Leadership Agility at EWAB
EWAB is an industrial automation company, founded in Sweden in 1970, but with a global footprint. The organization offers the manufacturing sector conveyor solutions, robot cells, and loading devices.
In 2019, after decades of success and innovation, the company faced challenges regarding what services and products to focus on within unprecedented market conditions. This required a shift towards a more agile approach and coherent culture to become more flexible and resilient.
The Challenge
A few urgent questions needed to be answered about new challenges EWAB was facing, both within the organization and externally, as they faced new threats from the wider market. These questions included:
- How frequently do these types of challenges appear in the organization?
- How big is the impact of these challenges? What is the most dramatic potential consequence?
- How is the organization currently addressing/reacting to these challenges? What can be done differently or better?
They figured that getting better results required a shift in organizational culture. But culture is about more than just table football, beanbags, and free snacks.
The Solution
Recognizing the need for leadership agility, Alf Jivegård, EWAB University’s Chief Knowledge Officer, understood that influencing leadership was crucial to shifting the company’s culture. By introducing new leadership behaviors, they could cultivate better narratives, which significantly impact how people react. This would create new success stories to inspire and motivate others.
While leaders shape the environment that fosters the desired culture, they must recognize that they are also components of that environment. Leaders genuinely committed to enhancing their organization should demonstrate an even stronger dedication to their own self-improvement.
agile42 Leadership coach Giuseppe De Simone could not agree more. “We can’t change people,” he says, “we can barely change the person we see in the mirror every morning.” However, we can nudge people’s beliefs through leadership behaviors.
A key component of shaping company culture is developing strong leadership capabilities and evolving with the culture as it changes over time. Leaders must be willing to adapt to the changing needs of the organization. This requires flexibility, creativity, and a willingness to take calculated risks.
A strong foundational education is crucial, especially when starting a new journey. With this in mind, we organized a series of ORGANIC leadership foundations classes. First, the executive team, country managers, and board members participated in the classes. Then, the direct reports to the executive team participated. The program helped the leaders to understand how their inherent cultural dispositions might influence the teams and the whole organization. They learned how to create a safe-to-fail environment and foster a culture of transparency, inspection, creativity, and adaptation.
![](https://www.agile42.com/en/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/06/leadership_training-1030x579.jpg)
The Results
“The classes organized by agile42 and Giuseppe De Simone have helped us in several ways,” explains Alf Jivegård. “There were many important takeaways that we still refer to five years later.”
A key perspective that helped enable leadership agility at EWAB was De Simone’s “Outside-In” view. “I believe we got a small dent in our self-perceptions when we, based on De Simone’s input, reflected on our innovation capability,” Jivegård shared. “What we thought were innovations were actually just product improvements. We were still solving the same old problems for the customer with the same old technology, possibly just with a bit more pizazz”. This insight, he explained, inspired them to look for novel ways to help customers. This led to a deeper dive into data mining and developing connected EWAB systems. One such development, Jivegård believes, can lead to new revenue streams.
According to Jivegård, EWAB’s leadership gained greater self-awareness and alignment through the leadership agility training. This helped them respond better to market demands and business goals.
Jivegård continued, “Another area of awareness was based on the explanation by Giuseppe [De Simone] of the Competing Values Framework. We had a mutual agreement that EWAB had, for at least the last decade, a history of a ‘Doing Things Right’ culture.” Reflecting on this, he acknowledged, “We can see that we have developed an organization where it has become more important to do things right than to do the right things. This has reduced our ability for fast innovations, something we were once good at.” He added, “Again, reflecting back to the ‘Outside-In’ perspective, we have developed a culture to efficiently deliver known and reliable products to our customers, whereas the drive for constant innovation had been forgotten. This has led to a re-start of our R&D work.”
Finally, Jivegård says, the “inside-out” perspective shared by De Simone guided their teams to reflect on why they have ended up in their current situation. “The result was that we questioned processes that were too rigid, inefficient structures, and policy decisions that had long-since passed their ‘best before date”, he explained. “This has led to an even more open working climate”.
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