Summit Case studies
From unconscious dynamics to a shared responsibility in the leadership team
How Summit helped a leadership team in Holstebro Municipality confront its own behaviour and take shared responsibility through leadership team development, Hogan Assessments, and business psychology facilitation.
When Søren Landkildehus took over responsibility for business and employment in Holstebro Municipality, a new leadership team came with it, and with that, a new task. Five leaders, each responsible for important management duties, now had to function as one unified team, and while the ambition was clear, the path there was not. Collaboration within the group was not working as well as the task demanded, and gradually something in the dynamic itself began to take up more space than the leadership work. To get to the bottom of it, Søren enlisted Summit’s help for a programme that combined leadership team development, Hogan Assessments and business psychology facilitation.
A leadership team under pressure after new positions
The challenge had its roots in a reshuffle that took place when Søren took on the business area in addition to the employment area. The change brought with it a new reporting structure, in which, among others, a former manager now reported to him, while several of the other leaders also changed position. On paper, it looked like a fairly ordinary organisational adjustment, but in practice the changed positions set off a pattern of behaviour that gradually became difficult to ignore.
It showed up most clearly in meetings, where the way the leaders spoke to one another began to take up too much space. The dynamic did not stay within the meeting room, though; it followed them into everyday working life, and for Søren it gradually became clear that something in the way the group interacted required more than simply asking everyone to tighten up.
Beneath the surface, it was mainly about two things: a good deal of informal power being negotiated within the group, and a tendency to shift responsibility elsewhere when things became difficult. Dynamics like these are rarely a sign of a lack of competence; rather, they arise because even experienced leaders react when positions, responsibilities and relationships all shift at once. Left unnoticed, they will sooner or later affect the quality of decisions and the group’s ability to take shared responsibility for its core task.
It therefore became necessary to create a space where the group could take a closer look at its own behaviour, not just at what it wanted to do, but at what actually happened between people when the task, the relationships and the pressure were all present at the same time.
A programme built on Hogan, feedback and facilitated team sessions
Summit designed a programme that linked individual development with development of the leadership team. It began with individual interviews with each member of the leadership team, after which the leaders completed a Hogan Assessment and received individual feedback on their profiles, a process Søren himself went through on equal footing with the rest of the group.
Hogan was used as a professional mirror for behaviour, motivation, strengths and overused strengths, giving the leaders a more precise language for how they can come across to others, particularly when collaboration becomes difficult or pressure rises. An important point along the way was that a Hogan profile tells the individual how others experience their behaviour in a given context, which is exactly why it is something one can work with.
In parallel, the group worked on team development, engaging in joint team sessions that explored its similarities, differences and overall dynamic, drawing on Patrick Lencioni’s work on trust, conflict, commitment and accountability as a concrete framework for discussing what was really going on between them.
The programme also included individual coaching sessions and facilitated three-way conversations, in which Søren and a business psychologist from Summit worked together with each individual leader to address concrete relational and leadership themes.
As a business psychologist, Summit’s consultant was able to hold the space in a way that created both a sense of safety and a sense of seriousness, making it possible to work with what is often hard to grasp from the inside: informal power, responsibility, vulnerability and the concrete behaviour that shapes collaboration within a leadership team.
From self-awareness to shared responsibility
The programme made it clear that leadership team development is not simply about agreeing on a shared set of words. Most leadership teams can nod along to a set of values and still find that their behaviour looks quite different when it actually counts, which is why it was essential to work with the behaviour itself and not only with the intentions behind it.
Over the course of the programme, the leaders gradually became more aware of their own patterns, and this awareness proved to be lasting. In time, that self-awareness became a shared point of reference, and whenever an unhelpful pattern resurfaced, the group could discuss it with greater precision and less defensiveness. The Hogan profile therefore did not become an explanation that locked anyone into a fixed role, but rather a starting point for adjusting what each person brought into a given situation.
As the leaders gradually dared to be more open about their own blind spots, it changed the quality of the collaboration, and Søren describes that shift like this:
Disagreement could increasingly be used constructively, as something the group could step into and out of again, rather than letting it settle as a weight over meetings, and at the same time the group became better at making decisions, sharper at prioritising and clearer in how it distributed responsibility.
The programme also gave a more precise basis for assessing the fit between each leader, their role and the group, and this led to adjustments in the composition of the leadership team, so that the group and the task were better matched. What remained was a leadership team that saw its own behaviour, to a much greater extent, as part of the leadership task it existed to solve.
Seeing the dynamic you are part of
For Søren, it was essential that the process was facilitated by someone from the outside. When a leadership team is itself part of the dynamic, it can be difficult to see what is actually going on, and the external perspective created a different kind of seriousness in the room, one that allowed the group to work more directly with its own behaviour than it could have done on its own.
Summit’s contribution lay not only in the methods themselves, but in the combination of business psychology expertise, Hogan Assessments, facilitation and the ability to keep the group engaged in the conversations it needed to have, and it was precisely this combination that made it possible to work with both individual and shared responsibility within the same programme.
The programme in Holstebro Municipality shows that leadership team development is rarely about improving the mood alone. It is about creating a group that can see itself more clearly, put words to what is difficult and take shared responsibility for the way it works. And when a leadership team reaches that point, collaboration does not just become easier, it also becomes more useful for the task that needs to be carried out together.