I have been a leader since 1990 – the first ten years as an officer in the Danish Army. I have been a leadership consultant, working with leadership and organisational development since 2000.
I spent the first seven years of leadership development employed at Salling Group – the largest Danish Retail Group. Then, I worked for Danfoss – a global provider of industrial hydraulics, heating, cooling and electrical drives. Since 2007 in People & Performance, serving international clients across various industries.
In 2021, I completed a Doctorate specialising in Contextual Leadership at the Henley Business School in the UK. The research led to writing the book The Contextual Leader – Match and Shape Your Leadership Context for Organizational Performance. It is a manual on exercising contextual leadership and shaping the context to set your organisation up for success.
The Contextual Leader is my new book that tackles two of the biggest challenges leaders face: how to align leadership with the organizational context and how to structure the organization for optimal performance.
In my years as an executive leadership consultant, I have learned about and used multiple useful frameworks addressing parts of the leadership context.
For example, the GLOBE framework for understanding the effect of national culture on leadership. Or the VUCA framework, which assists in understanding contextual effects from the external environment. However, without a coherent approach, the complexity is left to leaders and leadership developers, who must rely on experience to navigate the leadership context and the many disparate frameworks.
My appetite and frustration led me to research the leadership context more rigorously and in-depth.
Along with consulting, in late 2016, I joined Henley’s Doctor of Business Administration Programme, which I completed in 2021. My research was and is, focused on leadership context and its effects on effective leadership. My experience as an external executive consultant has been an integrated part enabling researching the complexity of the dynamics between context, leadership and performance.
The importance of pinpointing the key contextual levers and focusing the efforts to move the needle through involvement is a key reason for my interest in contextual leadership. Senior leaders cannot ignore the differences between factors influencing performance, engagement and leadership across their organisation. They need an approach to identify and influence the key factors, which has been the purpose of my research efforts since 2016.
Along with these experiences, I am a certified and seasoned user of several assessment tools: The Hogan Assessments, the 16pf© assessment, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, the Predictive Index, the Five Behaviours Team assessment and the Everything DiSC personality assessment. Experiencing the value of such assessments in leadership and organisational development is the reason for developing the Leadership Context Inventory. The ambition is to provide a language and approach to pinpointing the context which should be matched, shaped and leveraged through leadership.
When you buy the book, you also get a free trial of The Leadership Context Inventory (LCI) and access to additional free resources. You can see sample reports in the Products section. The free trial will provide the short report version with the diagnoses of your specific leadership context.
The Contextual Leader is a book for senior leaders and middle managers who lead teams, departments, organisations or processes cutting across a matrix. It is based on doctoral research and twenty years of international leadership consulting experience. The book challenges the assumption that leadership is only about person-to-person influence and demonstrates how the organisational context should be actively shaped through leader-led interventions to set the organisation up for success.
