Kate Holm Sørensen has just completed the program Leading Strategic Change at INSEAD. She has 25 years of experience in management and organizational development and is a partner in UKON, which is one of Denmark’s leading consultancies within organizational psychology and management. A central part of the work at UKON is to create a strong and sustainable integration between strategy, organization and people.

“My notebook is filled to the brim with gold nuggets, and my head is filled with good hands-on tools after a particularly exciting and educational week at INSEAD with a focus on strategic changes and transformation processes”, says Kate Holm Sørensen.

According to Kate, one of the heavy nuggets the future must be built on is precisely strong networks and relationships. We must be able to team up for complex change tasks when it really matters – and here it is important that we have some balance in the relations account that we can draw on.

Four important ingredients
She highlights four important ingredients in strong and professional networks and relationships, which she has opened her eyes to even more during the week-long programme, namely: expertise, emotions as a resource, tensile strength and curiosity.

“Expertise is about the knowledge, experience and competence we ourselves bring to the table in relation to creating mutual success. It does not come by itself, but is built up through personal character traits such as persistence and endurance. Next, I have become even more aware of emotional intelligence as an important resource, and how important it is that we are smart about both our own and other people’s emotions. The art is to get the emotions to work with us and the task, and not against”, says Kate Holm Sørensen, before she concludes:

“And then there is “tensility”, which is a new word in my vocabulary, which is about the number and quality of the contact points around which our relationships are built. It is important that we connect to each other and commit ourselves on a personal level, that we meet each other as whole people and not just with the professional role and mask. In conclusion, curiosity is an essential ingredient. Curiosity is precisely the driving force in relation to being investigative and developing, but at the same time an important driver for the three previously mentioned ingredients. Curiosity can make people, relationships and the business grow to the highest degree.”