The Choice Behind Every Hard Conversation

In 2007, I flew to Pafos, on the coast of Cyprus, to spend a week at Esa Saarinen's Tulenkantajat seminar.

I had been leading teams for sixteen years by then. I thought I had already learned the things that mattered. A week of philosophy under the Mediterranean sun sounded more like a pause than a turning point.

It was the opposite. Saarinen does not lecture at you. He builds a room where you can hear yourself think. Almost without noticing, you start treating the people around you as whole human beings rather than functions in a process. That distinction sounds small until you sit in it for a week. Most of leadership training tells you how to manage a function. Saarinen was asking something different. Who are you being, in the room, right now, with this person?

One image from that week has stayed with me since. Esa described how every person carries a plus button and a minus button. In every interaction, you choose which one you press. Press the minus, and you drain the person and sour the ground you both stand on. Press the plus, and you hand them energy and lay a foundation worth building on.

The choice is almost always yours and always small. A word, tone, a moment of real attention.

I came back from Pafos and ran companies the way I had before. Turnarounds, numbers, structure. The plus button idea shaped the room. The plan underneath it stayed the same.

At Ginolis, when I took over, the team had been shipping products nobody was proud of. The previous culture had trained people to expect the minus button. Corners got cut, and when something went wrong, the talk turned to blame. You fix that one exchange at a time, by choosing, deliberately, which button you press with the engineer standing in front of you.

I have run the ERP myself. I have done the service visit nobody else would take. People notice that. But what they remember longer is the five minutes after a mistake, whether you came in with the minus button loaded or whether you asked a real question first.

Strategy and process matter. I built my career on both. But people do not give their best inside an org chart. They give it when someone presses the plus.

Nearly twenty years and many teams later, I still pause before a hard conversation and ask which button I am about to press. It sounds soft. In practice, it is a decision made in real time, with consequences that show up in whether a team ships something they are proud of or something they are hoping nobody notices.

Pafos was where I learned to make that choice on purpose.

Kauko Väinämö, CEO, Ginolis.