Elena’s story

Elena arrives at the monday morning meeting with her usual PowerPoint slides, which include an overview agenda for the meeting, colour-coded status updates, some new info about demographics (in following years, they will have more demand for elderly care but the expectation is to maintain the budget), and the quarterly kpi dashboard that her director wants to be filled in by Friday. She quickly runs through some of the KPIs ahead of the meeting: response times, number of home visits completed, average case resolution. She knows that these numbers don’t represent the reality of what happens out there in the city: there is no information about whether Mrs. Andersson feels less alone than she did six months ago. That falls outside all the numbers Elena needs to report.

She sets down her papers and notices Jonas before the meeting starts.

He’s 25 and joined the team eight months ago. His master’s degree focused on ways to improve the social life of elderly care recipients. During his first week at work, he stayed late every day to map out the informal social networks around three of their care recipients: who visited them, who called, who lived nearby. He presented it to Elena with a hand-drawn diagram on a3 paper. The ideas were about connecting people at various events held in buildings owned by the municipality. She’d nodded at the time.

Since then, she’s meant to bring it up with her director. But other things have come first. Elena rarely has time to sit and plan, and she spends most of the week trying to fix problems.

Now Jonas is sitting at the far end of the table, turning his phone over and over in his hand. Last week, he’d proposed something smaller: a monthly, volunteer-run coffee meeting between care recipients in the same neighborhood. He’d sent it to Elena in a two-page email with a budget breakdown. Since the budget had already been approved and fixed a few weeks ago, Elena had forwarded the suggestion upwards–but she knew that now was not a good time, especially with the new restructurings, especially if some people might be laid off.

She had talked with Jonas briefly when she saw him in one of the corridors. ”The idea is great, really,” she’d said. “It’s only that these things take time. Keep the ideas coming.”

She watches him now as the meeting begins. He opens his notebook and writes the date at the top. That’s all he writes for the first 20 minutes. The meeting moves through the agenda. kpis are reviewed. Response times are up 3%: good. The number of completed home visits is slightly down: needs attention. Elena presents the numbers with the fluency of someone who has done this for seven years. She answers questions. She nods at the right moments. She updates the presentation based on the feedback she receives. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she is thinking that last week there was a book event and she met Mrs. Andersson, who told her that the best part of her week was when the young man from the municipality took the extra time to be with her, discuss some books and asked her to join the book club of the municipality (whispering, “where she could discuss books with single men from the neighbourhood”).

That young man had been Jonas. There is no column on the kpi dashboard about helping Mrs. Andersson get out of her house to attend a book club.

Now, towards the end of the meeting, someone references Jonas’s coffee morning proposal. It is mentioned as an example of why clearer submission guidelines are needed for new initiatives. They stress the importance of using the right template and storing submissions in a specific Microsoft Teams folder. Jonas looks up for a moment. Elena watches his face move through something (a brief flash of emotion that might be indignation, or hope that someone is fi-nally discussing his idea?), but then it settles back into its neutral position. Jonas writes something in his notebook and nods.

After the meeting, Elena finds herself standing next to Jonas at the coffee machine. She is no longer sure of what to say. She feels there is something wrong with the system. She knows the system is broken. She feels it in her body. In her stomach. But she doesn’t have the time, nor the energy. She needs to update the PowerPoint with the new information and send it soon–otherwise she will be late for the next meeting.

What can I do about it? She wonders. I need to do something. I really do.

* * *

A leadership course is held in a conference room on the fourth floor of the municipal building (the one with the good coffee machine and a view of the canal). In attendance are 12 managers from different departments. The facilitator, Karin, has kind eyes and a habit of asking a question and then waiting much longer than feels comfortable for the answer.

Elena signed up for this course willingly. She signs up for most things willingly. If it looks good, it is good, and besides, she is genuinely curious about the Personal Compass exercise Karin had described in the invitation email. A tool for mapping your val-ues, strengths, what drains you, what energises you. A foundation for self-leadership. Elena had read that and thought: useful for the team. She has already been thinking about who on her team might benefit from it the most. Jonas, probably. Sara.

Now, Karin is asking everyone to turn to their own Personal Compass.

The room quiets. Pens are uncapped. Elena looks down at the paper in front of her.

The compass has six sections. Elena starts with the easy ones. Strengths. Moving her pen quickly, she writes: structured thinking, reliability, navigating complexity, translating strategy into action. That’s true. She knows it’s true because she’s been told it’s true many times, in many performance reviews. She moves on to Values, writing: fairness, responsibility, quality. Elena pauses before adding: Peo-ple. Looking at it, she wonders if People is perhaps too vague. But she doesn’t know how to make it any more specific so she leaves it and moves on.

She arrives at the box in the centre of the compass which is slightly larger than the others. It reads: What energises you at work?

Elena puts her pen to the paper. She writes: Solving problems. Then she stops. She looks at it for a moment. It’s true. Isn’t it? She is energised by solving problems. By that feeling when a difficult situation untangles. When the right decision becomes clear. When someone comes to her overwhelmed and leaves with a plan. That feeling is real.

But then something else surfaces. It is quieter and less comfortable: Is that what energises me, or is that just what I’m good at?

Elena tries to think of the last time she felt genuinely energised at work. Not satisfied. Not relieved. Not competent. But energised. The way the word implies something being added rather than depleted.

She thinks of Mrs. Andersson at the book club. The way her face had looked. She thinks of Jonas’s A3 diagram, spread out on the table during his first week. The hand-drawn lines connecting people. She had felt something then. Not the satisfaction of a problem solved. Something more like… possibility?

Elena doesn’t write anything else in the box. After lunch, Karin introduces the second exercise. “Imagine your ideal work week,” she says. “Not realistic. Not what your calendar looks like. But how you would design it if you could design it from scratch. What kinds of work, rhythms, conversations and spaces would there be?”

Elena starts writing. Monday: team meeting and weekly planning. Tuesday-Thursday: problem-solving, stakeholder meetings, reviewing outputs, supporting the team with blockers. Friday: wrap-up, reporting, preparation for the following week.

She reads it back. It looks exactly like her current week. After a pause, she adds: More time for strategic thinking. Karin walks slowly around the room. She stops near Elena, glances at the paper without reading it, then asks the group a question. It’s addressed to no one in particular, but that lands, somehow, specifically in Elena’s thoughts:

“I’m curious–when you read what you’ve written, does it feel like something you’re dreaming toward? Or something you’re already living?”

A few people laugh. Elena laughs too. On the train ride home, Elena looks out the window at the city moving past. The canal. The old hospital building that’s been converted into flats. A group of teenagers on bikes.

She thinks about the compass sitting in her bag. The centre box, half-empty.

She thinks about something her mother used to say when Elena was a teenager and couldn’t make a decision: “What do you actually want, Elena? Not what makes sense. What do you want?” Elena had always found the question slightly frustrating.

She pulls out the compass. Reads her list of Strengths. Reads her Values. Reads Solving problems in the centre box, alone.

She picks up her pen. Underneath, she writes one more line. Small, slightly hesitantly, as if reserving the option to deny that she wrote it:

To see people become more than they thought they could be. She looks at it for a moment. Then she puts the canvas away and opens her email inbox: she has 43 unread messages since this morning.

Elena is attending a new workshop run by karin about culture and relationships. They have been doing some movement exercises that feel nice. Now, Karin invites participants to sit in a circle and asks Elena to describe her team.

Elena describes Sara’s precision, Jamal’s instinct for relationships, and Per’s reluctance that sometimes conceals his best thinking. Then she mentions Jonas.

She describes him the way she always does: “talented, full of ideas, still finding his feet.” She mentions the coffee morning proposal, the a3 diagram, and the book club. She can hear herself use the phrase, “I’ve been trying to protect him a little from how slow the system moves.”

Karin doesn’t say anything immediately. This is, Elena has noticed, a habit of Karin’s. The pauses are not empty: they have a texture, weight.

“Protect him from what, exactly?” Karin says. “From…discouragement, I suppose. From hitting bureaucratic walls and losing motivation.”

“Has it worked?” Elena opens her mouth. Closes it. She thinks about Jonas at the coffee machine. The polite smile. The notebook he barely writes in anymore. The way he used to stay late, but now leaves at exactly five o’clock.

“No,” she replies. “Not really.” Karin nods slowly. “What do you think he needed instead of protection?”

Elena looks out the window. It’s a grey Tuesday in November. A tram goes past.

What did he need? He needed the system to be less rigid. He needed Elena’s director to create space for new initiatives. He needed the bud-get cycle to work differently, the restructuring not to happen, the sub-mission guidelines not to require a specific Microsoft Teams folder. He needed things that were not in Elena’s power to give.

But then she hears herself, and the excuse in it. She thinks about what she actually said to Jonas. “Great idea. These things take time. Keep the ideas coming.” She had never once sat down with him and said: “Here is how this organisation actually works. Here is what makes a proposal land. Here is what I would do differently if I were you.” She had never offered her real knowledge.

“I think he needed me to actually tell him the truth,” she says to Karin. “About what I see in him. And about what I think he’s missing.”

“What do you see in him?” “Someone with genuinely good instincts who doesn’t yet know how to make them land. Who’s proposing the right things in the wrong register. Who’s waiting for the system to recognise him instead of learning how to move inside it.”

After the workshop, Elena schedules a conversation with Jonas for the following Thursday. She thinks about it more than she expects to.

She is not worried about Jonas’s reaction. She is worried about something harder to name: that the conversation will require her to admit, implicitly, that she has not been fully present as his manager. That the kindness she’s been performing has been partly for herself (a way of being the good one, the supportive one, the one who didn’t add to his frustration) while quietly avoiding the discomfort of the real conversation. She has been managing her own feelings. And calling it mentorship.

One week later, Jonas and Elena sit in a small meeting room on the second floor.

“I want to be honest with you about something,” she says. “I think I’ve been letting you down.”

Jonas looks up. Carefully. “Your ideas are genuinely good. The a3 diagram, the coffee mornings. They’re not just nice ideas, Jonas, they’re right. They’re the kind of thinking this department actually needs.” She pauses. “But I’ve never told you what I actually observe. How you’re presenting them. What I think you’re missing. I’ve just absorbed your frustration on your behalf and told you to keep going. That wasn’t fair to you.”

The room is quiet. “What do you think I’m missing?” Jonas says. His voice is careful. She tells him. Not everything at once. But the true things: that he’s proposing before he’s built any allies, that his emails read as solutions when they should read as questions. She tells him what she would have done differently. She tells him what she sees that he doesn’t see about himself yet.

It’s awkward in the way that honest things are awkward. There are moments of silence that require sitting with. But Jonas doesn’t deflect. He writes things down. At one point, he says, “I thought you just didn’t think my ideas were viable.”

“I should have said this months ago,” Elena says. “I’m glad you’re saying it now,” Jonas says. Elena nods. Then, after a moment: “There’s something else I want to tell you. Not just about the feedback.”

She had not planned this part. But the conversation has created a kind of honesty that feels worth staying inside.

“I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we work as a team. About the fact that your ideas keep hitting walls not only because of how they’re framed, but because there’s no real structure here for them to land in. No regular space where we actually think together about what we’re trying to do and how. Where someone like you can bring an idea and have it genuinely explored instead of forwarded upward and buried.”

Jonas is listening more openly. “I’m working on changing that. Not dramatically. I don’t control the budget cycle or the restructuring. But the things I do control: how we run our meetings, whether we have real conversations about what’s working and what isn’t, whether there’s a ritual in this team for actually hearing each other.” She pauses.

Jonas looks at her for a moment. Something in his face is doing the same thing it did in that first week, when he spread the a3 diagram across the table. Not quite hope, but the precondition of it.

* * *

Over the last few months, elena has felt like something is shifting, slowly but genuinely. The open hour meetings. The honest conversations. But now, alone in her office, a question starts to haunt her: If my team doesn’t need me to have the answers, who am I?

For seven years, Elena had been the one who absorbed chaos from above and translated it into clarity below. The one who solved problems before they escalated. The one people would come to when they didn’t know what to do. That was her value. That was why she mattered. Even the changes she’d been making recently: the new meeting format, the honest feedback, the space she’d been trying to create. She had designed those. She had been the architect of openness. Which meant, she now realises uncomfortably, that she had still been in control of it.

Her phone buzzes: a message from her director requesting an update on the quarterly targets. kpis. She puts the phone face down.

Elena thinks about Jonas. Three months ago, after their conversation, something had reawakened in him. He’d started staying late again, not every day, but sometimes. The open hour had given his thinking a place to land. Watching this, she had felt something close to what she’d written down on the train: to see people become more than they thought they could be.

Elena decides to say nothing in the first open hour meeting. She won’t facilitate. Won’t redirect. She’ll just sit, notebook in lap, and see what happens when she steps back from being the gravitational centre of the room.

It is harder than she expected. The meeting begins without her usual whiteboard question. Jonas had volunteered to prepare something this week, partly as an experiment. He writes: What is one thing we’re doing for our care recipients that we’re proud of, and one thing we wish we could do differently?

They are good questions. The conversation moves. Sara talks about a family she’s been supporting through a difficult transition. Jamal tells a story about a care recipient who asked him, last week, whether anyone at the municipality actually reads the feedback forms. The room laughs, and then goes quiet. It isn’t really funny.

Elena grips her notebook. The question hangs in the air unanswered. The silence stretches. Every part of Elena wants to speak. Her mouth opens slightly.

She closes it. Jonas glances at her briefly, not for the answer, she thinks, but just to check. She gives the smallest shake of her head. Not yet.

Sara makes a connection that surprises her. Jamal builds on it. They begin discussing ways to make citizens participate more and what it means to be listened to. The direction that emerges is not the one Elena would have taken. She finds herself leaning forward slightly, genuinely interested in where this is going.

After the meeting, as people gather their things, Jonas stops beside her.

“You were quiet,” he says. “I was listening,” she replies. He nods. Then says, “It felt different. The room felt different.” Elena knows what he means. There had been a quality to the conversation: a kind of energy, people building upon each other rather than referring back to a centre. It was something she had not been able to manufacture when she was running things.

* * *

The email arrives on a thursday afternoon in early February: the department’s annual budget, broken down by category, with a note from the director asking managers to confirm their allocations by the end of the month. As usual.

Elena reads it twice. The numbers are almost identical to last year. Home visit hours: same. Administrative overhead: slightly up. And yes, there is the footnote reminding managers that all new initiatives require approval through the standard submission process.

She forwards it to her calendar. She has done this every February for seven years.

Then she stops. She thinks about the last four months. The open hour meetings, Jonas’s question on the whiteboard, Sara’s growing confidence. She thinks about participatory structures: If you change the culture but not the structures, the structures will eventually win.

She looks at the budget email again. The structure, she realises, has been saying something to her team every year without anyone noticing: the important decisions are made before you arrive. Your job is to implement them.

Every open meeting, every honest conversation, every carefully created condition… and then this email lands and quietly undoes the message. Not maliciously. Just structurally.

She opens a new email to her team. She stares at the blank subject line for a moment. Then she writes: “This year I’d like us to decide the budget together. Can we put 90 minutes in?”

She sends it before she can talk herself out of it.

Elena comes to the meeting having done something she has never done before: she shares the full budget document with the team in advance, with no prior markings, no suggested allocations, and no hints about what she thinks the right answer is. Just the numbers and a single question at the top of the shared document: “If this were your budget to allocate, what would you prioritise and why?”

The conversation does not go smoothly. Per wants to protect the administrative hours because he’s seen what happens when they get cut. Sara pushes for more investment in community-facing work. Jamal asks a question nobody has a clean answer to: ”How do we measure whether we’re spending this money on the right things?” It’s the same question the kpi dashboard has been failing to answer for years, and here it is, surfacing from the team itself, in the middle of a budget meeting.

Jonas is quiet for the first 40 minutes. Elena notices but says nothing.

Then he puts something on the table. Not the coffee morning proposal that he initiated one year ago, but a question: “What if part of the budget was not pre-allocated at all? What if we kept a small amount of it fluid, and decided how to use it quarterly, based on what we’re actually seeing out there?”

The room considers this. It is, Elena thinks immediately, slightly impractical. The approval process would require… she stops herself. She lets the thought form fully before judging it.

It is slightly impractical. It is also exactly right in principle. A small pool of truly flexible resources, governed by the team, responsive to what they’re actually encountering in the field. It would require her to nego-tiate something with the director… It would require a different kind of accountability structure. It might be very impractical for the it systems that require filing some reports… “I think we should try it,” she says. “I’ll work out what it takes to make it possible.”

The final allocation looks nothing like what Elena would have decided alone. She approves it with a feeling she recognises from the team meeting three months ago: the particular discomfort of trusting something you didn’t design.

Six weeks later, Jonas uses the first quarterly allocation of the flexible pool to fund three community coffee mornings. Previously, the community coffee morning concept had been cited as an example of why clearer submission guidelines were needed. This time, there is no submission. There is a fifteen-minute conversation in an open hour meeting where Jonas explains what he’s seeing, the team asks three questions, and it is a safe enough experiment to test.

They do it. Mrs. Andersson comes to the first community coffee. She brings a neighbor Elena has never heard of –a woman in her eighties who, it turns out, has been entirely unknown to the department despite living only two streets away.

There is no column on the kpi dashboard for this. Elena writes it in her notebook instead.

* * *

The conference is being held in the main hall of the municipal building. The grand one on the first floor which is normally used for formal ceremonies. Two hundred people. Managers, employees, elected officials, and a few curious people from other municipalities who have heard something is happening in this department.

Elena appears on the programme twice: once as a panelist in the morning session about new ways to organise public sector work, and once in the afternoon, giving a short presentation on her team’s journey. She has given versions of this talk seven times over the last six months: three times internally, twice at a national conference, twice to a delegation from a neighbouring municipality that had reached out after someone forwarded them the internal newsletter article about their success. Each time she gives the talk, she finds she has to update it, because things keep changing quickly in her department.

Her team’s work is described in the third paragraph of the introduction: “A pilot in shared leadership that has produced measurable improvements in both team engagement and service outcomes, including a 23% reduction in staff sick leave, improved response times despite a flat budget, and qualitative feedback from care recipients indicating significantly increased sense of connection and support.”

She reads the 23% figure and reflects back on February, one year ago, when she was staring at a kpi dashboard that told her almost nothing about Mrs. Andersson. She had not set out to improve the kpis. She had set out to create conditions where her team could do the work they actually believed in. The kpis had followed quietly, like a byproduct.

She thinks this is probably the most important thing she has learned and also the hardest to put on a presentation slide.

The morning panel goes well. Elena speaks less than the other two panelists (a habit she has been cultivating) and asks the audience a question at the end rather than summarising her points. A few people appear slightly startled by this. Most lean forward.

In the break afterwards, she is approached by several people. She has learned to be present in these conversations, to resist the urge to hand people a reading list and move on. She asks questions. She listens to what people are actually asking beneath what they say they’re asking, which is usually not “what did you do?” but “do you think this could work for someone like me?”

Jonas finds her between sessions. He looks, she thinks, like someone who belongs in rooms like this one. He had facilitated this morning’s opening activity: a 20-minute exercise with the whole room that he had designed himself, drawing on the embodied practices from Karin’s workshops, but adapting them for a group of 200 skeptical public servants. It had worked out better than anyone expected. She had watched from the side of the room, genuinely surprised, as 200 people who’d been checking their phones when they arrived were suddenly in conversation with someone they’d never met, talking about something real.

“How did it feel?” she asks him. “Terrifying,” he says. “Good.”

She nods. She knows exactly how this combination feels. He tells her that two people have already approached him about the community coffee morning model: one from social services, one from the youth department. He has their cards. He is going to follow up next week. He says this without asking her whether he should, without checking whether it fits inside some boundary she has drawn. He says it the way someone says a thing they have already decided.

She remembers the person who’d turned his phone over and over in his hands at the Monday morning meeting. The one who wrote the date at the top of his notebook and nothing else for 20 minutes.

The afternoon session ends, and the formal programme dissolves into the noise of 200 people deciding whether to go home or keep talking. Elena is gathering her things when a man she doesn’t recognise stops beside her.

He introduces himself as David. He manages a team in the urban infrastructure department with 12 people, mostly engineers, and a culture he describes, with a kind of exhausted honesty, as “very hierarchical, very technical, very convinced that this kind of thing isn’t for them.” He’d been at the morning panel. He’d heard her talk in the afternoon. He looks like a man who has been sitting with a question for a long time and has finally found someone he thinks might have the answer.

“I want to do what you’ve done,” he says. “I just don’t know where to start. What’s the process? What did you do first?”

Elena’s first instinct is precise and immediate: she knows exactly what to give him. The personal canvas exercise. The open hour meeting format. Starting with culture before structure. Having honest conversations first. She could map it out on a napkin in 10 minutes. She has basically done exactly that, four times over the last six months, for four different people who’d asked her similar questions.

She opens her mouth. And then she stops. She thinks about the first leadership workshop. The workshop facilitator’s words: your role is to create conditions, not control outcomes. She thinks about how she had sat in that workshop and nodded along at all the right moments and then gone back to her office and continued, for months, to hand people the answers they asked for because it was faster and it felt like helping.

She thinks about what Karin asked her, in the circle, when she described Jonas: has it worked?

She thinks about David’s team. Twelve engineers. Very hierarchical, very technical, very convinced this isn’t for them. If she gives David a sequence (step one, step two, step three), he will follow it or he won’t. But either way, it will be her sequence, built for her context, her team, her particular combination of a Jonas and a Sara and a Per. It will not be his.

“Can I ask you something first?” she says. David looks slightly surprised. “Sure.” “What made you come and talk to me just now? Out of everyone in this room?”

He thinks about it. “Something you said in the afternoon session. About the budget process. About deciding to try something before you knew if it would work.”

“What was it about that specifically?” He pauses. “I think… I’ve been waiting until I understood the whole thing before starting. And I’m starting to think that’s not how it works.”

Elena looks at him for a moment. “What’s one thing,” she says, “that you could try next week? Not the whole transformation. One thing. Small enough that if it goes wrong, it’s recoverable. Real enough that it would actually mean something to your team.”

David is quiet. She waits. She has learned to wait and does not fill the silence.

“Well, there is this thing…”

* * *