Successful founder struggles to let go of the details
Interview with Founder and CEO Hans-Petter Mellerud of Zalaris
It’s the blessing and the curse of many a founder to be in the thick of everything, even the most minute details, during the early stages of a company’s development. Afterall, it’s their company and therefore, their problems. But then something changes. Success comes in bits and pieces, and the founder starts to grow into something more of a leader. There are new expectations, new demands and new roles to play, and that founder is forced to let go of the minutia of the company and hand over something even more precious. Trust.
Easier said than done, most founders will tell you, including Hans-Petter Mellerud, founder and CEO of Zalaris. Zalaris is Hans-Petter’s brainchild, inspired by his years in Accenture where he worked on the outsourcing of IT and accounting functions for Nordic companies. As with most founders, he saw a problem that he believed he could solve. So, he left Accenture and took the plunge in 2000, when he created the first-ever cross-Nordics payroll and HR solution. As he puts it, they’ve been offering cloud services (for HR) since 2001.
It turns out that Hans-Petter was on to something big and by 2001, they had their first major customer. A few mergers and acquisitions later, Zalaris is a known name to most corporate employees across the Nordics and throughout Europe. The company has 800 employees and an annual revenue of almost 800 million Norwegian Kroner. Hans-Petter was even named “Entrepreneur of the Year” by Ernst & Young in 2017. Despite all this success, there was still one thing that plagued this founder. He’d been with his company every step of the way, and despite the new demands on him, it was proving difficult to let go of the details in his everyday work life. That’s when he decided it was time to find a professional coach.
As Hans-Petter puts it, “For a long time, I was extremely hands-on. I knew everything about everything. Then in 2014, I felt myself pulled into another direction, from the time of our public listing. I had new stakeholders to meet and answer to, and it was becoming more and more difficult to continue operating the way I had. Since then I have been trying to find the right combination of ‘leader’ and ‘doer’, and that’s when I met Jon Erik, my coach.”
With the help of coaching, Hans-Petter has been working to prioritize, structure his thoughts, rationalize his challenges, and most importantly, give up some of the details. It’s about feeling confident enough to hand over responsibility to the people you trust, and to be clear with your team about expectations and targets.
“Jon Erik has been my sounding board and helps me to manage the issues that are on my mind. He doesn’t give me the answers, but rather leads me to the decision.”
Coaching hasn’t necessarily changed Hans-Petter’s view on what makes a good leader, but rather he better understands the difference between knowing what it takes and doing it. He has realized that sometimes, you need to step back and watch others succeed.
Hans-Petter will be the first to admit that he was extremely skeptical to the idea of coaching initially. He now believes it to be extremely useful for certain phases of a career, especially when growing or transitioning into a new role.
He says, “Having a coach doesn’t mean you have a problem. It’s not a sign of weakness. It’s a sign of strength that you dare to talk over challenges with someone. If you want to improve, you must be willing to expose issues rather than gloss over them and pretend they don’t exist.”
The challenges for Hans-Petter haven’t disappeared just because he started to work with a coach, but rather he feels that he is better equipped to deal with whatever comes his way. And most importantly, he knows when to step back and let his team tackle it.
