SSG: Structure, culture and leadership

Structure, culture and leadership for a safe and effective organization

Google research and Project Aristotle show that psychological safety is one of the most important factors in creating effective teams. When we feel safe and trusted, we hold each other accountable and can talk frankly to each other about problems while helping and asking for help. It is in such a climate that both performance and innovation thrive.

At the service company SSG Standard Solutions Group in Sundsvall, with around 80 employees, long-term efforts have been made to develop a leadership and climate in which employees can cooperate and resolve conflicts without worry and fear of humiliation.

– Since we started our journey, we have strengthened both trust and transparency in the organization, says Mats Jakobsson, CEO of SSG. “When people feel that there is no hidden agenda and start to trust each other, a huge amount of power is released in the organization. The work on the internal culture thus supports the business goals in a crucial way.

Self-leadership emerges

– For the company to grow, develop and thrive, work is needed on structure, culture and leadership. Developing a supportive structure with different types of plans and processes has been central to us. Based on plans and processes, a culture of self-leadership can emerge,” says Malin Lundgren, HR Manager at SSG. “It’s a leadership where management has started with itself and its own development to create the conditions for a culture of increased openness and a better climate of cooperation.

– Leadership with us is about the opportunity to act as a role model as a manager and create good conditions for the organization to be able to take responsibility and exercise self-leadership, Malin continues.

Along the way, SSG has adopted the Agerus approach and the idea of a sustainable performance culture.

– With Agerus, we got a research-based method for continuously developing the conditions for performing well at group and individual level, says Malin Lundgren.

Integrated operations

In addition to the collaboration with Agerus, SSG has also had the help of Masarin Consulting in Sundsvall to develop the culture, structure and leadership. Agerus’ focus on a clear mission and ensuring the right conditions for success has been integrated with Masarin’s knowledge of developing people and businesses.

– “Often you improve processes separately and people separately,” says Peter Axelsson, senior consultant and partner at Masarin. “But when we do it in an integrated way, we have a greater impact. And when the whole organization is involved, we get much greater effects in both organization and business.

Peter Axelsson notes that the operations of many organizations today are highly complex and increasingly interwoven. A working day requires cooperation with many other people, both inside and outside the organization.

– “It is in cooperation with others that we see the great opportunities for efficiency and development,” he says. “The impact benefits of deeper collaboration from my own experience are at least a factor of 1:10. So we can achieve dramatic improvements when we develop collaboration skills and reduce conflict energy in organizations.

Psychological safety

– To succeed, we work to create trust in the group through experience-based work and open discussions,” continues Peter Axelsson. This trust, the psychological security, is necessary to do the work required to develop culture and cooperation as a means to achieve results. Compare it to the behavior when we are unsure. Then we often accept shortcomings in deliveries, have difficulty making and following decisions, sweep conflicts under the carpet and talk to others instead of the person concerned.

Malin Lundgren gives an example of how the work of the management group is now conducted at SSG:

– We have spent a lot of time getting to know ourselves and each other. Over time, we have learned how important it is to have good relationships and the ability to cooperate between us in the management team in order to overcome the challenges we face together. Now that we are on the same platform, we dare to challenge each other in a completely different way, which provides a completely different level in both discussion and decisions.

Openness, choice and self-awareness

Peter Axelsson explains that they have worked on three areas as the cornerstones of a culture of psychological safety.

– The first is openness to be able to talk about our relationships and our cooperation in both good and bad times. The second is responsibility and personal choice, so that participants understand that cooperation does not happen because someone else takes the lead and that conflicts do not arise because someone else does not behave. Thirdly, we work on developing the self-awareness of both managers and employees.

Peter wants to emphasize the importance of good self-awareness:

Malin’s lessons learned

So what has SSG learned about psychological safety in relation to effective teams and business development?

– “My first lesson is that it takes time to build trust, so work long-term,” says Malin Lundgren. “You also have to be brave, dare to make uncomfortable decisions when old ways of working are to be changed and be prepared for things to get worse before they get better. Life is constantly changing, so it’s better to be flexible and adapt to the situation in this type of change process.