5 Lessons from the Nordics.

By Kate Thornton, Chief Customer Officer | 8 min read

I’ve had a lot of conversations in recent months about who I am and what I do, about how I have built my career, how Nordic culture supports women in the workplace and why on earth I speak Danish. If you’re interested in any of this, I’d love to talk to you too but for now I’ve summarised some of the most important themes into the five lessons below:

LESSON # 1: FOLLOWING YOUR PASSION IS A GREAT CAREER STRATEGY

In April 1987 I arrived in Copenhagen for the first time, at the start of what has turned out to be a lasting love affair with the Nordic countries. Over the following 14 years I would live, work and study in Denmark, Finland, Iceland and Norway and I maintain strong links to the area today.

This was long before we had fallen for Scandi style and hygge, and my choice was considered eccentric at best. I went to Denmark to learn the language in preparation for my degree course in Danish and French. My father despaired at my chances of ever finding a job while the Danes themselves simply couldn’t understand why anyone would want to learn it, when they were all so good at English. I didn’t care – I just knew it was what I wanted to do, and that conviction gave me the strength to follow my passion.

My father needn’t have worried. Having graduated and learned Finnish and Icelandic in that time in addition to Danish, I returned to Copenhagen where my language skills were enough to secure me a role in the British Airways frequent flyer service centre. I went on to secure my first management role as BA Sales Manager in Norway before moving back to BA’s Head Office at Heathrow in 2001, where I went on to build a highly successful 21-year career with the airline.

LESSON # 2: WOMEN’S RIGHT TO PARTICIPATE EQUALLY IN THE WORKPLACE IS WORTH FIGHTING FOR

In the meantime, the Nordic countries’ reputation as a great place to live and the home of inspirational businesses such as Lego and Ørsted (recently ranked as the most sustainable company in the world) has grown and grown. Now people are genuinely interested in why I went and what I learned there, and the conversation often turns to gender balance.

On 24 October 1975 Icelandic women went on strike for the day to demonstrate the value of their work – both paid and unpaid in the home. It is estimated that 90% of women participated and the Icelandic government legislated for equal pay the following year.

In Norway new mothers can take 49 weeks maternity leave at full pay or 59 weeks at 80%, with fathers also enjoying generous benefits. In 2007 the country introduced its quota law requiring Boards of all listed companies to have a gender balance of at least 40/60.

No surprise then that in March this year, Iceland topped The Economist’s ranking of equality for women in the workplace, closely followed by Sweden, Finland and Norway with Denmark not far behind.

No one is saying that the Nordic countries are perfect. Even Iceland still has a gender pay gap, but it’s significantly smaller than in the UK and still falling. Norwegian women in business still have battles to fight but every British parent I talk to can tell me what a difference a policy such as theirs would make.

When I was applying for university in 1985, the headmistress of my girls’ grammar school told me that my only chance of getting into Cambridge was to apply for a women’s college. I ignored her advice and was subsequently awarded a place at Trinity, which had admitted women undergraduates for the first time a mere 10 years earlier.

When I was applying to lead a £60 million market for BA in Norway as a young woman just a few years later no one told me that my gender would be a barrier to achieving my goal and it wasn’t – because women and men before me had fought to clear the way. We must keep fighting.

LESSON #3: LEADERSHIP IS NOT ABOUT YOUR POSITION IN A HIERARCHY

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what defines Nordic leadership and the degree to which my experience there has shaped the leader that I have become.

In his work on mapping cultural dimensions, organisational anthropologist Geert Hofstede characterises Nordic cultures as being more feminine in nature. He describes a culture in which relationships and societal solidarity matter, conflict is solved by negotiation, gender equality is prized and work-life balance is prioritised. These are values that are important to me and I can see how I have worked to incorporate them into my approach, with an emphasis on building strongly collaborative teams at its heart.

Listening to a series of interviews with Nordic leaders over recent months though, what has come across most consistently is their belief that great leadership is rooted in a non-hierarchical approach. I’ve heard this called many things – servant leadership, authentic leadership, anarchy even in the sense that anarchy is about equality, community and not blindly following rules. (Check out Adrian Swinscoe’s interview with the sensational Ari Weinzeig for more on this one).

What it boils down to for me, is that great leadership is not about you as a leader. It’s not about your ego and your place in the hierarchy – it’s about the people you are leading and what you are leading for. However, it is about what you do and your actions shout louder than any number of words. To be a great leader, having the humility to walk in your people’s shoes, listen to them and then shoulder responsibility for creating the best possible working environment for them aligned to your organisational objectives is mission critical.

One of the most powerful things I ever did in my career was to train and operate as cabin crew, at a time when I was leading BA’s global product and service team with a budget of over £450 million p.a. and a team of 150. Every few weeks I would put on my uniform and report for duty as the most junior member of crew on the day. I always told my fellow crew members what my management role was, but I was there to serve our customers and the leader on the day was always the senior cabin crew member, not me. This experience transformed the quality of my relationship with this key group of colleagues, while the insight I gained into their working environment gave me an invaluable new perspective on decisions I was making about investments, systems, policy and processes.

LESSON #4: CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE IS AN EMOTIONAL BUSINESS

I do not believe that customer experience is soft – it is directly related to the metrics that the most hardened of business executives care about. Get it right and you will win and retain customers, grow market share, increase customer life-time value, improve colleague engagement and productivity and drive growth over the long-term.

I do however believe that to create great customer experiences, you must be comfortable talking about emotions, which are often seen as soft. And of course, emotions are not the default language of business. This is a shame really, given that emotion and decision-making are inextricably linked in all of us. In fact, maybe one of the greatest contributions that we can make as CX professionals is to help businesses understand why emotions matter.

My first ever role for British Airways was a great training ground, teaching me lessons about building customer relationships that I carry with me to this day. I was recruited as the Finnish speaking customer service agent for BA’s Executive Club, at a time when BA had 40 Gold cardholders in the whole of Finland and I knew most of them personally.

The person I spoke to most often though was an Australian lady called Dale, whose husband had come to work at the HQ of his Finnish employer. Finland is a wonderful country, but Finnish is not an easy language to learn and she found it hard to settle. For Dale I could both solve functional needs around booking flights but also, importantly, emotional ones. I was a friendly, English speaking voice that she could talk to when she needed it. The time I spent talking to her might not have stacked up against any number of business metrics but what value do you place on a relationship and how do you measure the warmth of feeling that she developed towards BA as a consequence?

Over the course of my career at BA I met many of the airline’s most loyal and valuable customers, and my role as Head of Service Recovery involved resolving issues for many of them. When we asked them why they were so loyal, the answer was never functional, or product based – although functionality and product are important of course. The differentiating factor was always emotionally based and linked to the way the airline had behaved at a moment of personal significance to them.

LESSON #5: CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY IS NOT AN INITIATIVE

When I was working for BA in Norway, I was encouraged to find a way to promote the airline’s Change for Good charity initiative locally and involve my team in supporting it. This may sound normal to you but I quickly found that in Norway it was frowned upon, although I wasn’t quite sure why.

Over recent years I have become increasingly interested in the potential for businesses to create societal value and to do this in a way that also promotes the long-term success of the organisation. Part of my role as Chief Customer Officer at Simplyhealth was to realign its’ significant commitment to charitable giving to its overall organisational purpose and hard-wire it into how the business thinks about every aspect of its operation.

For me, not only is this the right thing to do but it makes business sense. As consumers, we increasingly demand that the brands with which we do business behave ethically and exact a heavy price from those who are seen to slip up. As employees, we increasingly look to work for organisations that are aligned to our values and recent events have only served to highlight the importance of working for an organisation that treats us decently. As investors, we are increasingly looking to place our money in companies that take sustainability seriously while our regulators are increasingly looking to target those who don’t.

Doing this properly requires sustained effort, as well as a significant shift in mindset from the days when Corporate Social Responsibility was a small department and a series of initiatives. The new approach requires leadership from the Board down and a recognition that we are all responsible.

Thinking about it now, I believe this is what I should have learned from my experience in Norway all those years ago. The Norwegians already knew behaving responsibly has little to do with promoting your latest initiative. Companies such as Lego and Ørsted have sustainability at their heart and have much to teach us.

These are the lessons I have learned and I hope they help you too.

Kate Thornton

Kate is a senior CX leader with a background that spans aviation and health insurance. She led British Airways' global product and service team, spearheading the airline's customer service transformation programme, and went on to become Simplyhealth's first ever Chief Customer Officer.

She started her career in Scandinavia and is strongly aligned to the positive values of Nordic leadership.

Today she's passionate about working with businesses to create better outcomes for colleagues, customers and the wider community that lead to sustainable commercial success.