As education levels rise and more organisations seek to make use of their employees’ intellectual capital, steep hierarchies at the workplace are losing their appeal in many countries. While it is one thing to regard hierarchies as less influential than before, it is quite another to attach a negative value to hierarchical structures, as some Swedish companies have done to great effect. Facing strong unions, a tradition of consensus and a broader culture of egalitarianism, some have made a virtue out of a necessity. Management methods have emerged from Sweden’s unusual workplace milieu that may be well suited to modern, complex organisations in which skilled workers produce innovative and sophisticated products and services.
Much academic ink has been spilled trying to establish the existence of a particular Swedish leadership style. According to this work, distinguishing characteristics of Swedish management include a preference for teamwork and cooperation, a non-hierarchical approach, emphasis on consensus and conflict-avoidance, encouragement of autonomy and delegation of authority. A typical Swedish management instruction might therefore be: ‘See what you can do about it’, rather than a direct order. A collection of interviews with Swedish managers concluded that their leadership style should be seen as a product of the country’s egalitarian society, and was likely to be successful in the current era: ‘A flat corporate structure is a logical and cost-efficient way to operate, innovate and recruit.’
No other company has made more of its management culture than IKEA – there is more to the Swedishness of an IKEA store than its minimalist products, blue-and-yellow façade and meatballs on the menu. At the heart of ‘the IKEA way’, the management philosophy first exported to Europe in the 1980s, was a powerful notion that the company was run according to Swedish principles. Managers would be whisked away to the corporate headquarters in Älmhult, the small town in the depths of the southern countryside where the late Ingvar Kamprad founded his empire, to help them absorb the local way of doing things.
Managers were encouraged to learn Swedish if they wanted to make a successful career, according to Anders Moberg, Kamprad’s chief executive for 15 years. They would be expected to move to Sweden for a while, living and working in a Swedish environment. ‘When we had infused them with the Swedish way, after two or three years we would send them back home and they would be better than the Swedes!’ Moberg says. ‘They were our future leaders.’
Some aspects of this management style were more obvious than others. Informality was in, so ties were out, says Johan Stenebo, formerly one of Kamprad’s most trusted lieutenants and author of a tell-all book about the company. Today it seems like a minor thing, but abandoning ties sent a powerful signal about the company’s values. ‘In those days it was trail-blazing,’ Stenebo says. Similarly, after Sweden in the late 1960s moved to ditch the formal second person plural in favour of the singular pronoun du, IKEA did the same in its German stores, branding the shift as the Swedish way. It also did away with titles, so managers and workers referred to each other on a first-name basis. Moberg says: ‘People said we were crazy. But it created a very good atmosphere, less distance between management and the people working for us.’ They found that people really liked to work in an environment like this, where you could talk to the boss as he was on the shop floor. The organisation was relatively flat, without many levels, he says: you could go to the boss if there was something you didn’t like, and relations with staff were very straightforward. ‘Many young people grew up with IKEA and spent the rest of their life with us; they felt at home. Lots of people don’t feel comfortable in the hierarchical way of being managed, where the boss is God,’ Moberg adds.
Kamprad himself summed it up in the penultimate paragraph of his Testament of a Furniture Dealer, written in 1976, which became a bible for IKEA managers: ‘Humbleness is the key word. Being humble means so much to us in our work and in our leisure. It is even decisive for us as human beings. It means not just consideration and respect for our fellow men and women, but also kindness and generosity. Will-power and strength without humbleness often lead to conflict. Together with humbleness, will-power and strength are your secret weapons for development as an individual and fellow human being.’
In this respect, IKEA was 40 years ahead of Silicon Valley – working for the company was like being at Google or Facebook today, Stenebo says. The attractiveness for Brits or Germans was that Swedishness was something exotic, everyone was on first-name terms and there were lots of symbols of working as a group. ‘People bought into it 100 per cent and felt proud,’ he says.
Stenebo is sceptical that IKEA still embodies this approach today. His book, The Truth About IKEA, while in many ways a tribute to Kamprad, also set out to demolish the idealised image of egalitarianism at IKEA. In reality, Stenebo claimed, it was a secretive dictatorship run with an iron fist by the Kamprad family with help from a network of internal ‘spies’ who reported on any senior managers displaying signs of disloyalty. Moberg is more positive: the IKEA way is still very much alive, he believes.
Who is right? Here is what American Ginny Figlar, who recently spent five years at IKEA HQ in Älmhult as a copywriter, concluded after her Swedish experience:
At work, people felt more like family than co-workers (and still do). There were no egos. There was no hierarchy. This made working in a corporate environment quite refreshing, but it also meant that decisions were made by committee. In other words, they weren’t made very quickly. But everyone worked together, respected each other and had fun. Despite the hard work, people came first. Life came first. You could say the stuff that matters most came first. I’ve often reflected on my time working there and wondered if what I experienced was because I was living in Sweden or working at IKEA. The line always seemed blurred to me. Was it the Swedish culture or the IKEA culture?
Are IKEA’s management methods more widely applied in Swedish business? Tobii is a Swedish high-tech company that develops products for tracking the movement of people’s eyes. Walking into the company’s offices in Stockholm feels more like entering a university department than the headquarters of a multinational corporation. From behind his large and messy desk, Henrik Eskilsson, founder and chief executive, is eloquent about his leadership philosophy. ‘A very hierarchical, top-down structure is effective in organising an army, where one person tells 1,000 people what to do,’ he says. ‘In a modern economy, the winning system is most likely to be the one that enables 1,000 people in a company to collaborate effectively – without one person telling the other 999 what to do, but rather 1,000 taking initiatives, having ideas, being proactive. You need 1,000 people doing the creative thinking, coming up with innovative ideas. The Swedish culture is well adapted to that, to dare to take decisions and make stuff happen.’
Eskilsson complains that he is treated differently in the US, where employees expected to obey him. When he whispers at the company’s Silicon Valley offices, people jump. The Swedish leadership style confuses North Americans – they think it’s relaxing, nobody is screaming at them so they can lean back and take it easy. As a result, Tobii has to retrain them, Eskilsson says. In Sweden, however, people are already accustomed to being autonomous and to taking decisions themselves. The hierarchy is there, it is just not so important: ‘We want people to understand that we shouldn’t let an option win just because it comes from the manager.’
This chimes with my own (limited) experience of working life in Sweden. I also work part-time as the editor of a company intranet for a mid-sized multinational. My manager is been exceptionally trusting. In essence, her approach is: ‘I don’t mind where or when you do it, just get the job done on time to a high standard and I will be happy – but always tell me when you screw up.’ She knows I have a certain set of skills, and she makes sure I am clear about my work goals so she doesn’t need to micro-manage me. However, whenever my concentration slips, or big life events get in the way (like writing a book), she steps in to steady the ship. This approach applies to the whole marketing and communications team, and it works very well.
The flat society in Sweden means top management is approachable and receptive, according to Lex Kerssemakers, the Dutch boss of Volvo Cars in the US. ‘Some people think it is anarchy,’ he says. And sometimes it is – but good ideas can flourish and are not always stopped by middle layers. ‘People here are raised to believe that everyone is equal and has the same rights, so they feel they can speak up, they are not hindered by feeling that they can’t talk to that person because he is a few levels up. You see that with graduates here. They are very open, sometimes even a little naive, they just talk to you. That means they have been raised in an open environment.’
The Swedish tendency to question authority is perfect for complex software development teams, according to Stina Ehrensvärd, the founder of Yubico, which develops IT security technology. Ehrensvärd moved from Sweden to California in 2011 to build her company. But in the US, her Swedish approach can create confusion, she says:
Sweden has the flattest organisations in the world; it’s okay to question your boss. Nobody can know everything, so I am super-open. I am constantly telling my team they know more than me in their expert areas. In the US people can be confused by this approach. The Swedes question me much more. In the US they are starting to do so, because now they know I’m not going to fire them for it. In countries where you are constantly punished for questioning and doing things that parents, teachers, the state, the emperor says you can’t do, people get afraid, they don’t want to speak up.
Approaching a senior manager also means sticking your head over the parapet. This might seem to go against another Scandinavian trait, the ‘Law of Jante’, according to which nobody should stand out or aspire to be above average. In other cultures this is known as ‘tall poppy syndrome’, from the story of the Roman king Lucius Tarquinius, who was said to have cut the heads off the tallest poppies in his garden as a signal to his son that he should assassinate high achievers to ensure his own success. The Jante law is part of the national consciousness in Sweden, but Swedes themselves cannot agree about its importance. You will hear contradictory arguments: the only Swedes good at sales are the Jante-free ones; understatedness is the key to success, which is why Swedish design is so good; or the start-up scene succeeds in spite of/because of the Jante law.
Jante seems now to be little more than a reminder to the ambitious to be polite to others – rather like political correctness – and with little more significance than that. When groups of people gang up on individuals because they stand out, I think it’s more likely due to other factors in society, rather than something peculiarly Swedish.