To grow in your career, place your personal values at the center and build outwards.

As women continue to be a driving force for change around the world, this series aims to highlight those who demonstrate an exceptional commitment to creating an impact.

Our interview with Mette focuses using your values to hone in on what you do, embracing who you are, and stepping out of your comfort zone. Learning and development only happens when you’re brave enough to step out of your comfort zone.

Mette Johansson is living proof that following your heart can bring success. After leaving a leadership position in corporate, Mette now inspires and trains others who have decided to take ownership over their career advancement.

She has wise insight that we’re eager to share with you!

I started MetaMind around three years ago, after a fifteen-year career in the Corporate world. I always knew the element I loved most from being a leader was helping people activate their strengths. As I developed my leadership style, I realised I needed a greater challenge, different from leading busy corporate communications teams with 50 staff.

I created MetaMind to help others on their self-development journey. Initially, MetaMind offered guidance on how people can increase their influence and impact. My first book, How to Make Yourself Promotable, focused on the seven skills needed for effective leadership communication. Now three years later, MetaMind offers much more.

In response to clients’ needs and growing demand, MetaMind has expanded services to offer an integrated approach to leadership development, and supporting clients throughout their leadership journey.

Programs now include: effective team communication; communicating your vision and values; speaking in front of audiences; working across cultures; Authentic Leadership, and coaching. This Authentic Leadership approach engages the client at a deeper level to explore how core values drive leadership behaviours, and how to adapt to improve communication, which in the end, increases productivity.

Being Honest And Authentic

I believe the way to grow yourself is to help others succeed, and my values are important to me.

I had to be honest to myself in acknowledging that my corporate career could perhaps not fulfil the challenge I was seeking. I took the skills and tools I had honed within the corporate world, and developed a business from the ground up that not only supports leadership capability in organisations, but reflects what I stand for as a leader.

Authentic leadership is important to me. I feel ever more, in this crowded digital space, aspiring leaders need support to bring out their values and remain true and authentic, to be inspirational people leaders.

My advice to those starting out is to be yourself and be authentic in how you offer your products or services.

My personal approach on how I deliver services has been critical to MetaMind’s growth. As an entrepreneur, people are hiring you as much as your product. You’ll thrive if you offer something that is of value to you, as much as it is of value to them.

When you’re truly passionate about what you do, you’re very likely to do an outstanding job.

Business-Building Reality Check

Setting up on your own can be extremely challenging, as you lack the support network of a team or a manager, or a wider structure to back you. Imagine your first IT problem when you no longer have a helpdesk to contact!

However, setting up your own also means you have freedom – freedom to pursue your ideas, follow your intuition and learn from your mistakes. The entrepreneurial journey can be a bumpy road but my driving passion for learning is what has kept me going.

If you take a step back and admit ‘so that didn’t work, but at least now I know…,’ you can re-connect with yourself to understand what you will do next time. When things haven’t gone smoothly or to how I planned, I learnt or even created opportunities out of those challenges.

Learning to seek and create opportunities is one of the most fulfilling aspects of entrepreneurship.

Soft Skills Matter, A lot

Throughout my corporate career and across various roles, I saw countless highly talented people who have the requisite hard skills, yet are held back because they haven’t sufficiently focused on their people skills.

The opposite is also true; managers are promoted without the right people skills, doing unimagined harm to team productivity.

Personal communication skills are critical to connecting with other people

– managers, clients, bosses. Unsurprisingly, studies are showing communication skills are on the decline. People – employees, are spending more time on their mobile phone or on email, and less time talking face-to-face or even by phone.

To be both a successful entrepreneur and an inspiring leader, you need to make an impact. And it’s much more than only about what you say or how you talk, it’s the whole package of how you communicate yourself.

MetaMind is addressing this growing skills gap. We work on the difference of transforming a manager into a leader. When managing a team, you need to get things done. When leading a team, you need to inspire and motivate people to make an impact on your project or the business. I believe an inspiring leader can only do that by being ‘real’ and being clear in communicating their greater purpose.

It’s about leading authentically.

Life Lesson Turned 

I’ve had fulfilling jobs and inspiring jobs throughout my career. Of course, my corporate career shaped me and provided me exciting leadership positions that I enjoyed, in an international context (in Japan, Germany and Singapore).

However, I went through what many people do; about mid-career. They ask: is this it? You reach milestones in your career and feel that something is missing. What’s missing is: we want to do something that’s truly meaningful to ourselves, and what we deep down believe in. We want to work toward a purpose for the greater good.

I had this epiphany only after quitting my last job, and spending some time reflecting on what I truly wanted to do in life. That’s when I connected the dots.

Whenever I was in leadership positions, I loved the big projects, but more importantly: I loved being able to support and develop people. Support them on their personal journey. Empower them. Bring them on the career path that was right for them.

Know What You Value

Whilst I have always striven to be myself, I look back and can see that sometimes, I wasn’t living by my own true values because I had never truly reflected on what my values and purpose were.

There certainly were times when I wasn’t at my best, not fully motivated and not achieving what I know I am capable of. Though that is with the benefit of hindsight, and after I found out that there is more to being authentic than acting on your impulses and feelings of the moment.

Authenticity is about following your intrinsic and fundamental values and is a central part of being an inspiring and effective leader.

In addition, following purpose that is built on these values is what makes you fulfilled, balanced and, ultimately, happy.

I wish I’d had this insight a lot earlier. It would have saved me from taking wrong decisions on the wrong basis.

Mette has learned much in her short years as an entrepreneur. Using the title of her Authentic Leadership programme: “Unmask The Leader Within,” she believes there is more to Authentic Leadership then just being “you” or ‘being real.’ Authentic leadership is as much about leading for ‘a Purpose for the Greater Good.’ Being a self-aware person who enthuses, engages, and empowers teams by leading outwards from their inner core values.

Everyone can be a true leader – who people follow because you inspire them: realise what your values are, and what your passionate purpose in life is.

Then, enthuse others with this purpose for the greater good; inspire, engage, and empower people around you. This is what creates a following, and this is what true leadership is about.

We are the leaders, activists, innovators, and visionaries – whether in the public eye or behind the scenes
– who are revolutionising the way people think and live. We are #ConnectedWomen.

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