Forca
Interview with Jes Damsted
Background
Forca is a thriving Danish service business for occupational pension funds and life insurance companies. Forca serves 11 different companies with over 450,000 clients. It emerged out of a pension fund serving only clients from the public sector and transitioned to serve pension funds with clients from both public and private sectors. Since 2006, then, Forca has operated as a commercial organisation pursuing a client-focused approach to tap into a growing market need.
Today, Forca is jointly owned by three occupational pension funds. This shift into being a privately-owned business was seen to be innovative and cutting edge in Denmark, but has nonetheless proven commercially viable. In the coming year, for example, Forca will work with a substantial new customer to deliver a pension fund with 20,000 clients within the financial sector.
With the creation of this new organisation came the expected challenges any newly established group might anticipate: a young team of senior leaders with little experience of working together, difficult cultural challenges as the old blood mixes with the new, and a sense of urgency about implementing a new business strategy swiftly..
Jes Damsted, CEO of newly formed Forca, embraced these challenges with vigour, keen to apply his personal experience of and belief in the importance of high performing teams and their impact on organisational performance.
Solution
Recognising that senior leadership effectiveness was critical to building success across a business with no existing structure, Jes created an exploratory team comprised of senior and middle managers to outline the strategic critical challenges Forca faced as a newly formed company.
Jes had experienced MBTI in the past in his own professional development and appreciated the positive nature of the instrument to express the unique preferences of all individuals. He was struck by the impact these preferences have on how people address and react to problems and issues in a business setting. Acknowledging that his new team of senior leaders was struggling with trust and empowerment issues, Jes viewed MBTI as an effective way of bringing his senior leadership team together. He saw the importance of their understanding themselves better, and understanding and respecting the preferences of their fellow managers, as a means of building better communication and collaboration at the highest level of the organisation - so driving the business forward.
Forca partnered with OPP® to help them build the senior team. This work incorporated everyone's completing the MBTI instrument and individual feedback sessions for all managers. OPP also ran a full-day team session using real-life scenarios for role plays in which leaders began to see their MBTI preferences take shape.
One by one, the initially sceptical managers began to see the value of their increased self-awareness and their improved understanding of their peers. They began to see how these new insights were going to help them move Forca forward, and recognised that the MBTI instrument had catalysed important discussions, rather than being simply another personality tool.
Business Benefit
OPP's solution brought balance to Forca's senior leadership team. This group now operates more efficiently to address issues, with a better understanding of themselves and how they address issues and a new-found respect for their colleagues and their colleagues' approaches to communication and problem-solving.
This shift has been remarkable for Jes as CEO of the organisation. "Issues that used to take several days or several weeks to resolve are now discussed freely in a single meeting."
The communication vehicles within Forca have also shifted. Since completing OPP's teambuilding experience, the leadership team has compartmentalised its meetings to separate strategic & development discussions from operational discussions - something the young company had not entertained in its earlier days. "This was a direct result of the team build. We came to understand that in order to be effective, we need to apply what we had learned to our meeting management within Forca, as much as we needed to build them into our interpersonal relationships. This shift in how we run meetings has alleviated a significant amount of stress that had been bubbling up within the management team. For this in itself, we are grateful for what we learned through the team build."
Use of the MBTI instrument has been successfully cascaded from the CEO to become an essential tool at all levels within Forca. According to Jes, any intervention brought into an organisation must be anchored at the senior management team level, otherwise it is likely to become just another personality test or a one-off training experience offered through a particular department.
As a CEO, Jes has benefited from the incorporation of MBTI into Forca's business. During the team building session, in particular, he was able to see first hand how his senior team members react differently to similar situations and how each of their reactions can add value to problem-solving discussions.
"It is easier to manage having had this insight. Trust has improved considerably across the team and each member is empowered to bring his unique styles into the management of the company. The team is able to get to the core of problems much more effectively and efficiently with a collective ownership of the final solution. I feel much better knowing that my next level of leadership has solid foundations of trust, respect and talent to problem-solve on my behalf."
Forca remains committed to OPP and MBTI, with senior managers currently bringing MBTI and team building experiences into their own teams to further cascade the insights they have gained around interpersonal relationships and communication.
For more information about OPP's teambuilding opportunities or the MBTI instrument, contact 0845 603 9958 to speak with an OPP representative.
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