Leadership at Wolt and becoming better every day

As a scale-up company that just seems to keep growing, it is important for Wolt that we not only excel at day-to-day business execution such as serving our customers and developing our products, but that we also keep developing the personal leadership skills of all our managers.

We value the willingness to learn and to teach, which is why our team leads at Wolt are always on the lookout for new ways to help their teams get better.

“While conventional wisdom may dictate,’if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’, I believe instead that just because it works doesn’t mean we can’t improve and fine-tune our ways so that every day we can perform better than the day before,” says Mikkel Feldt, Support Manager at Wolt Denmark.

Before Wolt, Mikkel was an Agile Coach on the strategy team at Nuuday and he’s held many other roles including Head of Sales and Head of Support. He used to be a Sales Manager with Denmark’s biggest newspaper. Elsewhere he has been Channel Manager of departments up to 3500 employees. Now, at Wolt Denmark, he manages eight Support Leads whose teams include Support Associates and Trainers.

A tailored course with the Copenhagen Business Academy

In this spirit of leadership excellence and continuous personal development Mikkel reached out to the Copenhagen Business School, and together they adapted one of the school’s management courses to Wolt’s specific needs.

“We blended the learning agenda and theory with actual Wolt-based cases to make the learning as relevant as possible,” Mikkel says. “By teaming up with CPH Business, the Team Leads from Wolt who completed the course were able to earn ECTS [European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System] points, which can be carried over if they decide to study at another university or similar institution in or outside of Denmark.”

The Danish government offered some funding for the course that gave twelve Team Leaders from Wolt the opportunity to learn how to be better leaders. Specifically, course participants were able to:

Gain insight into their own management styles and their effects;
Learn about their strengths and development areas as leaders;
Gain skills to handle difficult situations, assess challenges, and adjust workflows and processes;
Learn to define their development areas and draw up action plans for their leadership development and learning.

Louise’s process work in customer support

One of the students was Support Team Lead Louise Pedersen. She’s been working in customer support roles for twelve years, including at IKEA, where she initially learned what leadership means. Having been with Wolt for roughly 18 months, her team oversees a bunch of tasks relating to customer and partner support.

“To create focus and improve efficiency, we’ve built a sub-team called A.R.M.S, for Agile Resource Machines, which I lead,” Louise says. “This sub-team helps our merchant partners with their menu setups and ensures that our merchants have everything needed for the platform to work.”

Louise is also closely involved in onboarding new Support Leads and various initiatives around continuous learning and development, including Wolt Academy, a project that creates frameworks to help managers develop new skills via e-learning.

She explains that, as Wolt evolved from a startup to a scale-up, she decided to help with consolidating some of the processes, creating a common way of working that could bring synergies while at the same time securing sufficient flexibility at the operational level, so that teams can still cater to unique business requirements.

“We’ve come up with procedures to make it easier for Team Leads to handle customer cases consistently. We want them to know exactly what to do in familiar situations and whom to approach for advice when in doubt.”

Cats are smart

“One of the clearest takeaways from the course that Mikkel helped to organize,” Louise says, “is that I’ve become more aware of where my associates are in their career development journey. Next to that, I’ve learned how to differentiate between training, coaching and delegating versus times when I should take on a more supportive role. I’ve initiated more frequent chats with each member of my team to keep a sense of their progress and how they are feeling. And I feel better equipped now to reflect on different leadership styles and how I can leverage my personal strengths to support people.”

Mikkel’s advice to someone who’s looking to grow and develop their career with Wolt is to set some career goals and make room for change as you go: “As the cat in ‘Alice in Wonderland’ says to Alice: If you don’t know what your goal is, it doesn’t matter which direction you go.”

Louise stresses the importance of self-confidence and nurturing close relationships: “You need to believe in yourself, because you won’t get anywhere if you don't. You might fail sometimes, but by trying again, you show that you really want something and eventually, it will be noticed.”

“My second piece of advice,” she adds, “is to have a close circle of friends and family, or someone to believe in you and encourage you, during the times you might doubt yourself. I’ve had times when I didn’t believe in myself and times when I’ve felt the most prominent imposter syndrome. But I had coworkers, a fiancé, and other people telling me, ‘You can do this.’ On the days when you don’t believe in yourself, you need to have someone around you who will. I say go for it; show ‘em what you've got.”