Welcome to the latest episode of the TalentMiles Talks podcast, hosted by Bo-Magnus Salenius. This episode delves into the critical theme of continuous development and learning in the workplace. Joining the discussion are Camilla Alperi and Annika Floman-von Bonsdorff, both experienced learning coaches who share their insights and experiences.

Some of the questions discussed:

• What have we observed – is learning part of the job?
• How can we make development continuous?
• How can we make learning and development part of the job?

TalentMiles team members Erika Hyppönen, Johan Sigfrids and Annika Häggblom reflect on some of their most inspiring lessons learned from recent client engagements.

Some of the questions discussed:

• What have each of us been working on this spring?
• What do we actually mean by “discovering collaboration” and why is it so important in work life?
• What kind of collaboration do we see in organisations and what is the one thing we hope there would be more of?

“For me personally, the growth as a leader has been from the content towards the people, because leadership in the end is always about the people and nothing else but people.”

– Aleksi Malmberg, General Manager, Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra

In this podcast, General Manager Aleksi Malmberg shares his experiences about leadership of the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra in the challenging and ambiguous context of the pandemic and thereafter. What originated in a leadership of crisis at the outbreak of Covid, gradually, and partly by down-to-earth and seemingly small supporting actions, has turned into a growth of connectedness and interactivity in the orchestra.

In the podcast, Professor Wim Gijselaers of Maastricht University joins the discussion from the point of view of change and leadership in current research. One interesting insight suggested by this discussion is, rather counterintuitively, how the highly structured work-flow of the orchestra creates room for creativity and innovation.

The discussion is moderated by Bo-Magnus Salenius, Chairman and co-founder of TalentMiles.

“The interesting thing is that, if we do and lead this right, much of the many different activities we do now  play a part in our cultural transformation of behavior towards increased trust and more self-leadership. Somehow we take great steps forward without labeling it a “giant change” 

— Anna Thuresson, Head of HR and HSE,  EON Energy Networks Sweden

There are observations suggesting that preconditions for leadership and engagement are changing in the wake of the pandemic. Engaging communities of work for shared purpose, it is suggested, may grow even more challenging in the age of widespread hybrid work.

In this podcast, Anna Thuresson shares her reflections from the current cultural transformation in her company. While strongly underlining the importance of meaningful and shared purpose, she tells us a story of how the company is reinventing itself and its culture using a wide selection of improvements and measures while avoiding framing it as large, “programmatic” change to be cascaded. The exciting insights from practise are connected to the context of current research on leadership and learning by prof Wim Gijselaers, Maastricht University, and the discussion is moderated by Bo-Magnus Salenius, Chairman and co-founder of TalentMiles.

A high level of trust has been the crucial element of the culture and leadership of companies that better than others have taken their business and workforce through Covid 19 this far. And trust will be a key factor for leaders in companies going further. 

But what is ”trust”, what can it look and sound like? And how does a leader act to get it to grow? In this podcast, General Manager Inna Wahlberg is interviewed for the fascinating story of how Ascender Asian Services, a leader in the field of payroll outsourcing, has pulled through the pandemic so far building on trust and exceptional commitment by the staff. She describes the journey of creating a culture which suits the special nature of the work in the industry and herself as a “curious problem-solver trying to get out of the way of people who know what they are doing”.

”In my organisation, long before the pandemic, we had worked a lot on creating engagement and shared direction and helping people ”walk a little bit taller” and be a little more proud of what we do. This helped us. People believed in the organisation and the commitment to clients has been spectacular. I think it is really difficult for an organisation if it starts building engagement now, as the pandemic is easing, to suddenly start to say to employees that “we care about you, and you 

Inna Wahlberg is interviewed by Wim Gijselaers, professor of learning and development in Maastricht University, and Bo-Magnus Salenius, leadership coach and founder of TalentMiles.

How do you create onboarding remotely with better impact on connecting new employees to company culture, expertise and community?

Evac, the world’s leading provider of integrated water and waste management systems, has re-invented the company’s approach to onboarding. In this podcast Salla Jämsä, Global Senior HRD Manager at Evac, and Erika Hyppönen, Development Manager at TalentMiles, are interviewed about learnings and experiences of the promising new approach by Bo-Magnus Salenius.

Evac emphasises the importance of an excellent candidate experience in recruitment and the new approach in onboarding helps in creating an excellent employee experience from the very start of the employment.

The new digital approach has included helping new recruits to

• connect with other new employees
• become impressed by the talents and knowledge in the company
• build networks between new and old employees
• build the understanding of the company’s purpose, culture and strategy
• a way for top management to get to know the new employees.

Leaders and organisations today are faced with more complex problems than ever before. How can leaders enable people in the organisation to solve those problems when they themselves don’t have the right answers? In what ways can leaders create trust that allows people to solve problems collectively? What can leaders do to bring people together to generate change? How is learning essential for leaders?

In this podcast, Olli-Pekka Heinonen, Director General at Finnish National Agency for Education and, among other things, former Minister of Education, shares his view on how tomorrow’s leadership differs from the past. Olli-Pekka is leading the educational system ranked as the best in the world. Join to hear how he thinks leaders should be passionate about learning.

The conversation is hosted by Patrick Furu, Chief Strategist of TalentMiles and Adjunct Professor.

With the rise of digital and online learning, how can businesses use gamification to make learning more fun, and to develop comptence and change behviours? Is gamified online learning only something for the ”younger generation” entering the workplace, or how can we make this educational approach work for everyone? What does research show about this way of learning and what are some important things to consider before integrating elements of gamification into your development programmes? What is hindering the movement of gamification to continue going forward?

These are some of the questions that will be discussed in this episode of TalentMiles Talks, about the future of gamification in digital learning, with Anna Ockborn, Ouss Labib, Patrick Furu and Thomas Spjuth Eriksson.

It is our privilege to host this podcast in celebration of the release of the new edition of Reinvention, by professor Anthony Elliott, University of South Australia. The podcast offers leadership practitioners the perspective and understanding global worklife change on a level beyond the ones of leadership manuals.

In the discussion moderated by Bo-Magnus Salenius, founder of TalentMiles, and Ralf Blomqvist, expert in customer insight, professor Elliott invites us to recognise how pressures to repeated reinvention, ”makeovers”, increasingly shape worklife, its people, their careers and organisations of work. Reinvention concerns a global, cultural drive to transform social practises. This imperative, advanced by organisations, politicians, personal trainers and therapy gurus, emphasizes that reinvention, is the only adequate personal response to life in a global world.

It’s already happened to many, and if it hasn’t yet, it will happen to your company. But how can you make sense of disruption before it even occurs and really starts to change life around and inside the company? Why is market research useless, and what should you do instead? And what do we know about leadership in times of radical change?

In his new book, ”Play It, well: Strategies for digitally disruptive times”, Henrik Blomgren, Assistant Professor at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, offers straightforward examples from the music industry to understand disruption in any industry. In this TalentMiles Talks podcast he is interviewed by Ralf Blomqvist, author and challenger of conventional views of understanding customer insight, and Bo-Magnus Salenius, co-founder of TalentMiles.

As the pandemic continues and shifts its form, it is increasingly evident that work, and the organisation of work, are being transformed. At the same time, instead of the immediate-survival mode of leaders, the horizon is widening, and the topics are extending beyond the pandemic. But how can an organisation prepare for any future in a situation as ambiguous as the present?

Successful companies recognise that they need to focus on ’learning’ instead of on meticulous ’planning’. The core question is: How can top-management, and any leader, increase the capacity for learning on the organisational level, the team-level, and the level of the professional

Listen in to a conversation with Dr Therese Grohnert, of one of the leading research groups on learning and development in Europe. The conversation is hosted by Bo-Magnus Salenius, TalentMiles.

When the first wave of the pandemic swept over the globe, resulting in a far-reaching lock-down, many found themselves in a new situation trying to figure out how to work and lead their team from their kitchen table. Inka Partanen had started at her new job as Business Manager at the Finnish online media plattform Rakentaja.fi just a week before the lock-down and had only met a handful of her new team members before everyone was asked to stay home. 

In this podcast Inka Partanen shares her experience of working and leading remotely. In conversation with Annika Häggblom from TalentMiles some of the key learnings are uncovered:

• How do you start in a new management role remotely?
• How can you as a leader support your team in uncertain times?
• What should we talk more about in remote teams?
• What have been the surprising benefits of remote work and how could we capitalise on these more?

Listen to this podcast to explore how Noel Keeley, the CEO of a company recognised for its capacity to reinvent, is approaching the present challenges. Musgrave is one of Europe’s most successful family-owned businesses with a 140-year heritage in food and brand innovation. Topics of focus for this discussion include:

• What has enabled the continuous progress of Musgrave – before and during this pandemic?
• How does the CEO perceive and leverage his role supporting agility, teams and leaders throughout the company?
• How will the leadership sustain business, creativity, and flexibility in the uncertain 12 months to come?

The conversation will be led by professor Wim Gijselaers of Maastricht University and Bo-Magnus Salenius, founder of TalentMiles.

Hur klarar skolan och näringslivet av omställningen från klass- och konferensrum till det digitala rummet?

Inte var det många av oss som kunde förutsäga att förutsättningarna att bedriva kompetensutveckling och utbildning så drastiskt skulle förändras av ett virus! Vi var alla övertygade om vikten av att samlas i klassrum och konferensanläggningar om något lärande skulle ske. Omställningen har påtvingat oss till en ”pedagogisk distansering” och ny utmaning hur det är att gå från att fysiskt mötas i konferensrum och klassrum till det digitala.

Utbildningsinstitutioner, företag och leverantörer av traditionella upplägg av utbildningskoncept, med tyngdpunkt att fysiskt träffas, har nu prövat på att möta de här nya förutsättningarna under våren och sommaren. Lärandet och pedagogiken må vila på samma grund, men den digitala kanalen ger oss på gott och ont nya utgångspunkter. Vilka erfarenheter och slutsatser kan vi använda oss av inför ny uppstart av höstterminen och tertial 4 i våra företag.

Med Thomas Spjuth Eriksson som samtalsledare får vi höra Heidi Backman, Victor Svensson och Ola Andersson tala om sina perspektiv och dagsfärska erfarenheter om distansutbildning både från skolan och näringslivet, med internationella utblickar från Finland, Frankrike/Schweiz och Sverige.

In our work in supporting leaders, and remote leaders specifically, we often hear the question “How can I make sure my team works effectively and efficiently when working remotely?”. Remote work has quickly established itself as a standard element of work life, but what should you as a remote leader be aware of? Can remote teams really be as effective and efficient as teams working on site? What are the main challenges faced by remote teams today and what can leaders do to avoid these pitfalls?

In this podcast Erika Hyppönen and Annika Häggblom from TalentMiles share their key insights about remote leadership and trace out a roadmap for how to build and sustain a productive, creative and happy remote team for years to come.

In this podcast we talk about:

• The balance between trust and control
• Psychological safety and team learning behaviours in remote teams
• How to learn, innovate and work more effectively as a remote team

The present and global situation is challenging companies, employees and leaders alike at work in many ways. The insight has started to grow in the minds of most leaders, that the present and trying times can potentially be the most creative and reinventing of times. 

In this podcast Professor Wim Gijselaers of the Department of Educational Research in Maastricht University, Eeva Sipilä, CFO and Deputy to CEO at Metso with extensive experience of leadership of change in global industrial corporations, and Bo-Magnus Salenius, Co-founder of TalentMiles and pioneer of designing formats for ‘learning by questions’ in leadership, team and strategy development, will discuss practises for capturing and increasing the capacity for creativity and learning in remote teams.

The way we do strategy work has been changing for many years, but the current COVID-19 outbreak has notably magnified and intensified this change. The ongoing global crisis has highlighted the importance of being very flexible and able to change fast. How can we incorporate that ability into our strategy?

When Eric Schmidt was the CEO at Google, he said “We run the company by questions, not by answers.” We also know for a fact that we need to engage people and invite their input in strategy, but what are effective ways to accomplish that? How can we make questions the driving force in our way of working with strategy?

In this podcast, Jukka Hörkkö, Executive Vice President of Skanska Homes, and Patrick Furu, Chief Strategist of TalentMiles and Adjunct Professor, discuss how they see strategy work changing in this new reality. Skanska Homes recently employed a question-driven approach to their strategy process and Jukka Hörkkö will share some of his personal insights from this experience.

Vilka krav på förändring ställs i omstarten till en ny hållbar och digital utvecklingsagenda?
Hur behåller vi det mänskliga mötet och interaktionen med varandra i utvecklingsaktiviteterna med ett digitalt förtecken och delvis ny pedagogik?

Vi delar med oss och diskuterar vad forskning och praktisk HR verksamhet i detaljhandel och media branschen just nu upplever. Möt Thomas Spjuth Eriksson, Paulina Holm och Patrick Furu som alla tre har lång och senior erfarenhet från olika akademiska & strategiska HR roller; nationellt samt internationellt.

It appears increasingly difficult to predict what the ‘new normal’ will look like. Instead, HR and development professionals now need to find flexible solutions that can be easily adapted to changing and varying conditions.

Professor Wim Gijselaers of the Department of Educational Research and Development in Maastricht University, Tiiu Coughlin, SVP Human Resources at Evac Group, Thomas Spjuth Eriksson, HR-professional with extensive experience of leading HR-roles in the IKEA-organisation, and Bo-Magnus Salenius, Co-founder of TalentMiles and pioneer of developing approaches to question-driven leadership and learning, will share their thoughts on how we should think about organising learning and development activities in companies for the rest of this year.

We talk about:

• how to plan for learning and development-processes for the Autumn despite not knowing what the restrictions on work and work-related travel will be
• how still aspire for better learning and engaging managers in supporting members of their teams in self-driven development
• the unexpected opportunity for pursuing environmentally sustainable solutions in learning and development

You can find a brief summary of the webinar here.

Annika Häggblom and Erika  Hyppönen from TalentMiles will share their thoughts and best ideas for how to maintain a high standard of collaboration, teamwork and leadership, even when you are not working in the same  location as your colleagues.

We talk about:

• the challenges and opportunities of working remotely
• how to best lead a remote/virtual team,  maintaining a high standard on the quality of work and  collaboration
• how to create and maintain a high level of psychological safety in a virtual team
• our best tips, tools and activities for productive remote/virtual teamwork