Founder/CEO of Elevated Edge | Board Director, Smartports | Strategic Leader | Business Transformation Specialist | Executive Coach
Across two CEO roles and a transformation involving roughly 300 bank employees, Martina Åkerlund has developed a clear view of leadership: sustainable success requires trust, self-awareness and the courage to act on your values.
High-performing leaders are often rewarded for pushing harder, staying in control and carrying more. Over time, that can become their definition of strength. But what happens when control slows decisions, relentless ambition drains energy, or professional success comes at the expense of personal fulfilment?
For Martina Åkerlund, these questions are central to effective leadership. Across a career in banking, international gaming technology and board work, she has focused on creating the conditions for people and organisations to succeed—and on understanding what makes that success sustainable.
“One of the first things I look at in an organisation is how decisions are made,” she says. “Too many companies hire excellent people and then create structures that prevent them from acting.”
Her approach combines clear direction with trust and accountability. It also asks leaders to examine their own choices: what they stand for, how they use their energy, and whether the success they are pursuing reflects the life they actually want.
Today, Åkerlund is the founder and CEO of Elevated Edge and a board director at Smartports, an energy, mobility and infrastructure company.
Push Decisions Closer to the Knowledge
Åkerlund’s approach to organisational leadership begins with how decisions move through a business. Who has the relevant knowledge? Who has the authority to act? And do those two things meet?
Her guiding principle is to bring decisions as close as possible to the people who understand the work, supported by clear responsibilities and appropriate governance. Autonomy works when people understand both the direction and what they are accountable for delivering.
She applied this approach while leading a major organisational transformation at a Swedish bank. Working with an external consultancy and a cross-functional group of leaders, she helped develop a more customer-centred structure. The team explored flatter organisational models, including approaches used by Spotify and Klarna, and considered how those ideas could be adapted to the bank’s context.
The transformation affected roughly 300 employees and resulted in fewer management layers, shorter decision paths and improved employee satisfaction.
The experience also reinforced an important lesson: structural change is personal. Changes to roles, responsibilities and ways of working require people to adjust, even when they understand the overall purpose.
“Transformation becomes very personal when the new organisation changes people’s own power, status or territory,” Åkerlund says.
Communication and involvement were therefore central to the work. Explaining the reasoning, listening to concerns, involving people in the design and recognising progress helped build understanding and commitment.
“Having the right strategy is not enough,” she says. “If you cannot communicate it in a way that makes people understand where you are going and want to come with you, transformation becomes incredibly difficult.”
For Åkerlund, communication is part of how change happens. It gives people the context they need to contribute and helps turn strategic intent into everyday action.
Build Trust Through Accountability
Giving people greater autonomy also requires leaders to address problems that undermine the team.
Åkerlund distinguishes between underperformance and behaviour that damages trust. They require different responses. Underperformance calls for clear expectations, feedback and an understanding of what support is needed. Harmful behaviour requires equally clear boundaries and a willingness to act.
“The organisation almost always knows when this is happening,” she says, “and the cost spreads far beyond that individual into trust, productivity and culture.”
A person’s commercial contribution cannot be the only measure of their impact. Leaders also need to consider how that person affects colleagues, collaboration and the organisation’s ability to perform over time.
This is where trust and accountability reinforce one another. People need room to do their work, confidence that expectations are fair, and evidence that leaders will address issues that affect the wider team.
From Organisational Transformation to International Growth
Åkerlund brought the same emphasis on direction, communication and people into two CEO roles in international gaming technology.
In her second CEO role, she joined an existing business whose commercial relationships had developed largely through its founder’s network. The opportunity was to build broader market visibility and a clear international position.
Drawing on her previous CEO experience, she developed the company’s brand, positioning and go-to-market strategy and led its international market launch. She also represented the business through speaking engagements, industry events and commercial relationships across the sector.
“We operated globally and secured business with major players in the industry,” she says.
The work helped establish the company’s presence and recognition within its segment. It required alignment between what the company offered, how it communicated its value and how it built relationships in the market.
The bank transformation and the international market launch involved different organisations and different objectives. Yet both required a clear direction that people could understand and act on. In one setting, that meant redesigning structures and decision-making. In the other, it meant building positioning, visibility and commercial momentum.
Across both, Åkerlund’s role was to connect strategy with execution and bring people with her.
Strategy, Energy, Clarity and Courage
Through Elevated Edge, Åkerlund now brings these experiences into her work as a strategic advisor, executive coach and speaker.
Her leadership programme for senior women, The Elevated Way, is built around four pillars: Strategy, Energy, Clarity and Courage.
Strategy means knowing the direction and making intentional choices about what matters. For an organisation, that includes priorities and how resources are allocated. For an individual, it also means defining success on their own terms.
Energy addresses the capacity to sustain that ambition. Health, relationships and recovery influence how leaders think, make decisions and show up for others. They belong in the conversation about performance.
Clarity requires space to reflect. Senior leaders are often skilled at responding to demands, but can have little time to examine whether those demands still serve their goals. Creating that space helps them distinguish external expectations from their own priorities.
Courage turns that understanding into action. It may mean setting a boundary, addressing a difficult issue, changing direction or making a decision whose outcome is uncertain.
Åkerlund has faced those choices herself. Twice in her career, she left a senior role without another position waiting because staying no longer aligned with her values.
For Åkerlund, the real test of values comes when acting on them carries a personal cost.
Those decisions form part of her understanding of leadership: being honest about what matters and accepting responsibility for the choices that follow.
“Courage wasn’t the absence of fear,” she says. “It was deciding that what might exist on the other side mattered enough to act anyway.”
Lessons for Executive Teams
The principles behind The Elevated Way also apply to how executive teams lead their organisations.
- Start by examining how decisions actually move. When approvals add delay, ask what purpose they serve and whether authority sits at the right level. The aim is to combine sound governance with the ability to act.
- Make accountability clear. People need to understand what is expected, where they have autonomy and when support or intervention is necessary. Address performance concerns and harmful behaviour with attention to their different causes and consequences.
- Treat communication as an ongoing leadership responsibility. People are better equipped to contribute when they understand the purpose of a change, can raise questions and see how their work connects to the direction.
- Finally, create room for reflection before pressure makes every decision feel urgent. Leaders need opportunities to assess their priorities, their capacity and the example they set for others.
For Åkerlund, sustainable success is built through these everyday choices. It depends on the structures leaders create, the behaviour they accept and the way they manage their own ambition.
Who Is Martina Åkerlund?
Martina Åkerlund is the founder and CEO of Elevated Edge, a board director at Smartports and a former two-time chief executive in international gaming technology. She is based in Nice, France, with continuing professional ties to Stockholm.
She spent twenty years in Swedish banking and financial services before moving into gaming technology and board work. She began at NASDAQ OMX, leading a corporate actions team, then moved through project and change roles at Kaupthing Bank and worked as a management consultant on a long-term assignment within SEB Merchant Banking.
At Swedbank, she led the Regulatory Reporting function within Group Finance, with responsibility for reporting to Statistics Sweden and implementing FINREP. She later joined Marginalen Bank as Head of the Project Management Office and Transformation, before becoming a member of its Executive Management Team as Head of Marketing, Internal Communication and Sustainability.
From 2020, Åkerlund held two successive CEO roles in international gaming technology, with experience spanning brand development, market positioning and international growth. She also served on the board of the first company after her CEO tenure, before founding Elevated Edge in March 2025.
Today, her work spans board roles, strategic advisory, executive coaching and international speaking. Through The Elevated Way and Elevated Experiences, she creates opportunities for women to reflect, connect and take intentional steps towards the leadership and lives they want.
She has spoken at SIME, SBC, SiGMA, G2E and NEXT.io events, with international engagements across Stockholm, New York, Dubai, Malta and Las Vegas.
Her philosophy is reflected in Elevated Edge’s guiding words: “Be true. Lead boldly. Thrive fully.”
For Åkerlund, strong leadership means creating the conditions for others to succeed while remaining clear about your own values. Sustainable success asks leaders to bring the same intention to how they lead as to what they achieve.
Martina Åkerlund is the founder and CEO of Elevated Edge, a board director at Smartports and a former two-time chief executive in international gaming technology, based in Nice, France. To connect with Martina or learn more, visit her LinkedIn profile.
