing organizational cultures in some of the world’s most successful companies. She is Founder & CEO of Corporate Spring and an Executive advisor for Fortune 500 leaders.
Annicken is author of the novel – Fly, Butterfly – which was released in the US in October 2019 and became an Amazon bestseller on its first week. The Norwegian translation – Fly, Sommerfugl – was released on August 20th. She is Business magazine writer (Business Insider, Huffington Post) and co-author of the book Creative Superpowers.
Annicken is on a mission to make the (corporate) world a happier place. She lives in Scandinavia and California. Norwegian of origin, global of spirit.
Annicken and I agree how soul is becoming a pivotal area of focus for the modern organisation.
I asked her what soul means to her?
Soul means the deepest of the deepest to me. When you get to the core of a human being, a team, or a group of people, and you uncover what really matters. The word culture is by many considered to be rather vague and superficial, but when we boil it down to values, heart and soul it gets much less superficial. When we talk about values, we typically refer to what the company stands for and what guides their mindsets and behaviours. When we talk about heart – or purpose; we usually refer to a company’s reason to exist, beyond pure profit and shareholder value. And when we talk about soul; it is all of the above, plus the art of creating an emotional connection and sense of belonging to the true spirit of the company.
The soul of an organisation is what really connects people on a deeper level. You can say; “we’re like this, our culture is like that, this is how we do things”…but to get real commitment, you need to be able to connect with peoples’ feelings, so they actually feel it in their body; “I want to be a part of this, I belong here. This is me. This is us.” If you have a group of people who are so strongly aligned and they’re so passionate about not only what they do, but who they are, what they believe in and where they are heading, there is no limit to what they can do.
The data is there to support the view of what this kind of engagement, passion and joy does for performance. Gallup is a great source. One number I use frequently is that highly engaged teams can achieve up to 50% higher performance than those who are not. When people are truly engaged, they are inspired to give it their all, do their best – and as a consequence deliver great performance.
So, I think it’s very clear that a corporation’s ‘soul’ is important to the business, but we still seem to have a long way to go before this becomes a top priority for most business leaders. We cannot force this insight on anyone, we have to meet people where they are. But the fact that many leaders are starting to pay attention to their culture is definitely a step in the right direction.
Can you give us some examples of soul in meeting business challenges and driving performance?
I was hired as Chief Culture Officer for Tandberg in 2002. My job description was to take care of the corporate soul. The Chairman and leadership team were clearly ahead of their time since they already then realized the importance of having a “company soul”. When I joined, Tandberg was 300 people in 15 countries and within the next 8 years we grew the organization to 1800 people in 50 countries. I put a team together, naming us ‘People and Culture’ (I didn’t want to call us ‘Human Resources’ as we were dealing with human beings not “resources”.) From the beginning, I was very clear about the fact that culture needs to start on the top, with the leadership team: “If we’re going to create this kind of culture, the leadership team needs to be committed and demonstrate these kind of behaviours ourselves.” Not everyone gets that, but thankfully the leadership team at Tandberg did.
While growing the company, our recruitment process was rigorous; every candidate had to go through 8 to 10 interviews, and I was usually the last one interviewing them. Every interviewer was asked to have the ‘culture hat’ on. Even in the engineering department, who were really focused on technical skills of course, they were just as much looking for culture fit. Our mindset was that even if a candidate was brilliant at what they did, if they weren’t willing or able to share their brilliance and help others learn and develop too, they wouldn’t be right for us.” We had defined Tandberg ‘values and attitudes’ together with all employees, and we were extremely conscious in making sure that whoever was hired were sharing those values.
Once people were hired, they were invited to our onboarding programme, much more than just the normal first day administration processes. We flew everyone from around the whole world into three days in Oslo, in our headquarters. We designed a packed agenda that started with: “This is where we come from. This is our history. These are our values. This is our heart and soul, and this is where we’re heading. All employees learned from day one that they would be playing a crucial role in shaping our culture and contributing to the success of the company. That created an enormous amount of energy and pride.
We had people discuss the values and what it meant in practice, and designed activities so that people could engage with and get to know each other. In the evenings, we took them out. We had drinks, we had fun and someone from top management always came along. We did silly things and were very informal in the way we did it.
After three days of interactive work and lots of energy, I would stand outside and watch people as they walked out to the bus. They always look different compared to when they had arrived; in their eyes, the way they walked, the way they talked. I could see they had become ‘Tandbergers’.
We also had our own leadership programme called ‘The Tandberg Way of Leading’. So, we would position it as: “We want to build this culture, this is our soul. This is not only how we want to operate it’s about how we want people to feel. What will that take from us, as leaders?” During this program, all leaders got to learn, reflect, and discuss what it meant to be a culture leader at Tandberg, and what they could do to make sure our company soul stayed alive.
By having leaders and new employees through these extensive programs and constantly reminding everyone in the company about our company soul, it got quite easy to see if someone didn’t fit in or stopped living the values and attitudes. By being so clear about who we were, the culture reinforced and self-corrected itself along the way. It needn’t be me, or even the manager, often colleagues would notice and point it out too. Sometimes people would get picked up by a colleague: “Hey, come on, that’s not really the Tandberg Way is it?” It was always important for us to emphasize that we were talking about values, not rules. People could show up differently, but they could not violate our core beliefs.
It was the culture that made Tandberg so hugely successful. Over a period of 10 years, we had 30% annual growth. In fact, in the last two years before we were sold to Cisco, in 2010, we had 50% annual growth. We were awarded the Best Place to Work in Norway three years in a row, and we were in the top 50 workplaces in Europe. People were queuing up to work for us. Even in a period where it was hard to get people, we never had any problem and we got the most brilliant people. There were a whole range of wonderful new companies, spin-offs, that emerged out of Tandberg, and a lot of my former Tandberg colleagues work in these companies or are still working in Cisco, who last year was awarded the world’s best workplace by Great Place to Work Institute.
The soul we created in Tandberg is now living and growing within multiple companies around the world, which reminds me of the beautiful thing about “soul”; it can live on forever…
This interview is one of over 55 I’ve completed this year with a mix of past customers and other leading industry figures.
Do connect with me on Linked in or get in touch via our website if you’d like to know more about the research findings and/or explore how to drive your business forward…with soul.
