How Isavia is building a culture of trust and achievement

Imagine if you worked in a place where you really felt connected to your colleagues and your leaders.

A place where the people you worked with knew the real you and accepted both your strengths and weaknesses. But also a place where your colleagues and leaders challenged you on your decisions and opinions and where you felt free to challenge them. A place where you felt safe.

Just imagine what you and everyone around you could achieve in such a workplace.

In Conscious Consulting, a workplace culture like this is called a constructive culture because your interactions with the people around you are constructive. You help develop each other and work together to achieve shared ambitions for strong results and solid performance. In other words, you build each other better and you build yourself better.

This is the story of how a company on an island of volcanoes decided to embark on a journey towards a constructive culture.

How it all started: why the need for change?

In the dynamic world of air traffic, adaptability and efficiency are critical skills. Isavia is the national airport and air navigation service provider of Iceland, and they operate KEF, the international airport of Iceland. Isavia faced operational challenges exacerbated by resistance to change among its skilled work force. The executive team helmed by CEO Sveinbjörn Indriðason realised that they needed to establish a culture of trust and empowerment if the company was to reach its ambitious goals. And they knew that if they wanted change to happen, they needed to start the change among themselves. This realisation marked the beginning of a transformative journey from control to trust, and Conscious Consulting facilitated it.

“It is my conviction that in order to implement a strategy successfully, we need to change the workplace culture so that it supports the strategy we intend to implement", says Sveinbjörn Indriðason. He adds: “Instead of immediately implementing the strategy, we decided to embark on a cultural journey. Our first step was to look inward and consider what needed to change within ourselves.”

“Instead of immediately implementing the strategy, we decided to embark on a cultural journey. Our first step was to look inward and consider what needed to change within ourselves.”

— Sveinbjörn Indriðason, Executive Director of Isavia

Even though Isavia had a successful track record and was achieving one target after the other, there was a sense that the company had the potential to achieve even higher levels of success. However, Sveinbjörn Indriðason knew that if Isavia was to progress further, they needed to address the root cause of operational challenges and resistance to change. The leadership team realised that this root cause was a company culture defined by a lack of constructive dialogue and trust at all levels of the organisation.

Organisational culture is about how we interact with each other as human beings at the workplace and outside of work. It’s how we support the growth of individuals to perform at their best and how we make sure that we as a company achieve the best results possible. To do that, the culture has to be more constructive and less defensive. The defensive culture has a negative impact on both organisational performance and individual welfare, whereas the constructive culture will strengthen cooperation and performance on both individual, team and organisational levels.

It may sound very abstract, but it can be boiled down to how we think, act, and relate — especially when under pressure. And in a business, long-term, high performance can only be achieved when everyone performs at their best, also when pressure is high. A constructive culture is consequently a prerequisite for a high-performance business.

What cultural transformation looks like in practice

Conscious Consulting coaches worked intensively with the Isavia leaders on creating awareness of their own personal behavioural style and their own mindset. This personalised approach aimed to create self-awareness and enhance interpersonal skills. The leaders practiced self-reflection to help identify negative response patterns, and the positive effects spilled over into their personal lives for many. They began to strive towards establishing relationships characterised by curious dialogues, trust and shared responsibilities. The leaders learned the value of open and honest dialogues, self-disclosure and listening, and they gained more awareness of the negative consequences of avoiding constructive conflicts and placing blame, which are typical behavioural patterns in a defensive organisational culture. Instead, leaders needed to start trusting each other and learn to be open in communicating about their challenges and asking for help and feedback. This is what characterises constructive behaviour.

As one leader reflects: ‘What I learned is that when I witness tension between my colleagues or friends and family, I can find the courage to lean into the situation and ask questions about what is happening. I believe that in doing so I can learn to decode my old autopilot reactions and have different reactions without avoiding these situations.’

Behaviour in both teams and individuals moved from displays of power and scapegoating to transparent decision-making processes and sharing responsibilities.

— Simon Skaaning, Partner at Conscious Consulting

Coaching wasn’t only done on an individual level, but also on a team level. Isavia's leadership teams underwent intensive and sometimes challenging team dynamics sessions in which they needed to learn how to open up about their own personal insecurities, concerns, and weaknesses to achieve a real sense of trust and understanding within the team. The coaches helped the team break down silos, foster collaboration, define their purpose and improve the quality of dialogue and other communication among the people in the organisation. Through dialogue and coaching, behaviour in both teams and individuals moved from displays of power and scapegoating to transparent decision-making processes and sharing responsibilities.

Over time, Isavia started to transition from traditional top-down management practices to the beginning of a culture of open dialogue, trust and empowerment. The leadership teams saw the positive effects of trust within their own teams and slowly started to show more trust towards their own employees and to let them carry out their work with minimal interference. They started to make courageous decisions on organisational structures and key processes, shifting responsibilities and bases of power. In other words, the leaders acted as ambassadors for the desired culture and helped create ripples of change that spread further into all the reaches of the organisation. They started to pull some of the key levers for culture change. This paved the way for a more engaged and productive workforce.

A cultural transformation takes courage and commitment

As Conscious Consulting worked with Isavia on moving aggressive and passive behavioural dynamics to constructive dynamics, the shift from a directive management style to a more collaborative and empowered approach opened up for creative problem-solving and a quicker rebound after the pandemic. However, this shift didn’t happen overnight as a cultural transformation is no quick fix.

"I fully acknowledge that embarking on such a journey as ours requires a certain level of courage. But if the leaders don't commit to this work wholeheartedly, there's every chance that the transformational work will just fizzle out," explains Sveinbjörn Indriðason. He further adds, "But I'm absolutely convinced that if we don't start by looking inward, engage in self-reflection and make changes within ourselves, then we won't achieve the changes most beneficial for success. Through this work, we're simply raising our standards to achieve even better results than we have achieved so far, even though the results have been significant."

Isavia's cultural transformation is a testament to the effectiveness of focusing on team dynamics and individual leadership coaching.

— Torben Nielsen, Partner at Conscious Consulting

Isavia's cultural transformation is a testament to the effectiveness of focusing on team dynamics and individual leadership coaching. The company is shifting towards constructive dialogues and is learning to welcome differences of opinion instead of avoiding them. This shift won’t only strengthen operational efficiency in Isavia but also enrich the work experience for all. It’s a prerequisite for a successful workplace where potential is realised to the fullest and where people thrive.

"The cultural journey essentially involves maximising the potential of the individuals working here. To maximise the success we can achieve as a workplace, we need to build a strong workplace culture."