Birgitte Nyborg: my dream boss

First, a warning: I love this woman. I love how she leads, how she delegates and how she manages to rise above events. I want Birgitte Nyborg to be my boss. That said, let’s start with a short dialogue.

 

 

In this short, made-up exchange, we see certain key aspects of the leadership style of Birgitte Nyborg, the Danish prime minister in the political drama series Borgen: priority management and delegation capacity. She’s there to do things, not to sell them. That’s why she has Kasper. Birgitte rises to power unexpectedly. After foul play by her rivals is revealed during the last televised debate before the election, Birgitte rises to a central position in Danish politics and becomes the leader of a less-than-stable coalition government. When Birgitte comes to power, she has to balance priorities: the management of political and economic pressure aimed at stopping her reforms; her own ideas about what a political leader should do, such as not lying, being faithful to her commitments, and not letting the position absorb the person; and her family life. This difficult combination of interests initially overwhelms her.

 

Birgitte’s priorities are focused on the public sphere, which she puts ahead of her personal life. Despite delegating properly and managing public affairs with aplomb, the tension in her family life ultimately breaks up her marriage: her husband refuses to accept the subordinate role he must play and the incompatibilities entailed by his wife’s position, so he ends up asking for a divorce.

 

Despite paying a personal price, Nyborg stands firm. And this is where we see another key element of her leadership: loyalty to principles and a collective project rather than to individuals. Later in the series, this same principle leads Birgitte to fire the Minister of the Economy, her mentor and friend Bent Sejrø, in order to maintain the stability of her government and keep her political project on track. At another point, after seeing that her longtime political party has become a mere instrument of power at the service of an arriviste who will sacrifice his principles on the altar of power, Birgitte decides to create a new party. This decision marks the thrilling return of the Nyborg who puts her principles before the temptations of money and status, since creating a new party out of nothing means sacrificing income and personal stability.

 

 

Looking back over the entire series, we can see that Nyborg is a leader who is faithful to her ideas, capable of negotiating skilfully and reaching agreements that bring her closer to her objectives without losing sight of reality. When called upon to interact with economic powers, she is able to find solutions without betraying her principles. In fact, we see a leader who is capable of dealing with anything in the public domain, but who suffers much more in the private sphere: the series puts her through a divorce, serious problems with her daughter (whom she is forced to institutionalise), and finally, in the third season, cancer.

 

Despite it all, Birgitte overcomes every obstacle with perseverance and a mindset of public service. Birgitte herself evolves over the course of the series. The stubborn reality and the betrayals of friends and enemies shade her initial naïveté, but she does not fall into cynicism. She stands firms in her convictions, but she knows when reality demands a more practical position. On one occasion, she is faced with the dilemma of whether to prevent the leak of information that would put an end to a peace agreement in an armed conflict. Suppressing the news would be contrary to the freedom of the press. She meets with the journalists who know the information and presents the ethical dilemma of revealing the truth but ruining a peace agreement that would stabilise a wartorn region of Africa. Luckily, this is Denmark, so there is a happy ending.

 

To finish our analysis of Birgitte Nyborg’s leadership, we should not focus on what she is like, where she is from, or – as the song says – where she fell in love with you. Nor should you pay too much attention to what she says, although Birgitte is certainly capable of delivering highly persuasive speeches. What counts is what she does. A leader is defined by her actions, and Birgitte’s actions are very clear: loyalty to principles and a collective project rather than to individuals, integrity, perseverance, priority management, delegation, and remembering every day that she is in politics to make her fellow citizens’ lives better.

 

At the end of the series, she returns to her home, Christiansborg Palace, also known as Borgen. She could have returned as prime minister if she had accepted forming a coalition with an amalgam of forces – including the far right – but she stays loyal to her principles and instead signs on as the foreign minister of a liberal Christian democratic government.

 

But of course, all this happens in Denmark, so please don’t look for parallels with Spain, dear reader, because unfortunately you will find none. That’s why I love Birgitte Nyborg.

 

 

BORGEN: A STORY OF AGREEMENTS 

 

Borgen – the common name for Christiansborg Palace, the seat of all three branches of Denmark’s government – is one of the most revelatory television series to appear anywhere in the world in recent years. It traces the evolution of the politician Birgitte Nyborg (Sidse Babett Knudsen) as she rises from the opposition to become Denmark’s first female prime minister. The creators of the show – producer Adam Price and writers Jeppe Gjervig Gram and Tobias Lindholm – depict this journey from the inside of the characters, in their day-to-day lives, with a very human perspective. They show that Denmark, despite being one of the world’s most advanced democracies, is home to politics rife with light and dark forces.

 

More akin to The West Wing (Aaron Sorkin, 1999-2009) than House of Cards (Netflix, 2013), Borgen had a three-season run from 2010 to 2013 that was broadcast in 60 countries around the world. In Denmark, it drew up to a 40% share of the television audience. Although it features aspects of Danish politics – such as multi-party coalition governments – that are less common in the bipartisan Anglo-Saxon world, Borgen addresses universal issues that strike a chord with all sorts of audiences.

 

Nyborg’s path is filled with betrayal, espionage and power games as she tries to reconcile her reformist ambitions with her family life.

Fiction aside, Borgen has become for many people a utopian mirror of how European politics should work to address the great challenges of the 21st century: the end of majorities, the revolution of social media and communication, and the relocation of large multinationals.

 

In addition to the protagonist, other noteworthy roles on the show include Nyborg’s reserved advisor Kasper Juul (played by Pilou Asbæk), the astute journalist Katrine Fønsmark (Birgitte Hjior Sørensen) and Katrine’s boss Torben Friis (Søren Malling).