Your Team Has The Answers with Ulf Hahnemann
Ulf Hahnemann, Chief HR Officer, AP Moller Maersk
In 2016, Ulf Hahnemann became the head of HR for AP Moller Maersk, a global shipping company responsible for those big blue container ships that carry about 20% of the world’s trade. Ulf launched his career in Human Resources at Mars in 1989, and has lived and worked all over the world including Norway, Australia and in Tennessee in the US prior to accepting the role of Chief Human Resources Officer at Maersk. In this interview, Ulf shares some brilliant stories and lessons learned.
Create a clear, simple strategy
Carlos: Do you remember when you led your first team?
Ulf: Yes, I do. I led my first team when I became a sales manager for Mars in Norway. I led 8 people in the Impulse team who managed impulse buying of chocolate in gas stations and kiosks in Norway.
Carlos: Reflecting on that, is there a lesson learned, an event or incident that sticks with you?
Ulf: There is, actually. It was quite a forming time in my life or at least in my career. My brother-in-law, an American, was in the Euro fast food business. He was probably 25 years older than me and was visiting Norway just when I’d been assigned my new team, and he asked me, “What are you going to measure them on? What’s the goal with this team?”
I came up with a lot of things I was going to do with them. As I listed off all the things I’d planned, he answered, “No, that’s not going to work. You have to focus on three things. There are 3 things that drive sales with that team.”
I said, “That sounds too simple.”
Then he gave me the task of figuring it out overnight. At breakfast the next morning he asked me, “Have you worked it out?”
I replied, “Maybe it’s the number of visits each salesperson does. Then the number of displays in each store, and maybe the number of each distribution point of chocolate in each store.”
He said, “You’re going to do that for the next 2 years. That’s how you’ll measure them, and nothing more.” And I thought that was crazy, but I tried it. And it worked.
Focus on 3 critical metrics
Carlos: So wait, he asked you to think about it overnight, you came up with those 3 things, and they were exactly right?
Ulf: He didn’t really question them, he thought they were good enough. He was more interested in me rationalizing it. I think they were about 80% correct. His point was, you focus on those 3 things and you do nothing else, that’s your job. You get everybody else focused on those 3 KPIs for the next 2 years. But the truth is, I did it. And we increased sales week by week by week. I learned that I always focus on 3 things that I do. Always. And I think the team really got obsessed with these numbers. I think we probably changed one or two of the KPIs over time, of course, but work became easy in some ways. We uncomplicated it by focusing on a very few things that were really instrumental in driving sales. Then we had some fun around it, a lot of competitions, etc.
Carlos: As you know about me, I’m a fiend for focus. “Let’s focus on the things that matter most”, right? One of the barriers I encounter is people who say, “Yes, BUT, all these other things matter, too. Certainly we are going to be held accountable for them” What’s the conversation you have with the person who says that?
Ulf: The reason why it’s difficult for people, including myself, at times is that it’s counterintuitive. It’s just not human nature to focus on 3 things. It doesn’t make sense that that can be really effective. What I say to people is come up with these 1, 2 or 3 things that you’re going to do. It doesn’t mean you’re not going to come up with other stuff because that’s just the way that life and business. There are other things that happen and other things you have to focus on as well. But these are the 3 things that really matter. So forget this notion that nothing else matters, that’s not the case, but these are the things that really matter.
Carlos: So do they become decision tools? For example, when we have to invest money somewhere and therefore not somewhere else, can you use it as a decision aid?
Ulf: Absolutely. Basically it becomes your strategy. It’s a simple way of talking about strategy. It’s a prioritizing tool in saying therefore we’re going to invest in these areas or spend most of our time on these things. It doesn’t mean that there won’t be other things that come up but you don’t need to talk so much about them, you just do them.
Learning from mistakes
Carlos: When, along your leadership journey, did you make a choice about what to do or not to do that didn’t work out as well as the big 3 did?
Ulf: I don’t know if it was specifically a decision, but I was definitely put in positions where I wasn’t particularly good. So, at the time I was an Organizational Development and Design director for Mars in Europe, and I was an individual contributor doing a lot of org design and managing restructurings, and I was really not very good at it. I realized at the time that I’m not good on my own. I’m good on a team, and I’m good at leading teams, but being by myself as an individual consultant I was horrible.
Carlos: Of course, that’s exactly what I do! So teams and teamwork, you feel like that’s your milieu where you really do well. Was there a time leading a team where you look back and shake your head think, man I wish I hadn’t done that? Let’s assume you learned a valuable lesson from it, are there things you look back on and think if I were to do it again I might make a different choice?
Ulf: Yes. There was a time when I was leading a team in Mars Petcare North America. I drove this team like I had all the answers. I was giving everybody directions. I didn’t have great people on the team or at least I didn’t necessarily get the best out of them because I was giving them all the direction, I had all the answers and they just needed to go and do. It suddenly occurred to me that that didn’t work. They were very unhappy and it was chaotic. We didn’t achieve anything. We had lots of conflict. And I suddenly realized that the role of the leader wasn’t to have the answer. The role of the leader was to bring people together to create the capacity for us to create change in the company. And my role was to bring the right people together, to create an environment of trust where people could be at their best and that they had the answers, or we had them together. That’s how I’ve tried to lead ever since.
Bring a team together with the right competencies, and build capability. You build a team that has an ability to affect or impact the organization to enable a strategy, or has the capacity to do that, and have a positive impact on the organization versus a leader coming up with a lot of workstreams, actions or decisions, etc. I think it’s much more powerful to create an atmosphere where people feel trusted and comfortable enough to use their brains and intelligence, and they come up with the solutions that are the right ones for the organization.
Human Resources as an agent for change
Carlos: Creating the capacity for the organization to change: do you believe that, as an HR person, HR has that, as part of its role, to be an agent of change for organizations?
Ulf: Absolutely. I have no doubt that that’s the role of HR. At AP Moller Maersk, which was quite an old-fashioned shipping company that has been incredibly successful but was stuck in a situation where the share prices hadn’t appreciated in a decade in a very difficult industry and capital-intensive industry, my job as head of HR, and my team’s job, is to create the conditions for change. And that’s in many different aspects. I see myself and my team as absolutely responsible for the results of the company, and if we’re stuck then our job is to enable us to get unstuck.
Carlos: Change is considered a discipline. There are people who do change management. Do you have generalists on your team as well as specialists? And you hold everyone equally responsible for being agents of change even if they’re a generalist?
Ulf: Yes, for sure. I think we all have to anchor ourselves in the success of the enterprise but also in the strategy, and do our work in a way that slowly but surely moves the corporation or the organization, which is then made up of individuals or teams, in the direction of where we want to go. That’s everybody’s responsibility.
Leading Remote Teams
Carlos: Speaking of change, COVID, lockdowns, pandemic, etc. How have you adapted? What have you learned about yourself, about leading teams in the face of this pandemic?
Ulf: We have 750-780 HR people across the world. I myself have a colleague in Colorado, one in Spain. It was already a remote team. But still I think I have learned to be even better at proactively following up with people and checking in with them. Checking in with them individually but also doing team check-ins on how we are doing mentally, etc. But I also would say that I have always worked from home, personally, a lot. I’ve worked remotely a lot and worked with people who were remote a lot so I don’t think it is significantly different.
Carlos: What is it about you, both as a team member and leading a team, that has caused you to feel that that is where you are most effective?
Ulf: I think my talent or main competence is bringing the best out of people. Making people believe that they have the answer. I’m much more comfortable doing that than having the answer myself. Let me give you an example. I was asked to be an interim general manager for a Mars Pet division, which is a $500,000,000 business which I did for about 14 months. This was a business that was in dire straits – really, really in trouble. I was asked on a Sunday night in January. It was announced on Monday Morning. The CEO of that division was asked to leave. I was the head of HR being announced as the interim CEO.
On Tuesday, everybody asked me for the solution to get out of this catastrophe. We were declining by 6% in revenue. The Friday before I was the head of HR and nobody asked me then. Four days later everybody asked me the answer, which made no sense, and frankly said something about those who were asking to some extent. I was really shocked about this. It made me nervous because I really didn’t know what to do.
After a few days, I decided that my job was to help the organization believe that we had the answer in-house. We didn’t need anyone to come in and tell us the answer. The answer wasn’t with me, and it wasn’t with the management team, but it was collectively somewhere within the organization.
We created an unusual project team. For example, we took one of the lowest level sales planning managers because the sales forecast was a political number. It wasn’t true. I wanted the truth. We added the sales director, the marketing head, some research people, etc. They worked for 4 or 5 weeks on analysis and some solutions, then we decided on a strategy. We took 16 brands and decided to focus on 5. I wanted 3, but they insisted on 5. We called it Drive Five and it became super successful. My point is, everyone was looking to me and I knew I hadn’t a clue what to do. But I did know that I had this talent of getting people to believe that we knew what to do as a team. There were 700 people in the office who got super-excited about this process, and we turned it around.
Carlos: Was there anybody who influenced that thought? Was there a mentor or a leader who role modeled that for you or was it just a situation-based inspiration?
Parking Lot Mentor
Ulf: Carlos, I know exactly what happened. It was that Tuesday when everyone questioned me, my second day in the position. They wanted me to actually sit in the CEO’s seat to show that somebody was in charge. I thought it was crazy. Mars has an open office, and I was already sitting in the management circle area, but they wanted me to literally sit in his chair at his desk. I thought this was nonsense, but it showed me the psyche of the organization, the fear, the search for solutions and leadership. But I thought we needed almost the opposite.
When I got home that Tuesday night I was scared. I didn’t sleep well. The next morning I drove to the office at 8:00 in the morning, I sat in the parking lot, and I looked at this building with 700 people in it, and I thought, I can’t go in there. I’m frozen. I’m paralyzed. I cannot go in there because everyone is looking to me for the solutions and I didn’t have one. I hadn’t a clue what to do.
So I called a headhunter I knew in New York. A woman in her late 60s. I told her I was sitting in the parking lot, I can’t do this, and I think I’m going to call my boss in McLean, Virginia and tell him I can’t do this, they have the wrong guy. After about an hour of speaking with her, she asked me what the leader who can solve this looks like, and how this leader acts. I described it for her – somebody who could come in and facilitate this, and get the people to provide the answers because I thought the expertise was in the house.
Then she does the classic trick and asks me to role-play as this person. So I acted this person, who was probably myself. Then I gathered everyone for a town hall meeting on Wednesday morning, The first thing I did was tell everyone that needed to stop asking me for the solution because I didn’t have it no matter how many times I’m asked, but we have it together and we’re going to find the wisdom here. And we did.
Carlos: What a great story! It was a headhunter that was able to hear you and then ask that wonderful question, “What would that leader look like”.
Ulf: We all have it within us mentally.
Change - Systemic Impact
Carlos: Great example of one person having an impact with the mere asking of a question. Are there other leaders who have influenced your thinking and philosophy of leadership?
Ulf: I had a session in Austria with Linda Gratton from the London Business School who is an iconic professor in HR. She was teaching a group of 30-40 people which really shaped my views around HR. I have used her principals ever since. The main themes were around an organization being systemic: everything is linked. We think we have impact on one thing, but we have to impact multiple things at the same time and affect the system.
The other thing was moving an organization from the cycle of despair to the cycle of hope by building trust in the organization. This is exactly the principle I’ve used at Maersk.
Building trust in a team
Carlos: I think a lot about trust because I’ve encountered a lot of bad thinking on the subject. I think we have to consider it when we’re building teams and organizations. I think there are more effective ways to build trust, and there are less effective ways. So, gathering everyone in a town hall and saying, “Ok everyone we’re going to do a trust fall to build trust” or going out on a ropes course. Those are fun things to do, and they help you feel better in relationships, but they don’t necessarily help you build organizational trust in my experience.
Ulf: I used interviews and my onboarding program to help form a hypothesis of what our organization needed to change, and to get some inspiration and ideas of what we needed to strengthen our weaknesses. Also to determine what the level of trust was in the organization which is more intuitive than anything else. We basically focused on 5-6 areas to build trust.
Make sure we had a really clear, engaging strategy that people understand.
To build trust, people must be anchored in an exciting future, to hope and believe they’re working for something that makes sense.
Ensure people are communicating in an adult-to-adult way.
We worked with our communications team to encourage speaking the truth and eliminate the common parent-child form of communication within organizations.
Discuss the sweet AND the sour.
We can handle it at home so we can handle it at work. What we can’t handle is being told just a little bit about what’s going on.
Create line managers who were people managers responsible for managing people.
Managing people is a responsibility and a privilege, not just an entitlement.
We introduced Gallup Q12 to measure the quality of line managers and give them a tool to raise them and their teams up to a higher level.
Eliminate triangulation when communicating.
Go directly to the person and speak with them instead of talking to a 3rd person about them, which is poison in an organization.
Ensure the right people are in the right roles – performance management.
We’ve done a whole range of iconic moves on the culture to let everyone know we’re empowering them and treating them as adults.
Example: We had a very formal dress code: suits and ties, white shirts, black shoes, black belt, etc. That is not a way to treat adults. You don’t need a policy to tell adults how to dress in the morning. You can assume 99% know how to do this and you don’t need to design anything for the 1%. So we took the dress code away and people were super-confused. But it relayed the message that I have the responsibility and power to do it and people just loved it.
Carlos: Ok, so we have to have a clear business strategy, and that creates hope and trust. I didn’t hear any trust falls or ropes courses in there. Truth – tell people the truth, manage people like adults. Don’t just manage the work, manage the people. And tell the truth – don’t be political, don’t go behind people’s back. Pretty straight forward.
Ulf: Well, we are pretty straight forward people. I think in HR we complicate things a lot.
Carlos: HR has become known for imposing processes on people, and compliance. We forget the dynamic and strategic role of the people function.
Ulf, thank you so much. I will never forget the conversation with the headhunter in the parking lot – that one is sticky.
A life well-lived
From the Actually Curious deck, I have one final question: What does a life well-lived mean to you?
Ulf: To have some kind of purpose and positive impact with
family, creating good fun with my family
work, doing something that’s meaningful – I find what I do at work extremely meaningful
friends, having a positive impact with good friends.
It gets harder as you get older because kids grow up and things change a little bit. I think the purpose of life is to be as happy as you can.