What is strategy work for you?

Strategies — or common direction — must be created in collaboration with the organization. Otherwise, it will not reach where it should work. That is why it's important to use the time to talk and get involved, especially in the initial strategy phase. As a senior manager, it is important to know the core tasks in the subject areas in order to create meaning, including strategy and practice - and we must work together to find solutions in interdisciplinary cooperation processes.

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Strategies are about defining goals for further work — and at the same time prioritizing. It can be advantageous to combine the strategy process with defining organizational values, e.g. what we mean when we say community. It is important to spend time talking about the strategic concepts, preferably in collaboration with the MED organisation and locally in the many workplaces.

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Strategy work is also about inviting politicians into the strategic space, in order to gain a better understanding of each other's tasks in a common perspective. By spending time on the strategic expectation vote, more freedom is created for the administration.

What is the biggest challenge in your strategy work?

The biggest challenge is if the strategy does not make sense in the organization — and the strategy ends up in the drawer. In fact, we mean that we only succeed together. We try to think the organization differently so that it is not the traditional hierarchy with the director at the table end that determines how a task is solved. We must first examine what kind of task we are facing and who will then be involved in solving it. It places demands on our leaders, because it makes the task of leadership change from making decisions on their own to creating common opinion and direction.

“The biggest challenge for us right now is to make sense of the necessity that I see in leading and living the strategy across the organization. As a leader, you have to dare to open up your leadership space and dare to challenge each other. It is one of the hardest things, and it is a training ground where we try our hand and learn along the way”

Another strategic challenge is also that we need to become better at establishing strategic partnerships. For example, we are currently working to establish a partnership for children and young people and craft companies.

“As an organization, we constantly work with the strong citizen perspective, an outside and inside view, where every day all employees and managers create solutions that provide value for citizens, for companies and for the society we are a part of.”

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How do you manage your strategy?

It is important that I, together with the rest of the management, manage to create a strategy that is accepted and that is an overall coherent 'work'. The leadership skills I use in strategy development and realization are to be listenable and ask many open-ended questions.

“As a senior executive, I have an important facilitating role in the strategy process, where I have to be aware of my position in order to get as many voices in play.”

Citizens' voices are also crucial to be included, as part of the expectations of everyday service levels and the distribution of roles in the welfare society of the future.

Strategy in Rudersdal Municipality

In Rudersdal Municipality we work focused on release. Back in 2018, we have been working to release our care centers and housing offerings — for example, by removing a management layer and creating direct references to the Executive Board. We wanted to show more trust and create co-leadership by removing a management layer. It was a necessity because the extra management layer created a hierarchical bottleneck. We were talking about devolution at the time, before the release day order was in earnest in the municipalities.

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Today we are intensifying the development and focusing on finding new solutions together. The local council places a high priority on the work of the UN's global goals. Together with citizens, companies, associations and others, we will work for sustainable development, where together and with local support we can create a green and climate-friendly municipality.

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