Henrik Johansson
Co-founder & CEO
Boundless, Austin, Texas
Number of direct reports: 7
Nominated by: Sarah Radin
Nominator Sarah Radin appreciates boss Henrik Johansson’s easy-going style.
Henrik’s cool factor: He participates side-by-side with employees in outside company activities such as running in the Austin Statesman Cap 10k and Car2Go marathon relay. “How many employees can say they’ve run a 10k next to their CEO?” asks nominator Sarah Radin, marketing associate. “Henrik’s management style is unlike any boss or CEO I’ve ever known. Approaching him feels like approaching any other team member.”
Johansson got his start managing small-project teams while working as a management consultant at Andersen Consulting in the early ’90s. Following his first venture as an entrepreneur in 1998, he was recruited from San Francisco to Austin to lead Everyday Wealth, a credit management company, and met Boundless co-founder Jason Black in 2004. They launched the distributor company the next year.
“Henrik is as eager and fun-loving as a new hire, and as determined and hard-working as you think a CEO should be,” says Radin, who has reported to him for the past four years. “When you hear ‘CEO,’ you may feel intimidated just from the title, but Henrik defies all negative stereotypes of the typical CEO. Whether we’re collaborating with Henrik on a project, reviewing work he’s written, or listening to him speak about the company’s progress at our quarterly analysis meetings, Henrik is always easygoing and open to hearing his team’s opinions and feedback.” Radin also appreciates her boss’s active recognition of the entire team at meetings and events. “He encourages staff development and understands the importance of rewarding good work,” she says, adding that Boundless has a robust awards program recognizing top sales performers, corporate staff and suppliers. “Henrik maintains personal relationships with his staff and sales team, is present at all company events and always makes himself available.”
One-On-One With Henrik Johansson
Most important lesson learned as a boss:
Steven Covey calls it ‘servant leadership,’ which basically means managing with the attitude that the primary job of a boss is to make his team successful. In the end, it’s typically not the boss that does the work, it’s the team members. It’s not the coach that plays the game, it’s the players. So the boss needs to do everything in their power to make sure their team is positioned for success. Make sure you hire the right person for the job, give them the proper training, and support them with resources they need to succeed because when each team member succeeds, then the team succeeds, and that is the measure of a successful boss.
Philosophy for successfully managing people:
Set goals at the company level and let them cascade through each team and team member. Allow everyone in the company to see how they contribute to the overall success of the company, then let each team member define how they will achieve their goals. Hold people accountable to their goals, not how they achieve them.
To create a positive team culture:
We try to hire people with shared values. We make sure everyone knows what our core values are and we recognize when people do great things in line with those values. One of our core values is “Embrace the Fun.” It’s not about happy hours or “work hard, play hard.” It’s about finding joy in what you do and the people you do it with every day. Life is too short to be miserable at work eight hours per day. Put a smile on someone’s face. Let someone know you appreciate them. Those little things can make all the difference.
Best advice for other people managers?
It’s pretty much what I already mentioned above: set goals, but let your people define how to achieve them. Hold them accountable but don’t be a jerk about it. You don’t have to be mean to be an effective manager, but you have to be firm and make sure you both agree on how to measure success in advance. Embrace the fun, smile, have a laugh—you don’t have to be serious all the time to get stuff done. Give your people the ability to grow and take on more stuff. Most people are capable of so much more than we may initially think. Give them a chance to prove it. They may surprise both you and themselves.
Best boss ever:
Sheila Ferguson, president of Everyday Wealth. She held me accountable to a higher standard than I had been used to before. She gave me autonomy to define the way I wanted to achieve the goals we set together, and then she held my feet to the fire to ensure I did what I had committed to.
