The key to successful collaboration? Deep listening.
A social entrepreneur and business leader share lessons for trust-based teamwork.
By Sarah Holcomb and Lena Borsoi
Heidi Wang and Hilke Rosskamp act like old friends — but the two real-world leaders come from different worlds. Those worlds collided thanks to Ashoka’s Executive-in-Residence program, which matches social innovators with business leaders who can help grow their impact.
A social entrepreneur who is revolutionizing dementia care in her country, Heidi teamed up with Hilke, Global Senior Manager of Healthcare Innovation at the multinational pharmaceutical company Boehringer Ingelheim. Together, they set out to scale Heidi’s solution and reach dementia patients outside Norway’s borders.
Heidi is an extrovert; Hilke an introvert. Heidi lives in Sweden; Hilke in Germany. Yet the two hit it off and developed a trust-based partnership. For months, they met weekly to talk through ideas and opportunities, brought together by their individual and collective purpose to make a healthier world.
Rather than positioning business leaders as experts with solutions, we need a new, collaborative mindset for our current reality. We brought Heidi and Hilke together to share their discoveries and how changemakers can support each other across sectors. Here’s what we learned.
Start with listening
Before offering an answer, deep listening ought to come first, Hilke says: “First of all, I need to listen and to understand what the issue is before I come up with a solution prematurely that might be completely irrelevant. I’m not an expert in dementia care. But I’m trying to listen and to understand what Heidi’s ambitions are, what her plans, and her thoughts are.”
Hilke encourages fellow business leaders to embrace their role as learners, especially at the beginning of their relationship with a social entrepreneur. “It’s stepping out of your usual routine. Finding solutions is something that most of us have been trained to do,” she says. “However, who am I to say I know better than you? For me, this whole journey is a collaboration.”
Empower the other person
To have a true spirit of collaboration, both people must be at the same level, Heidi explains. “I should be 100% a giver and 100% a taker,” she realized. “I was empowered for this relationship to go both ways.” Trust must happen naturally, Heidi reminds us. “It’s gained by listening. It’s a feeling of being respected. It is not rushing things. I think trust has to just come.”
Heidi’s work focuses on empowering people to find the best solution for themselves. Hilke was inspired to adopt a similar approach for their collaboration: “I think the better word for my role is ‘facilitate,’ rather than ‘helping,” she says. “I enjoyed…facilitating the discussion and process of finding the best solution.”
Lean into the questions
There’s usually not a straight path to answers — by asking questions, Hilke helped to sort through ideas and reframe the project. “It’s a journey that might go in circles and have a couple of bends. It’s not a straight line. There’s no clear recipe for how it’s supposed to work. You have to find out by listening.”
“I was just trying to put a framework to Heidi’s thinking and all the things she has already done,” Hilke explains. “Because most of the components are there.”
Sometimes this process reveals a deeper question. Initially, Heidi was looking to scale her idea to other countries. But through their conversations, the two realized that there was another question that needed to be addressed first. “What we are working on actually is not where to scale,” Hilke explains, “but first of all, what is it that’s being scaled? What is the product? I think we spent quite some time sorting that out…We also had to work on what do we mean by scaling?”
During weekly meetings, they collaborated using a virtual whiteboard. “We continuously went back to that whiteboard,” Heidi says. “What could the potential franchise model look like?”
Be open and transparent
When Hilke wondered if Heidi felt their conversations were productive, she brought it up. “We discussed it and were very open,” she says. Both felt comfortable with the approach they had taken, and decided to continue along the same path.
“There are so many unknowns,” Hilke says. Success doesn’t hinge on arriving at a fully-formed solution; it’s more about the process. “It’s a way of being together as a team, finding the best approach.”
Consider it a journey of discovery
Through this collaboration, Heidi has new direction for her organization — and confidence to pursue it. “Working together has given the space to believe in what I see and then make the choices and build resources within my organization to go new ways,” Heidi says. “So, we’ve already decided for 2021, within nine months, we should switch from being a service provider to being a platform provider and educator.”
For years, Heidi’s team has been developing methodology and digital tools for dementia and providing them to individuals, families and care workers. Now they will equip others to disseminate those tools and NOEN’s methodology in order to reach a greater number of individuals. This is the whole point of developing a social franchise, she says — to make the technological tools and methodology accessible.
Heidi also began taking ownership of her creativity in a new way, she says. The cross-sector collaboration has “really been an opportunity to explore oneself.”
As a corporate leader, embarking on a journey with a social entrepreneur requires a mindset shift, Hilke says. “Most of us [business executives] have been hired to bring the best solutions to our company. In a program like this, you aren’t supposed to solve the problem for someone. You are supposed to solve it with them.”
Hilke and Heidi’s collaboration took place in the context of the Making More Health (MMH) global initiative of Ashoka and Boehringer Ingelheim, which aims to create a healthier world for individuals, animals and their communities. MMH supports social entrepreneurs and social entrepreneurial thinking to unleash health innovative solutions and impact. Find out more here
Ashoka’s Executive in Residence program seeks to disrupt silo-thinking in sectors by connecting the world’s most powerful network of social entrepreneurs with changemakers from the business and private sectors to tackle social challenges at a large scale. The program is built to enable a collaborative and generative experience where both the corporate leader and the social entrepreneur learn, experiment and develop solutions together.
