By Kirsten Weiss, journalist, february 2025
How do you instill such a strong organizational culture that values and behaviors remain deeply rooted, even when half the workforce is constantly changing—replaced by new colleagues who must quickly turn their knowledge into productivity?
This was the question posed by the leadership team at Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møller Center for Zero Carbon Shipping. Their answer? A deliberate effort to develop, support, and maintain a leadership and organizational culture that ensures the center’s success in reaching its goal: a CO₂-free maritime industry by 2050.
Last year (2024), the center approached CfL to create a program focused on leadership culture—one that could be embedded in an organization with high employee turnover, requiring a collaborative culture that is both agile and focused, yet productive and goal-oriented.
“As a leadership team, we sat down to discuss what it takes to succeed in the long term. What behaviors and collaboration styles do we want to foster? How do we lead and cultivate an innovative culture where we get things done while staying open to new ideas?”
– Anders Peter Kierbye Johansen, Chief People & Culture Officer
Established in 2020, the Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møller Center for Zero Carbon Shipping is recognized for its significant cultural diversity, with employees representing 33 different nationalities. Additionally, the workplace is characterized by a high and intentional turnover of personnel, as employees are on secondment from 25 strategic partners—companies spanning the energy sector and maritime industry.
The fundamental idea behind the center and its partnerships is to continuously translate knowledge from various disciplines into tangible solutions.
“Many of our employees come from industries with well-established and documented processes, such as shipbuilding. However, we are tackling challenges that have never been solved before. That’s why it is crucial to cultivate an internal culture of collaboration, ensuring that all ideas are brought to the table and that new ones are not dismissed prematurely.”
“Our key focus in developing a leadership and culture program was dialogue—a dialogue that enhances cross-disciplinary collaboration, establishes psychological safety, and fosters a culture where mistakes are viewed as learning opportunities rather than failures.”
“We aim to build a culture where we are not only good listeners and creative thinkers, but also practical and action-oriented.”
– Anders Peter Kierbye Johansen, Chief People & Culture Officer
Johansen emphasizes that the leadership team sought a program that could be seamlessly integrated into daily operations. After evaluating various consulting firms, CfL was ultimately chosen, as their proposed method was directly aligned with the center’s core values and day-to-day realities. Their approach prioritized developing internal expertise and capacity, rather than merely introducing an external framework.
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“Our key focus in developing a leadership and culture program was dialogue—a dialogue that enhances cross-disciplinary collaboration, establishes psychological safety, and fosters a culture where mistakes are viewed as learning opportunities rather than failures.”
When collaborating with CfL, Anders Peter Kierbye Johansen expressed a strong desire for the center’s culture to be so deeply embedded that it would be clearly reflected in daily interactions—how employees engage with one another, share their knowledge, and collaboratively explore solutions.
As a result, the model developed in close partnership with CfL was designed to ensure that the entire leadership team would act as culture bearers. This means that senior leadership takes direct responsibility for leadership training and subsequently drives internal training within the center itself.
“The Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møller Center for Zero Carbon Shipping is a unique organization, made up of knowledge workers who are part of the center for a limited time, and a leadership structure built on partnerships.”
– Michael Tolstrup, Head of Leadership Consulting, CfL
“This setup presents challenges when it comes to establishing a shared approach to leadership and collaboration. How do you create a motivating and effective leadership culture for people who come from different backgrounds, bring in their specialized industry expertise, and stay for only a short period?”
“No one questions the end goal—achieving CO₂-free shipping. But the path to get there requires experimentation.”
– Michael Tolstrup, who co-designed the program together with Anders Peter Kierbye Johansen and the rest of the leadership team.
The core principle of the program is to start at the top—training leaders first so they can, in turn, train their own leaders and employees within the organization.
The program, named Collaborative Culture with Impact, was the result of extensive discussions with the leadership team. After thoroughly refining the structure and key leadership themes, the entire senior leadership team participated in a two-day training session at CfL.
“It’s one thing to sit in a classroom and learn. It’s something entirely different to be so well-equipped that you can go back and effectively pass on what you’ve learned to others. There’s a much greater sense of commitment and cultural transformation when you choose a Train-the-Trainer model, as we did. If you want to build internal capacity, you must take responsibility for teaching and embedding the culture you want to promote.”
– Michael Tolstrup, Head of Leadership Consulting, CfL
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The leadership training model, which the leadership team now uses to train other leaders, is fundamentally based on the same themes and modules that they themselves trained in at CfL.
Module 1: focuses on strategy and communication, with an emphasis on alignment and autonomy, and on how to develop a communication style that enables both reflection on the situation, strategic intent, and priorities—while at the same time ensuring an open dialogue that fosters creativity by articulating the desired outcome rather than dictating how it should be achieved.
Module 2: focuses on psychological safety and innovation and on creating an environment where people dare to experiment and make mistakes and are open to learning.
Module 3: focuses on dialogue capacity and a learning-oriented mindset, where leaders train their ability to engage in constructive discussions, even on difficult topics, and develop the skill to balance their own perspectives with openness and curiosity toward those of others.
“The goal of this type of training is to create a culture where the strategic direction is clear and shared, while still allowing room for employees to apply their expertise freely and work with a high degree of autonomy.”
“It takes a great deal of strategic skill—especially for leaders, who are often experts themselves—to share knowledge and engage in discussions that challenge perspectives. The key is figuring out how to share knowledge without diminishing the drive and initiative of others,” says Michael Tolstrup.
“Ultimately, it requires leaders who can point to the mountain that needs to be climbed—without dictating exactly how to get there. It requires employees who are willing to share their knowledge, without assuming they have the entire solution themselves.”
Tolstrup emphasizes that in such a context, leaders must be able to communicate shifts in direction clearly and effectively without imposing their own 12-point plans. Instead, they must grant autonomy to those on the ground, who are best positioned to assess the opportunities in the field.
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“The design is based on the organization's own unique context, with a few but precise slides, effective models, and a strong focus on building a solid leadership culture with clearly defined values. We did not want to get caught up in theoretical frameworks or give an already highly competent group of senior leaders a mini-MBA.”
Anders Peter Kierbye Johansen shares his thoughts on the model:
“Letting go of some control comes quite naturally here because our employees are so skilled, and as leaders, we maintain a culture where it’s not about being right but about discovering, ‘What do you know that I don’t?’—and then finding the way forward together.”
“It’s probably embedded in the center’s DNA that many of our employees are, in many ways, more knowledgeable than our leaders—because they come in as experts from the industries we work with. That’s why our leaders need to be especially good at setting strategic frameworks and engaging in dialogue to bring out that expertise.”
“Their job is to bring out the best in others,” he says, emphasizing that a stable leadership culture is particularly crucial in an organization with a high turnover of incoming and outgoing employees.
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The Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møller Center for Zero Carbon Shipping is a non-profit and independent research and development organization dedicated to making the shipping industry carbon-free. In collaboration with its 25 partners, the center works to:
For the Train-the-Trainer approach to be effective, it must be simple enough that even leaders without prior teaching experience can step up and facilitate training sessions.
The framework itself is complex, but the training outcomes must be immediately applicable—unlike many programs where participants struggle to translate what they’ve learned into real-world practice.
Michael Tolstrup explains:
“The design is based on the organization's own unique context, with a few but precise slides, effective models, and a strong focus on building a solid leadership culture with clearly defined values. We did not want to get caught up in theoretical frameworks or give an already highly competent group of senior leaders a mini-MBA.”
“We wanted a model that works in practice and contributes to a culture where people have the mandate to explore and stay curious—while avoiding heavy, bureaucratic chains of command when communicating strategy and direction.”
“Our goal was to make complexity simple and dynamic, ensuring that the organization itself builds internal capacity. The model can be adjusted and expanded when necessary, but the objective was to establish a leadership culture that becomes part of the organization’s foundation—not one that is dependent on individuals but one that endures.”
– Michael Tolstrup, Head of Leadership Consulting, CfL
How Do You Build a Company Culture When Employees Are Only on Board for Six Months at a Time? The answer lies in the collaboration between Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møller Center for Zero Carbon Shipping and CfL.
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