Internal Leadership Development at CARL CHRISTENSEN A/S

The trading and industrial company CARL CHRISTENSEN is growing—and with that growth comes the need to enhance leadership quality.

In collaboration with CfL, the company has designed and implemented an internal training program tailored for middle managers stepping into their new roles. This program aims to equip them with the tools and insights necessary to succeed in their leadership responsibilities and support the organization’s continued expansion.

By Kirsten Weiss, journalist, july 2024.

“We want to invest in leaders who have both the will and the ability to lead. In my view, becoming a leader is a process, and we aim to provide people with the opportunity to grow so they can step into new roles—sometimes even as leaders of their former colleagues. This process requires awareness of new demands and roles, as well as the chance to learn more about leadership.”

So says Thomas Jensen, CEO of CARL CHRISTENSEN A/S, who, after several years of strong growth, sees the need to better prepare the company’s middle managers for leadership roles.

As Thomas Jensen points out, one of the common challenges for middle managers—and for the Aarhus-based company’s team leaders in particular—is that they are often promoted from within and suddenly find themselves leading former colleagues.

This transition can be demanding, but the company, as Thomas Jensen emphasizes, has chosen to invest in people and their willingness and desire to grow.

“When you become a leader, you can no longer be best buddies with your former colleagues. You take on a new role—suddenly there are gatherings you’re no longer invited to. You must be a safety net, dare to make decisions, and have opinions."

"We need a new layer of leadership in the company, and we want to give people with the will and ability the chance to step into these roles. If they succeed, we will have played a part in developing an individual,” says Thomas Jensen.

To this end, the company, in collaboration with CfL, designed a leadership development program that balances what the middle managers already know, what they aspire to, and what the company needs.

The goal was to strengthen the leadership skills of the 12 middle managers while fostering unity among team leaders from different departments. Though their backgrounds vary, they share the challenge of addressing issues they may not have faced before.

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Operations, Operations, Operations

“In an operations-driven company like ours, which is also growing rapidly, it can be hard to find time to lead—and to learn how to lead. Every day, countless things land on our desks. For better or worse, we are in the thick of reality, and most of us struggle with time.”

“That’s why it was so important for us that the team leader training also provided an opportunity to bring up very familiar and concrete situations from our daily work and reflect on them together,” says Tina Skaaning Piilgaard, HR Manager at CARL CHRISTENSEN. She was both involved in designing the program and participated in it herself.

As a long-time middle manager, she fully empathizes with her newer leadership colleagues' frustrations over the lack of time. She highlights a key strength of the program: it was grounded in relatable, everyday dilemmas while also offering the opportunity to get to know both oneself and one’s colleagues better.

"I’ll just fix it myself"

During the program, the leaders gained a comprehensive understanding of the company and its business strategy, enabling them to see their role more clearly within the bigger picture. Additionally, they received a thorough insight into their own personality profiles, preferred communication styles, and typical behavior patterns.

Goal-setting and task delegation were recurring themes throughout the program, which ran from fall 2023 to spring 2024, with follow-ups.

“I’ll just fix it myself! That pattern is very familiar to most middle managers, myself included. You feel most comfortable solving problems your way, and you think it’ll be quicker if you just handle it yourself. But we need to get better at delegating tasks if we want to make time to lead.”

“We all struggled with finding enough time, no matter how long we had been in leadership roles,” says Tina Skaaning Piilgaard. She also points out another common trait among many middle managers: they often become leaders because they are skilled at their jobs, but frequently without having developed genuine, well-tested leadership competencies.

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Confidentiality and trust

“When you grow as quickly as we do, you have to continually develop your leaders. But being a new leader can feel lonely. That’s why we need a shared language for leadership that helps us share experiences and draw on each other’s support,” says Tina Skaaning Piilgaard.

She notes that the sense of trust built during the training program has persisted beyond its conclusion. “We’ve become better at seeking advice from other team leaders because, despite the differences between departments, we share many similar experiences.”

The 12 team leaders come from diverse functions within the company, including warehouse, sales, marketing, IT, HR, and finance. Through the shared training program, they’ve developed a common language for leadership and a deeper understanding of how their varied roles contribute to the organization’s success.

“We all do things differently, but fundamentally, we share the same goals. The JTI personality profile was a huge eye-opener for us. I think most of us realized that people are similar without being the same. It created greater awareness of ourselves and our patterns, and it suddenly became easier to understand specific situations where you might feel others don’t see or do things the same way as you,” adds Tina Skaaning Piilgaard.

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Concrete assignments from leadership

Organizational psychologist Morten Overgaard Eskelund, who led the participants through the program on behalf of CfL, highlights that the course covered a wide range of relevant leadership themes—from change management to leading diversity. However, team cohesion and collaboration were a consistent undercurrent throughout the training.

Before the program began, middle managers were given assignments from their leadership team. During the course, they worked in groups to deliver actionable solutions.

These assignments addressed issues such as proposing ways to optimize collaboration between the warehouse and procurement, achieving synergy in task planning across departments, communicating and implementing workflows more efficiently and improving knowledge transfer between departments.

The participants tackled these tasks in triads, and several modules included role-playing exercises where they practiced skills like being a coaching leader.

“The strength of a program like this lies in its focus on concrete, familiar situations where we practice understanding ourselves and others. The program was intense, but the leaders consistently shared experiences and advice, which participants wanted even more time for,” says Morten Overgaard Eskelund.

Even after the program concluded, Eskelund remained engaged with the group and company leadership to introduce two additional themes: conflict management and handling difficult conversations.

Hands-on leadership

“Morten has a natural ability to pause and make space for what he could sense was important to us. He took a very hands-on approach to leadership and was excellent at adjusting the agenda slightly so that our discussions were always grounded in what mattered most in our daily work," says Tina Skaaning Piilgaard from HR.

She notes that participant feedback reflected high satisfaction with the program, particularly regarding themes like developing a shared language, delegating tasks, and setting priorities.

“He brought extensive knowledge about leadership but translated it into our reality,” she adds.

“Overall, I think it’s safe to say that, as team leaders, we’ve gained new self-awareness and the courage to occasionally step back from operations to reflect on the leadership task,” says Tina Skaaning Piilgaard.

The company, in collaboration with CfL, has planned a new leadership development program, this time tailored for seven regional managers.