There are many definitions of what excellent leadership is. Because great leadership is situational and contextual. The great leader differs from the good leader by practicing the very behaviours that make them unique. Exceptional. In our daily lives, most of us have encountered the leader in a situation that stands out as one of the very best leadership situations. In this project, we seek through interviews to find the very best leadership behaviour at Danske Capital, the handball team YDUN95 and PCB. We want to uncover the unique strategies of the leadership behaviour so that it can be transferred to other leaders. We know that outstanding leaders have the very best leadership situations, which we want to put together into a model for the outstanding middle manager. But what makes these leadership situations different and can we learn from the very best? We believe this is possible if we are able to uncover their macro and micro strategies for the way leadership is executed.

First, however, we need to get a handle on what we mean by excellent leadership.

Basically, we see that the purpose of excellent management of a company is:

to get the best possible long-term result for the organisation

Inspired by our colleagues, CEO of Rosendahl Consulting, Arne Rosendahl Lassen, we define the result at a given point in time (t) as:

Rt = f1(motivationt, relevant competences)

This applies to the employee, the manager, the team and the organisation as a whole.

With the above definition in mind, the excellent leader needs to constantly develop motivation and relevant competences to keep up with competitors, who also evolve over time. The constant evolution of competitors means that the following leadership components must be constantly maintained and developed:

• High professionalism
• Business understanding
• Personal Social Skills
• Leadership behaviour – (Creativity – Power – Influence)

All in all, Rt will develop over time as the above four components develop accordingly.

It follows that it is the manager’s role to optimise the motivation and relevant competencies of their employees, which is what we have focused on in this modelling project.

The model below shows performance at a given point in time as a function of motivation and relevant competences. That is, both the best and worst competitors increase their leadership performance over time. This is shown in the graph as the space between the two solid lines.

Thus, a company can choose to:

• keep up with the trend
• slow down and then position itself on the low-performing line or below
• focus on developing employee motivation and relevant competences and thereby create results that place the company among the best-performing organisations. This means that the company is close to the top line, above it or on a steeper line (see the dotted line in the figure).

Competitors’ performance
R(t) = f(t) (M, RK.)

Time

1.8 Delimitation
Employee satisfaction surveys are a commonly used tool in many companies and organisations. This is the case for Danske Capital and PCB, who use MTU relatively intensively with quarterly surveys and associated analyses. In the analysis of Danske Capital, we used the MTU, but we later found that almost all middle managers can talk about unique leadership situations. Based on this, interviews are a far better tool than MTU when it comes to finding the Outstanding Middle Manager.

1.9 Premise
The premise of this book The Excellent Middle Manager is that we follow the methods of NLP modelling. See section below. We are very grateful for Danske Kapital’s and the handball team YDUN95’s and PCB’s contribution to the book.