STENA AND SKF EXPLORE THE FUTURE TOGETHER
To succeed as a company in the future, you need to be brave, forward-looking, broad-minded and quick to acquire new knowledge. Now Stena and SKF are entering into a unique collaboration to develop their leaders in a joint leadership program. The starting point is the rapid changes connected to digitalisation and how to best meet the challenges and opportunities associated with it.
Last year, Stena introduced “Envisioning the Future” as part of their acclaimed leadership program Ready 4 Anything. The interactive and fully digital module highlights new technologies, behaviours, mega trends and scenarios – and how to create exciting new business opportunities based on that. Stena has also invited SKF to participate in the training – creating great value for both companies in terms of new networks and wider perspectives.
“You must be daring and willing to experiment. Both companies gain from an outside-in perspective where you can be open, inspire and challenge each other. Inviting an external partner raises the level of the training even more. Besides, the new contacts created will hopefully lead to that those working together will keep in touch and help each other in the future”, says Dan Sten Olsson, CEO Stena AB.
The collaboration started when SKF HR Director Ann-Sofie Zaks heard about the training, became curious and contacted Stena to participate.
“We had already considered developing something similar at SKF, but we thought it was unnecessary when the what we were looking for already existed”, says Ann-Sofie Zaks, who leads a change initiative for the SKF group called People Transformation.
This led to the decision to run a pilot training with five managers from each company, which will now be scaled up with several trainings this year.
“Today’s rapid pace of change means that we need to train in a completely different way than before. This is the first time we have seen a model this efficient and scalable at the same time. We are extremely grateful to Stena for inviting us to this unique colla-boration. Other collaborations are usually about products and selling something to third parties, while here we get the oppor-tunity to help each other strengthen our organizations internally”, says Alrik Danielson, CEO AB SKF.
The leadership program Ready 4 Anything develops Stena’s leaders for the future
Leaders at Stena are responsible for developing their employees, the business and themselves, which requires new skills as the outside world changes. The new Leadership Program Ready 4 Anything (R4A) is another step along the path towards positioning Stena’s leaders to capture the opportunities of the future. The program is divided into six modules, which are given on an ongoing basis and which are aimed at all leaders within Stena. External companies – primarily SKF – have participated in a couple of the trainings. The plan is now to do this in a bigger scale.