By Janus Boye
VELUX creates better living environments for people around the world; making the most out of daylight and fresh air.
If you leave the corporate headquarter in any large, complex and global organisation, it’s not unusual to hear headquarters described using terms familiar from any love-hate relationship. Being at the receiving end of directives from HQ, while working hard to make sales goals in local markets can easily lead to despair and frustration.
Andreas Klinke Johannsen is a senior manager at the Copenhagen-based headquarter of VELUX Group and in his experience you need to understand the special HQ reality in order to be successful. As a part of the onboarding process, he requires new team members to work locally as an embedded part of a local team. Might this be the key ingredient that can unlock better collaboration and higher performance?
This posting is based on a conversation with Andreas as he has kindly agreed to share his thinking on leadership in a distributed workplace.
Headquarters has its own reality
Let’s start with an (almost) fictitious example:
It’s Wednesday and a local sales company asks HQ for some tracking to be activated on a new landing page by Monday as that’s the launch day for their new campaign.
This is short notice to HQ which already has other priorities, while the local sales office has an urgent need. This is entirely solvable, but creates friction and while the exact context might be different, it’s happening all the time.
To quote Andreas:
“Being humble towards those who are making the money is often not the HQ mentality”
Andreas has a vast experience with large, complex and global organisations and as a former entrepreneur and senior executive at both digital agencies and software vendors he has experienced first-hand how international organisations really work.
Today at VELUX Group, he works with a truly global perspective in one of Denmark’s largest family-owned businesses with manufacturing and sales organisations in more than 40 countries. Similar to other organisations in the category of roughly 10,000 employees, it’s a complex business where many of the local markets carry different products and approach the market in different ways based on local requirements.
As in many other organisations, Andreas shares the feeling that there is something special to it, when local staff visit HQ and the same goes when HQ staff travels to offices in other countries.
Compared to local sales offices, the pace in headquarters is often slower as it is not as driven by monthly targets. There’s a high pace locally and usually a very operational focus. To be fair, HQ is not necessarily slow, but global solutions are a different beast compared to just serving a given local market. This naturally increases complexity and makes stakeholder management more cumbersome.
Being embedded locally for 2 weeks
Andreas left HQ in Denmark and went to Belgium and worked there as a part of his onboarding experience
During the past years, Andreas has made it a regular part of onboarding new team members, that they need to be embedded in a local sales subsidiary for some time.
A shorter period is better than none, but ideally 2 weeks. 2 days is much better than none. The important part is that the new colleague don’t just travel to, say, Belgium and sit at a desk working on HQ tasks. The employee must be a part of the day-to-day tasks locally, which means attending local meetings, local trade fairs or whatever is happening during the weeks. Solving the tasks that needs dealing with as a part of the local team.
For this to work it requires buy-in from the local marketing director or similar, but so far everyone’s been positive. Upon arrival, the new employees gets a local buddy who then embeds the HQ colleague in the team.
Having gone through this process with several new team members, and also having tried it himself, it’s clear to Andreas that this really helps with collaboration, trust and mutual understanding.
Next steps
On a closing note, Andreas brought up the idea to also do this the other way around: Getting local colleagues to become embedded in HQ for a few days.
If you have any feedback or questions, please do leave a comment below.