At Telenor Denmark, Natalia Bates Laursen’s B2B sales and marketing team works under daily pricing pressure, tight KPIs, and changing demands across its sales channels.
As Head of Mass Market, she wanted her leaders to work well together under that pressure. She brought Atlas People in to help the group understand what kept each person motivated and where the work was taking its toll.
A shared way to understand the team
Natalia's team already used personality assessments, annual reviews, and quarterly planning. Yet those practices hadn't given the leaders a shared way to discuss how each person's behavioural profile related to the work that gave them energy, their role within the group, and the situations most likely to wear them down.
That mattered across five channel segments, where the demands of mass-market retail differed from those of large enterprise accounts. By bringing assessment data into the discussion, Atlas helped the leaders examine how their individual drivers fitted the responsibilities they carried.
“High performance isn't about pushing harder. It's about placing people where they naturally perform best.”
What the workshop revealed
Atlas People assessed each of the six leaders individually before bringing the group together for a two-day off-site workshop in Aalborg. When they looked at the profiles together, Emil Dreyer, Partner at Atlas People, noticed an unusually close match between Natalia's profile and those of her team.
"I have never seen two symbioses at the top: the same alignment between a leader's profile and her entire team. It's absolutely incredible. I've never seen it before," says Emil.
Because the leaders thought and worked in similar ways, they could build momentum quickly, but there was also a risk that they would miss the same things. The workshop gave them time to examine that trade-off and discuss where the team might need a different perspective.
Putting the profiles to work on Telenor’s strategy
On day two, Natalia began using the Atlas AI platform with her team to map Telenor's commercial strategy directly to individual talent profiles.
As they worked through the strategy, Natalia could see which changes each person was naturally suited to lead, as well as where the team lacked coverage. Two colleagues who had rarely worked together were also paired on a joint initiative for the first time.
“When we put the right people on the right tasks, it doesn't just go faster. It goes better.”
“We went from assuming to asking, and from defensiveness to curiosity. It became much easier to talk about friction without making it personal, and to say out loud: 'This drains me' or 'This is your strength, not mine.'”