My career at Meltwater consists of training that takes place on a daily basis. Every day, we ”spar” our sales cases and strategies, discussing the details with our colleagues and supervisors. In addition, we occasionally get external training from top business & leadership coaches and professors around the world.

Last year, the Meltwater executive leadership training took place at Stanford University, where we worked on improving our negotiation skills and analysed our body language in a business setting.

This year our executive leadership training took place at the University of Oxford, UK. We participated in a tailor-made executive training that gave us some interesting tips and findings from the academic perspective.

At this year’s training, we studied entrepreneurial leadership in organizations and also analysed ourselves using personality evaluation tests, which I found to be a lot of fun and full of surprises. The exercises helped me understand how certain characteristics influence different situations in work and life.

Prior to this training, I thought that where someone comes from defines their behavior and characteristics. For example, this weekend I spent a traditional Finnish weekend in a summer cottage walking for hours in the forest, enjoying sauna at least twice a day and swimming in a freezing lake. It is difficult for me to imagine my colleagues from big global metropolises (London, Barcelona, Paris, Berlin etc) doing and enjoying the same, but I was wrong. There were a lot of surprising similarities among my colleagues and some surprising differences as well. It is amazing how you think you know someone really well, but when analysing the results, you realise that the person is not who you thought they were. This experience was a great way to get to know my colleagues both personally and professionally.

Based on my new discoveries at this years leadership training, I decided to run the same personality exercises in our Helsinki office. I think my colleagues found it insightful and unforgettable. It is really astonishing how similar all of us truly are. It really doesn’t matter where you were born or where you have lived, people are fundamentally very similar.

More later on how the Helsinki team’s results compares to my colleagues in other nations.