Colas Danmark
Transforming culture and leadership behaviour in a production company
Background and need
Colas Danmark is one of the country’s leading contractors in civil engineering and asphalt, built on nearly a hundred years of experience, deep craft and strong delivery. With a solid market position and a proud history as its foundation, the company wanted to keep developing its organisation and leadership so it can continue to stand strong in a reality marked by rising complexity, new expectations and a need for even closer collaboration with customers and partners.
The executive team saw clearly that continued development isn’t only about strategy and business priorities, but also about how leadership is exercised day to day. The ambition, then, was to strengthen the leadership chain’s shared direction, interplay and ability to turn strategic ambition into behaviour, decisions and collaboration close to operations.
Approach
The transformation was set up as an integrated process with two parallel tracks - one for the leadership team and one focused on embedding the strategy in everyday practice.
Track 1: Stronger strategic leadership. The track opened with workshops that built a shared starting point for strategy, direction and the role of leadership. Leaders worked on a shared understanding of the organisation’s strategic anchors and on how each individual leader concretely contributes to both execution and coherence. A central piece was building psychological safety inside the leadership group.
Track 2: Organisational culture, communication and capabilities. The second track focused on the wider organisation and on the cultural and communicative conditions for succeeding with the strategy in practice. Through workshops and training programmes the focus was on communicating in change - including how to make room for different perspectives, experiences and reactions.
Results
Colas is well underway with the transformation, and clear signs of movement can already be felt in the organisation. The strategy is being executed, and employees are increasingly able to make sense of it. The work has also sparked new conversations across the leadership chain and built a stronger shared language for leadership, collaboration and development.