Piia Töllinen on leadership, culture, and sales in a changing world
In this edition of our leadership interview series, we feature Piia Töllinen, Sales Director at Lantmännen Unibake Finland. Since joining Unibake, she has embraced new challenges, found ways to inspire her team, and navigated the ever-changing landscape of sales with creativity and care. In this interview, Piia shares her thoughts on leadership, company culture, and the valuable lessons she’s learned along the way.
When I was a little girl, I wanted to become a police officer, but my father quickly talked me out of it. From early on I have been active in different hobbies like sports, scouts and music where I was leading different groups of people and organizing happenings. In high school and later when I attended business school, I realized that my calling was coaching. I find it inspiring to help others succeed. That is something that translates directly to my current position as a Sales Director in Lantmännen Unibake.
I would describe the company culture in Lantmännen Unibake as a caring culture. People truly care about each other. In my organization, we have meetings every week with employees, and we visit our bakeries. That sense of being close to one and another makes it easier to speak whatever is on your mind.
One of the biggest challenges I have faced in Lantmännen Unibake was the years with COVID. My team was responsible for the foodservice business, which was closed, so everybody had to work from home. I was really, really scared of how we would handle it. All the uncertainties about the future. I came up with an idea to spend an hour each morning on the phone where we had walk-and-talk meetings to share our thoughts on how everybody was doing, what to do with our customers and so on. That was a nice way of taking care of each other while at the same time keeping a customer centric focus.
Working in sales, you need to be able to see the big picture. We are of course selling delicious buns, rolls and bread, but we are not only selling buns, rolls, and bread. We are offering services that add value to our customers business. If you focus too hard on pricing, you end up only selling products. We want to enter into a partnership with our customers where we get a deeper understanding of how to help them succeed.
My biggest inspiration as a leader was a woman that was my superior many years ago in another company. She was much older than me. She was first and foremost a good listener. She also said to me, you can do it, Piia, you can do it and gave me a lot of responsibility. She was the first leader who saw that I needed new challenges every now and then. She taught me that constant development is my superpower. I’m not good at doing the same year after year.
The same old lady was also the one who gave me my best career advice. She said: Do your best, that’s enough, always. Most of the time, I think that I should have done more. I need to remind myself that doing my best is okay. It’s a simple advice, but good to keep in mind. I try to pass it on in my organization. We can’t always strive for doing an absolute perfect job on every little task because there is so much to focus on during a workday.
The first time I managed my own team, I wasn’t good at handing out tasks to others. I quickly became overloaded and couldn’t see my colleagues’ capabilities and how they were able to help me and take some of the pressure off. I didn’t ask them for help either. I just kept working, and it all piled up. My mistake was that I only thought about my own resources. I didn’t stop to think of the resources we have as a team. I think it is very typical for a first-time leader. You want to do it all yourself, as if it helps your team. Luckily, it didn’t end up in a sick leave or anything like that, but I had to change my perspective. Looking back, it was a good learning experience and an important reminder of the importance of delegating and sharing responsibilities as a leader.
When I look at my personal and professional development, I think I have managed to combine two traits of my personality. I have this childish, creative and questioning side of me that I have kept over the years. At the same time, I’m a Sales Director managing a lot of people and taking overall responsibility for a big business. What I have realized is that I don’t have to choose between the two sides – they work fine together. That’s not something I thought was possible when I was young. I thought you had to be very serious to be a leader.