Showing Up When It’s Ugly

Stockholm, 2015. Ten airports, one contact centre, about fifteen people reporting to me across three shifts. Swedavia wants to digitise the whole operation — better tools, an agile way of working, nobody in that building had tried before. Restructuring, in an airport company, during a period when the work is already relentless.

The easy version of leadership here is: set the strategy, brief your direct reports, check in monthly. Stay upstairs. Let the plan cascade.

I didn’t do that, and it wasn’t virtue — it was necessity. When you’re asking a three-shift team to change how they work while the phones never stop ringing, the only thing that convinces anyone you’re serious is being visibly, repeatedly present for the hard shifts, not just the demo days. People don’t follow the strategy document. They follow what you do at 6am on a Tuesday, when nothing’s going right yet.

That new Contact Centre concept was implemented in full in 2018 — after I’d already handed it over. Which tells you something: leading the charge doesn’t mean you’re the one who gets to cut the ribbon. It means you were there often enough, and honestly enough, that the people who did cut the ribbon still trusted the plan when you weren’t in the room anymore.

That’s the piece that starts to trouble me, though. Because “be relentlessly present, sell the vision constantly, carry the energy for everyone” is also, if you’re not careful, a description of exactly how transformational leaders burn out their own people — or worse, mistake their own conviction for truth. That’s the story I need to tell next, and it’s the one that isn’t flattering.