It's time, and I want to welcome you so very much to this session leading at the breaking point when autonomy, technology, and humanity meet.In the next twenty minutes, I want to give you something practical and personal. If you are leading a business, if you are managing teams, if you are shaping culture or scaling innovation, this talk is for you. And when you leave today, you will walk away with a sharper lens to spot what's quietly shaping your organization, a stronger compass to lead through uncertainty, and concrete action steps to build trust that scales, not just tech that scales. My name is Frida Harmholm, and I am a tech business adviser. I have helped scale courage in boardrooms, build psychological teams, psychological safety in teams, and educated hundreds of top leaders in the STEM area.

And this year, I was also named one of Sweden's top board talents, Plus, I am leading Sweden's bigoted tech community for women and non binary people as chair of the board. But this is not where I started. I still started nowhere near this. Before I tell you my story, though, let me start by asking you a question. When was the last time you questioned the environment you lead in? Not the product, not the toolset, not the road map, not any of those, but the invisible layer that dictates how decisions get made, who is heard, who is ignored, what behaviors are rewarded, and which ones quietly cost you. Tell me also if you recognize any of these situations, you can put it in the chat. For example, you have a new hire who started out very curious and very outspoken with a lot of new ideas, but then they stopped coming with their input.

Or you have a team where some people are always speaking and others, they never say a word. Or you have a leader who opens up with saying, here we have a safe space. But then the minute they get challenged, they get defensive and they shut down the others' opinions. Please write in the chat if you have recognized or experienced anything of these things because these these are not competence problems. These are trust problems. And the thing is that in very many tech organizations, those dynamics, they aren't even accidental because they are inherited. Yes. You have experienced number one and two. Thank you for telling me, Sarah.

Built on old standards, tech organizations are very much optimized for predictability, not innovation, for compliance and not psychological safety, and for efficiency, not questioning, even though what we say we value is innovation, autonomy, courage. And if we don't learn how to challenge those old standards, we keep replicating them. And the cost to this, it's that the ideas that actually could lead to breakthrough, they never even get spoken out loud. And that is why I am here today, to challenge how we lead, to help you build organizations where innovation thrives and where your product, your people, and your culture evolve together. Yes. I have very deep experience of what it means to lead without autonomy and what it takes to reclaim autonomy when it's gone. Because I grew up in a very strict religious cult in Sweden, yes, in one of the world's most progressive democracies, I grew up in a culture where a system based on totalitarian control.

Inside my world, obedience was everything. It was not just expected. It actually defined your worth. I was 13 years old when I stood up in front of hundreds of people and said yes to a life that I had no chance to understanding. And you know what the most scary part with this was? It was that that moment, to me, it didn't feel like captivity. It felt like belonging because our brains often confuse control with safety. And in this environment, women were even more controlled than men. We were not allowed to have any leading positions. We were not allowed to hold speeches on a stage like I do now, and we were not even allowed to decide anything inside of our own homes.

So this what I experienced, what I grew up in, it was the opposite to autonomy. It was total control. And yet, here I am speaking at this digital stage, the Global Tech Conference together with you about this very topic. And that is because I didn't just break free. I rebuilt. I rewired how I think about leadership, how I think about autonomy, and what power can look like when it is shared instead of guarded. When we shift from power over to power with. But this talk is not just about my story because this is a reflection of what very many people in the tech industry are quietly navigating today and what I have heard thousands of women experiencing in our community as women in tech. And this is also a wake up call to every leader building the future on yesterday's rules.

When I left the control and cult, the first step into leadership roles with budgets and teams and delivery responsibilities, I had a very naive belief that autonomy came with a title, manager. But I quickly learned that you can hold formal power and still feel powerless. You can be responsible for outcomes, and you can still be navigating unspoken expectations. I saw companies that praised innovation, but then they punished risk and the mistakes that come from risk. And I saw feedback leaders who looked for feedback and asked for it, but they feared it, and they shut down any disagreement. And I saw teams that spoke about openness and agility but defaulted into silence. And this was not in former rules or roles, but in what went unsaid. And I see I have a bit of a questions here in the chat, and I will try to keep up with those, as we go on. Yes.

We have leaders, of course, who don't ask for feedback at all, and they are even more wanting to have this compliance as we talk to. They are not even asking for for challenging the compliance in the organization. Thank you, Sarah. So the first shift we need to do is go from unconscious control to intentional awareness. And I will give you three steps on how to do this now. The first one is notice what gets rewarded. Is it agreement, or is it original thinking? Do people get praised for asking better questions or for having the right answers? Number two, watch who speaks and who doesn't. In your next meeting, please count who takes up the most airtime and then ask, is this based on any form of hierarchy in this group, or is it based on the impact of what's being said?

Number three, audit how decisions are made. Are they transparent? Are they collaborative? Or are they concentrated in a few within this organization trusted voices? Because once you can see those patterns as you have in front of you here, those three steps, you can start to change it. We're going for the second shift, from perfection to presence. Because if we are completely honest with each other, tech is full of high performers. Right? Smart, capable people who know how to execute. And still, so many leaders I work with feel like frauds the moment they don't have the answer to everything. They feel like being a good leader, it equals having answers. But here is one very extremely important aspect that I have discovered, and this is this is it. No team can be autonomous if its leader is not. I'll say that again. No team can be autonomous if its leader is not.

And autonomy, it doesn't come from perfection. It comes from presence. There have been very many moments in my leadership career where I tried to be the perfect leader. I was always polished, always well prepared. I could always take care of everything, and I wanted to have the answer of everything. But you know what I realized? That perfection, this is exhausting, and it creates distance, not trust. So the turning point for me when I started to actually share uncertainty with my team and do you know what happened? They didn't lose faith. They leaned in, and they took more responsibility, and they dared to have the to get creative to solve things together with me. So the most powerful move you can make is not to take control. It's to offer optionality. And what do I mean with optionality?

It means acting early without locking in. It means having the confidence to experiment and the humility to learn. But that takes self leadership because you need to ask questions like, how do I what do I need to let go of in order to build a connection with my team? Where am I holding on to certainty when what my team really need is clarity or optionality? And where am I trying to be perfect when I should focus on being present? I'll give you three three steps here also on how to work with presence instead of performance. One, trade plans for patterns. Instead of asking what's the plan, ask what are we noticing? What signals are emerging? What tensions are repeating? And what should we experience on based on that?

And then run leadership check ins both with yourself and your team. Do not just ask, like, how's the sprint? But how am I leading through this? And what do you need more from me? Do you need clarity? Do you need space? Do you need more trust? And a very important next step is practicing early decision loops. Do not wait for on for certainty because certainty might never come. Move small and test and adjust because the best leader, they don't just steer. They sense. And if you are thinking now, what if I get it wrong then? Well, you you will. We all do. But leading with presence, it means that you stay open long enough to get it right together and not bear everything on your shoulders by trusting our coworkers, trusting yourself, and trusting the process.

Let's zoom out for a little moment. In tech, we very often talk about scaling. Right? Scalable systems, scalable code, scalable growth. But one question that I believe we need to ask more often and that I've never heard anyone ask, actually, is are we scaling trust at the same pace as our technology? Because tech is not neutral. It reflects us. Technology is a mirror. It scales what we value. So if we value speed over safety, we will scale burnout. And if we value silence over disagreement, we will scale compliance. If we scale control over curiosity, we will actually kill innovation before it even starts. And AI and automation will continue to evolve, but the question is, will we build them to empower, or will we build them to control? Because I believe that the future of tech is not just about automation. It's about augmentation, enhancing human capacity, not replacing it. It.

We need people not just who can code the future, but also those who can question the future. And those questions need to come especially from those who historically have been excluded from leading it. Because that experience, that is not a weakness. It's a leadership advantage. Because with a more diverse branch of leaders stepping into decision making, we don't just get better representation. We get better questions and better questions are what makes better systems. So let's take three steps on how to scale trust. One, audit where fear lives. Pay attention to the moments when people go quiet because this is where missed ideas, where it's polite silence or careful agreement, those are signals that we do not have that we we should not ignore them. And two, set a trust baseline. In your one to one meetings, ask what do you feel make it safe to take risk here at our workplace?

What is one thing I could do to make it easier for you to speak up? And then listen and act on what you hear instead of getting defensive. The third very important thing is to model micro repair because it's not about never missing up. It's about what you do after you have messed up. If you own it, you apologize, reset expectations Because this repair of the messing up, it builds more trust and perfection in the original moment ever could. We don't just need tech that scales. We also need trust that scales. So let's get back to where we began. When was the last time you questioned the environment you lead in? Over this twenty minutes, that's exactly what we have been doing. And we have talked about how we can go from unconscious control to intentional awareness, how we can go from perfection to presence, and how we can go from tech first to trust first.

Because you have a choice, and that is not always to change the system overnight, but to slowly rebuild it and to stop reapplicating it. So I believe that we need to talk about not only what tech can do, but what tech can do in combination with trust and autonomy and humanity. And if you are more interested in this, I have actually written two guides, that you can email me. You see the email here, and I will send it to you. Or if you have any questions that I have not had the time to take up here in the chat, feel free to talk to me and to ask me any questions. That was what I wanted to say, and I