Johan Berndtsson
April 22, 2024
One of the perks of my job is that I get to meet loads of managers and leaders within UX and design. A few weeks ago, I had an online coffee with Björn Lindqvist, Head of Customer Experience & Strategy at ICA, to discuss leadership and professional development.
Hello Björn! You lead a team of 16 who all work to create the best possible experience for ICA’s customers and employees. Starting with a broad question… What does good leadership mean to you?
– For me, it’s about both challenging and supporting your team. Challenges lead to development, and when faced with new situations and problems, you grow as an individual. At the same time, it’s incredibly important to provide support. This involves clearing obstacles and creating the right conditions so that everyone in the team can achieve as much as possible.
What would you say is the single most important thing in order to help your team develop and at the same time help ICA achieve its goals?
– It’s hard to say what’s most important, but one key thing is to build a strong culture of learning and goal orientation. You need structures and processes that focus not only on individual skill development but also ensure this development is directly linked to ICA’s business goals and vision. It’s about making a clear connection between daily work, individual development plans, and the company’s long-term goals.
– Our HR system plays a central role in developing my employees. We have integrated specific features to formalize professional development within the system. For instance, we have defined seven generic and seven design-specific skills as part of the system. This allows us to have a structured overview of which areas each employee should develop.
– Moreover, we use the HR system to set up and monitor individual goals, which are linked to both learning and business objectives. This has become a cornerstone in how we work with professional development, and gives us the opportunity to support each employee’s development in a structured way.
What goals related to Empower have you set for the members of your team?
– Professional development is just as important as everything else you do at work. The first learning goal involves doing the activities in Ambition Empower every week. Besides that, members are also expected to be active in our Monday meetings where we discuss what we have learned and how we could improve our workflows. Additionally, we have individual goals around different aspects of, for example, design research that various people want to delve into.
– The final part involves setting goals where we apply what has been learned in ongoing work to create business impact, and we follow up on this as well.
Exciting! Proactive professional development where business goals guide the way seems like a recipe for success. What prompted you to contact Jane about Ambition Empower?
– We realized that we needed to strengthen our ability to work more impact-driven within design and development. To succeed, deeper skills in specific areas, such as research, were required. Our goal was not only to improve our development process but also to ensure that our solutions meet our customers’ needs in the best possible way.
– A colleague knew that Ambition Empower offered the type of development we needed, so I called Jane. We hoped to gain access to the tools and methods needed to streamline our design process and enhance our ability to conduct thorough user studies. This would, in turn, help us develop more user-centered products and services, which is crucial for achieving the impact goals we had set and thereby support ICA’s overall business objectives.
You’ve been at this for just over six months now. How has it worked for you? What outcomes have you achieved?
– The collaboration with Ambition has had a clearly positive effect on our way of working and on the results we achieve. By integrating the methods and tools we were inspired by and learned about, we have been able to create a more impact-driven design process. This has led to an increased understanding of our users’ needs and how we can meet them in the best way.
– One of the most tangible effects is how our team now works more cohesively around user-centered design. We have been able to implement new research methods in our projects, gaining deeper insights into our customers’ behaviors. This has in turn led to more well-founded design decisions and an improved quality of the products and services we develop.
– Another important result is the increased skill level within the team. Through the learning goals and setup in Ambition Empower, we have seen a clear development in our employees. They have not only improved their skills in user research and impact-driven design but have also gained a greater understanding of how their work contributes to the company’s overall goals.
Thank you very much for sharing your thoughts, Björn. Very enlightening! I’ll get back in touch later to hear more about how things are going!
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