Victor Folkebrant, Sabrina Sharpe, Dr Stefan Cousquer
April 30, 2026
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Our recent webinar explored a challenge many leadership teams struggle with: how to create the space for transformation while still delivering today.
At the heart of the discussion was a framework from Dr Stefan Cousquer’s work with leadership teams at Hult Ashridge Executive Education, which highlights five strategic tensions that leaders must actively navigate.
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Victor Folkebrant, Chief of Staff and Director of Transformation Office at Seco Tools, and Sabrina Sharpe, Global Strategy Lead at Haleon, shared practical strategies from their organizations. A common theme that emerged as setting successful teams apart is being able to surface and balance these together through high-quality conversations.
1. Performance ↔ Transformation: Make space for the future today
When it comes to balancing delivery today with building tomorrow, many organizations find themselves stuck at the short-term “performance” end of the spectrum.
Folkebrant highlighted that the majority of leadership conversations at Seco Tools were heavily weighted toward the present. For example, 72% of time was spent discussing current performance, compared to just 5% on future aspirations.
Using the Three Horizons framework as a mirror, they were able to rebalance their focus, doubling time spent on transformation at executive level.
In addition to the quantity of time spent, the quality of conversations also emerged as key. Transformation requires leaders to engage in harder discussions around trade-offs, resource allocation, and operating model shifts.
As Cousquer noted, “the ‘how’ of strategy is facilitated by the conversations you have. Having strategy on paper is one thing, having strategy living in conversations in your organization is another.”
Sharpe – in her experience of strategic work with cross-functional teams – highlighted that a common barrier is structural. There is a potential trap in global organizations, whereby global teams focus on the future, while local markets focus on delivery, leaving the crucial bridge between the two (Horizon 2) under-owned. Leaders need to actively create these conversations and bring in people from different functions to make them happen.
2. Linear ↔ Dynamic: Execute with learning built in
In fast-changing environments, a purely linear approach can lead to perfect execution in the wrong direction.
Sharpe highlighted how shifting consumer behavior, particularly in healthcare, demands a more dynamic approach. Consumers now move fluidly across channels, relying on reviews, digital tools, and AI before engaging professionals.
To keep pace, leaders must balance holding a clear direction (linear), while building in continuous learning loops (dynamic).
Practical implications include:
Regular “pause and reflect” moments
Mechanisms to sense-check with customers
Flexibility to reallocate resources as new insights emerge
As Sharpe explained, leaders should hold a conviction of where the organization is going, but hold it loosely to enable flexibility and safety for everyone to bring up difficult conversations, rather than getting stuck on the execution pathway.
3. Efficient ↔ Participative: Take leadership from telling to hosting
Efficiency often drives top-down decision-making, but this can limit engagement and slow transformation.
At Seco, moving from a hierarchical model to a more participative approach required a fundamental shift in leadership mindset:
From “hero” to “host” leader
Redesigning leadership meetings to encourage participation improved both performance and engagement, with employee NPS rising significantly from 11 to 27.
4. Individual ↔ Team: Build shared transformation accountability
Organizations often invest heavily in individual leadership capability, but transformation depends on how leaders operate together.
Sharpe highlighted the need to move from leaders representing functions, to leaders speaking for the enterprise as a whole. This requires:
A shared language to surface tensions
Shared KPIs for the transformation team, beyond individual accountability from each of their functions
Ensuring trade-offs happen in the room and within the team, not outside it
Without this, teams risk “false alignment”, where everyone agrees to things in meetings but then backtracks during execution.
5. Internal coherence ↔ External fit: Bring the customer into the room
Many organizations claim to be customer-focused, but struggle to operationalize it. A key shift is making the customer everyone’s responsibility, not just that of the marketing, customer service, or market research teams.
Practical techniques shared included:
Explicitly representing the customer in meetings, for example by having an empty chair labeled as the consumer, or nominating someone to be the voice of the consumer
Using real customer feedback, reviews, and complaints
Clarifying the operating model required to deliver value for customers, and having a shared language to enable this
A powerful indicator of success is when cross-functional teams can discuss the customer so fluently that you cannot tell who belongs to which function.
Under pressure, teams often revert inward, focusing on internal dynamics rather than external relevance. As a result, maintaining this balance becomes even more critical in times of uncertainty.
Transformation, one conversation at a time
Ultimately, transformation is shaped by the quality of the conversations that leaders are willing and able to have, especially when those conversations are uncomfortable.
As Dr Stefan Cousquer put it, “organizations change one conversation at a time.” The role of leadership is not to remove tension, but to create the conditions where it can be explored productively, with the right people, at the right moments.
Three practical takeaways from the panel
1. Protect time and space for learning
Folkebrant emphasized that transformation depends on learning, yet this is often the first thing lost to day-to-day pressures. Leaders must actively safeguard time for learning and treat it as essential, not secondary to operational demands.
2. Build the case for change and learning
Cousquer highlighted the importance of creating genuine buy-in within leadership teams. This means clearly articulating why change matters and why new ways of working and learning are necessary to deliver it.
3. Host the conversations and surface the tensions
Sharpe encouraged leaders to put tensions on the table with positive intent, not to resolve them immediately, but to create openness and shared understanding. Starting these conversations in smaller groups can also help build confidence before bringing them to the wider team.
Meet our experts
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Victor Folkebrant
Chief of Staff and Director of Transformation office at Seco Tools
Victor Folkebrant is Chief of Staff to the President at Seco Tools, where he also leads the company’s Transformation Office. In this role, he works across functions and geographies to translate strategy into execution, driving enterprise-wide transformation initiatives focused on innovation, organizational effectiveness, and sustainable growth.
With a background in strategic program leadership and technology development, Victor brings a strong systems-thinking perspective to complex business challenges. He is particularly interested in leadership, large-scale change, and how organizations can build adaptability and resilience in increasingly complex environments.
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Sabrina Sharpe
Global Strategy Lead at Haleon
Sabrina Sharpe is a global marketing and strategy leader in consumer healthcare, currently with Haleon and based in the UK. Over a 20+ year career, she has worked across North America, Europe and Latin America, leading brand growth, category strategy and enterprise transformation.
Originally from Canada, Sabrina is passionate about consumer-first decision making, building strong teams, and turning strategy into execution that delivers sustained growth.
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Dr Stefan Cousquer
Professor of Strategy and Leadership at Hult International Business School
Stefan works with leadership teams in the areas of strategic transformation, system change and top team effectiveness. He also works with executive education programs in the areas of strategic leadership, sustainability, organizational development and collaborative innovation.
Previous senior leadership roles in strategy consulting and the energy sector have provided Stefan with the practical experience required to support clients lead change in leadership and business models. His current research focuses on the role of top management teams in enabling organizational transformation and humanizing leadership.
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