I’m happy to share that I have recently completed the Just Lead Academy at FLA Leadership.
As part of the Academy, I participated in five inspiring and exciting workshops where passionate, engaging, and accomplished leaders shared their insights on what it means to be a leader in the modern landscape.
It felt like a privilege and an oasis in a busy work life to have the opportunity to get together with kind, intelligent, and ambitious people for a full day biweekly for the ten-week period. Working with data and automation processes all day, it was both fun and challenging to expand my understanding of how categorizing people is unproductive, how true leadership is relational, and how much courage it requires to embrace individuality.
I learned many things that I’ll keep in mind going forward, but for me, the biggest takeaway was the importance of embodying intention and leading from within. Anyone can have a five-year plan and act strategically, but I believe that speaking with purpose and truly believing in what you communicate is essential. This can be embodied in many things like “owning the room” during a presentation or practicing self-leadership in your daily tasks, but the end goal should be to be your authentic self.
Understanding, integrity and reflection are central to both my work ethos and the way I engage with things personally, and my reflective side often leads me to tackle things on my own.
But something that has become particularly clear to me during this time is that growth relies on a strong support system as well. I want to thank Maria Anker Andersen for building an environment where it felt safe to speak openly among such kind and ambitious people, as well as my manager Thomas Seim Larsen for backing me up the whole way - always being inquisitive about what I was learning and exploring my reflections on the FLA and so many other things.
In the words of Mette Norgaard - and one of the very first things I noted down during my time at the academy: “Today is a great day to grow as a leader.”