Søren: My most important task is to help my employees evolve

1.     What exactly are you doing in your role as ‘Teamleader Consulting’?

Even if the role would imply that I am delegating tasks – I rarely do. It is more a role of coordination, and I try to make, and keep people happy while working on their daily tasks. One of my main tasks is to assign the right tasks to the right people. When it is possible, the team can decide for themselves what they want to do, and they appreciate this kind of freedom very much.

If an employee faces too many tasks, I look if I can assign some to other consultants with vacant time. On the other hand, if there is too little work for the consultants, I contact our salespeople to inform them. However, sometimes issues arise where I have to resolve conflicts. Fortunately, these situations are rare. So, this part of a compliance job is marginal. 

I also try to keep a balance of new and repetitive tasks for employees. New tasks give people the possibility to grow. Our team is eager to expand their existing expertise, and sometimes I can reallocate projects to make it possible to work on new exciting tasks, and on challenging requirements. It is crucial for employees not to do the same things over and over again, but to get expertise in innovative areas or new specific subjects. 

We at BE-terna support consultants who wants to expand their expertise, and therefore assign some additional non-billable hours to a project budget so consultants have time to educate themselves, on our internal employee development platform. 

2.     What is your recipe to satisfaction and happiness amoung both the team and customers? 

In my experience, the chemistry between the consultants and the customers are the most important thing! We are transparent with our customers and discuss things openly. Besides that, we are glad to have particularly good and strong relationships with our customers, since we have lots of highly professional people in the group. I also dare to say that we are easygoing and likeable people. ;-) 

“We are people who are able to find great solutions for our customers by not just repeating what we did for other customers! We - together with our customers - are lifting the level of knowledge by creating new innovative solutions that are precisely tailored to serve the customers needs. Assigning a motivated consultant with analytic skills and technical background is actually better than forcing consultants executing the exact same thing over and over again.” 

One concept that our customers like is the “trusted advisor.” Especially smaller customers prefer having a consultant, which is their single point of contact. This contributes to clear responsibilities and centralized information. Hereby, small customers try to avoid having too many people involved in the same project if this is possible. These trusted advisors are backed up by the whole power of the BE-terna expertise. If a question remains open in a customer meeting, the whole team acts supportive. Our BE-terna group, operating in many parts of Europe, is granting every subsidiary access to a vast amount of experience in many areas of business.  

3.     What are your strengths? 

I am a huge fan of freedom and own responsibility in people's job. I trust people, and I do not control them a lot, even though, Ifollow up on their daily tasks. I do not interfere too much in the daily work if it is not needed. People have reasons why they devote a lot of hours to one task in one week and less in the other which I am not aware of. I am open to the way they want to work. The team also knows that they can always come to me if they have any doubts or questions. Freedom and trust are appreciated very much by the team, and I think thesehese are my main strengths.  

4.     Why do you like your job?  

I like the combination of being able to work with people and diving into a technical task if help is needed. Then I spend several hours or days, trying to find a solution where someone else has given up. The combination of people management and technical challenges is an incredibly good part of my job. 

I love being surrounded by an amazing and highly self-motivated team. We are very motivated by what we do - everyone loves their area of expertise.

Another fact that I like very much about the job, is that it is is future orientation. A long time ago I used to work as a controller for an international company. I collected a lot of experience, by completing the books of all the subsidiary companies, and I travelled a lot. Instead of just looking at the figures from what has happened in the past, it is fascinating to work now with implementation and changes that actually drive an organization.  

5.     What are the pros and cons with your work? 

Besides the numerous great things I have already mentioned, the combination of being a manager and still doing consulting myself is a very good for me.  

Challenges I faced was  times when I was overbooked and had work for seven days a week. Managing these peak periods successfully and delivering solutions even faster than expected, makes me proud and satisfied. Of course, these peak periods cannot last for half a year or more, but two tensed months can be satisfying when overcome in a successful manner.  

6.     Anything else you want to share? 

I would like to share a scenario of how management contributes to increase work motivation, by allowing employees to make their dreams come true.  

One team member of mine, dreamed of moving from Denmark to Spain for half a year, and therefore asked if there were any chance to do so. Even if the work contract includes several days in the office in Denmark, we started the conversation about the realization. One important prerequisite for me was that the employee clarified with every customer with project involvement, if they agree with the situation of him being abroad. All customers agreed since the employee guaranteed remote availability. Our colleague moved to Spain, and I am glad to say that it worked perfectly for everyone. Our customers are happy with the performance, and I am happy contributing to the possibly of an employee living abroad.  

It is great that BE-terna does not want to put obstacles in the paths of ambitious employees, if it is important for them, and if there is nothing to be said against it in respect of the general business conditions.