Interested in Becoming a Part of Team TARGIT?
It’s probably not surprising to hear that artificial intelligence (AI) is making its way into TARGIT’s company and product strategy, product roadmap, and work practices. What is perhaps more surprising is that we have also started using AI technology to strengthen and accelerate our culture development and leadership approach.
At TARGIT, we aspire to deliver value and success to our customers through our Friendly Business Intelligence (BI) Platform, Industry Value Drivers, and Care for Customers approach. We see our employees as our most valuable assets, and we’re committed to creating a workplace that brings everyone’s skills, talents, and passions to center stage and empowers them to grow their careers in a supportive, dynamic environment.
Our approach to leadership and culture is centered around the empowerment, autonomy, and alignment of our teams. We've built our unique model inspired by Stephen Bungay's book "The Art of Action" and Gen. Stanley McChrystal's "Team of Teams." Here's a snapshot of some of the key concepts:
- Leading Through Empowerment: Our leaders empower individuals and teams to take ownership and excel in their fields in an environment of creativity, innovation, and resilience. It’s not about command and control, but creating a culture where decisions are made closest to the action — extending autonomy and fostering alignment.
- Succeeding on the Playfield: The Playfield is a metaphorical space where our teams operate, focusing on customer needs, accountability, empowerment, and adaptiveness. We prioritize results, and every team member contributes actively to our overall success, adapting quickly to changes.
- Acting as a Strong Team of Teams: Our organizational structure thrives on transparency, decentralized decision-making, and continuous learning. We promote cross-functional collaboration, ensuring everyone understands the broader picture and their role in furthering our goals.
Through these principles, we create a culture that values trust, learning, and adaptability while empowering teams to deliver excellence. We consider alignment and autonomy as prerequisites for each other – not each other’s opposites. We work actively to ensure a high degree of alignment around company and team strategy, intent, and objectives to enable a high degree of autonomy in the organization.
TARGIT has offices throughout Denmark, Belgium, and the United States. Despite our broad international presence, we strive to create a transparent, close-knit company culture in which every employee feels heard, understood, and respected. We follow a flat organizational structure that supports and encourages empowerment, open communication, cross-team collaboration, adaptation to changing circumstances, and rapid decision-making.
We believe this approach works well for us at TARGIT and is instrumental for our contribution to customers and success as a company.
Why Use AI for Culture and Leadership Development?
The simple answer is because it is so important, and because we wanted to learn how AI can contribute to improving our capabilities and culture development.
We strive for a high degree of alignment and autonomy and aspire to become the leading "team of teams" in our industry: a customer-friendly, flexible organization that can quickly adapt to change through transparent information sharing, decentralized decision-making, trust-building among teams, and continuous learning and improvement.
When we began to integrate AI into our company and product strategy, we also realized that AI could contribute to our organizational development.
So, how did we bring this vision to life?
Meet TARGIT Gandalf
In the fall of 2023, we collaborated with CultureDrivers to release TARGIT Gandalf, our internal AI chatbot trained on the guiding principles behind TARGIT's company culture and leadership approach.
All TARGIT employees can chat with Gandalf about various workplace scenarios and challenges and then receive intelligent insights and coaching based on the company's "Leading Through Empowerment" playbook and our "Team of Teams" philosophy.
Gandalf runs on top of the ChatGPT platform, with added security to ensure company information remains confidential. Employees are encouraged to ask Gandalf questions about any challenges related to leadership or collaboration in TARGIT.
Then, Gandalf crafts a custom response through Natural Language Processing that references TARGIT's playbook and three-part philosophy: Leading Through Empowerment, Succeeding on the Playfield, and acting as a strong Team of Teams.
Everyone has a separate login to the platform which allows users to receive responses that make sense with their specific roles and TARGIT's company culture.
By giving every team member access to TARGIT Gandalf, we enable them to work through challenges, ask questions, and brainstorm new ideas through the lens of our company culture, ultimately leading to informed yet autonomous decision-making at every level of our organization.
The platform can be valuable for individual employees and teams discussing specific opportunities or challenges.
Continuing the Journey with CultureDrivers
Beyond making TARGIT Gandalf available to all employees, we have also started using AI-powered tools to collect and dive deeper into employee feedback. In 2021, we introduced CultureDrivers’ TeamDrivers and Leadership Assessments to our entire organization in order to become data-driven in our culture and leadership development efforts.
In 2024, we upgraded these assessments to CultureDrivers’ most recent concept, GrowthDrivers. The GrowthDrivers assessments use AI and natural language processing to evaluate each team member’s feelings about collaboration and success within their department.
Rather than simply asking employees to fill out a survey, these assessments engage the participants in a conversation about an employee’s work and team dynamic and reply with adaptive follow-up questions based on the employee’s initial response. This all happens in a chat dialogue like the one used in ChatGPT and other notable AI chatbots.
At the end of each assessment, the AI summarizes the conversation and identifies the main points, allowing the employee to make final adjustments or additions before submitting their responses. All responses from within each department are then categorized into key themes and shared with the relevant managers.
The assessment tool also produces an AI video that outlines the team’s overall feedback and recommends unique discussion topics based on everyone’s responses.
This solution helps us:
- Gather anonymous, detailed feedback
- Look deeper into both individual responses and common themes across team members and teams
- Prepare and facilitate team discussions in a scalable way
It also helps us stay focused and gather more insights where the potential is higher and vice versa. This makes it much easier and more efficient for teams and leaders to learn from the assessments, take action, and develop new ideas. Plus, we continually leverage these insights in our business strategy, even when the survey is no longer fresh in employees’ and leaders’ minds.
