Human-Centered Leadership: How Clever Rebuilt Work Without Bosses
Clever launched in Denmark with a simple but powerful mission: to accelerate the transition to electric vehicles. In itsearly years, the company operated like many startups: fast paced, close knit, and informal. Everyone wore multiple hats, decisions were made on the fly, and mutual responsibility was instinctive rather than formalized. But as Clever grew, the friction of scale became harder to ignore. Hierarchies began to emerge. Decisions drifted away from the teams doing the work. The organization was successful, yet it no longer felt human.
This blog post is part of 80+ case studies of progressive organizations we created for the ZeroDX awards 2025. These organizations embody the principles of RenDanHeYi in their work structures:
Zero Distance to customer: Decision what to build is based on insights from the marketplace
Autonomy: Small teams with full decision-making autonomy enable speed in execution
Shared Rewards: Everyone in the micro-enterprise participates in its financial success.
Casper Kirketerp-Møller, Clever’s CEO and co-founder, remembers that moment clearly. “We weren’t treating each other the way we do in our communities or families,” he reflected. “We needed to redesign how we worked if wewanted to stay human as we grew.” His response was not to reform the hierarchy, but to remove it.
What followed was a radical redesign grounded in what Clever calls medledelse, or “co-leadership.” The company eliminated managers entirely. Everyone joined a team of four to twelve colleagues, each with a clear purpose, and every person took on one or more roles defined not by seniority but by skills andmotivation. Roles are not static. They evolve based on the individual’s capacity and interest, and decisions are made collectively by consent, rather than by mandate. This approach closely mirrors one of RenDanHeYi’s foundational design choices, which is to distribute power to those closest to the work while aligning autonomy with accountability.
Clever organizes its work around a cascading “purpose hierarchy.” The company’s mission to accelerate sustainable mobility flows through each business area, team, and role. Everyone is expected to understand not only what they do, but why it matters and how it connects to the whole. Each role serves the team’s purpose, and each team contributesdirectly to the purpose of a business unit, ensuring coherence across the organization.
Rather than rely on fixed annual strategies developed at the top, Clever created a rotating “strategy lab.” Participation is based on skill and relevance rather than title, and the lab provides a space to explore emerging risks, customer needs, and strategic possibilities. Strategy is treated as a shared and ongoing dialogue, not a plan locked in advance. This flexibility aligns with the way many RenDanHeYi companies treat strategy as an evolving process shaped by the people closest to customers and operations.
Instead of tracking performance through rigid KPIs, Clever works with a set of shared indicators. These include subscription growth, system uptime, customer satisfaction, and team well-being. They are reviewed collectively in weekly forums, not to assign blame or rank teams, but to prompt conversations about where support, attention, or course correction might be needed.
Operational autonomy is also a defining feature of the model. Each team is responsible not only for delivering outcomes but also for managing its internal operations. This includes recruitment, onboarding, budgeting, and salary discussions. Support teams exist to train and enable others, but they do not make decisions on behalf of others. Like the platform teams in RenDanHeYi, their role is to serve and strengthen autonomy, not to supervise it.
New employees are introduced to this model through a carefully structured onboarding process. They are not onlytrained in the business and products, but also in co-leadership practices such as facilitation, decision-making by consent, and peer-to-peer feedback. Cultural alignment is assessed through conversation, not hierarchy. Many of these conversations include colleagues from outside the hiring team to ensure diverse perspectives and shared accountability.
Responsibility for team dynamics and psychological safety is also held locally. If tensions arise, teams are expected to address them through structured dialogue, often supported by trained facilitators or psychologists. But responsibility is not passed upwards. The default response is not escalation. It is engagement. This shared ownership of team health reinforces the cultural maturity that Clever’s model depends on.
Decision-making across the organization is guided by two simple questions: is it good enough for now, and is it safe enough to try? These principles help teams make timely, grounded decisions without overplanning or defaulting toconsensus. If something goes wrong, the team reflects, adjusts, and continues. Failure is treated as a necessary part of learning, not as something to punish or avoid.
By 2025, Clever had grown to more than 300 people, operating across the Nordic region. Its business scaled significantly, yet its core structure remained intact. Teams continued to form and reform based on needs. Roles evolved with experience. Purpose alignment stayed central, and strategy remained active and participatory. Whatbegan as an experiment became a system capable of holding both freedom and performance.
Although Clever’s transformation was homegrown and grounded in Danish cultural values, its model shares meaningful similarities with RenDanHeYi. Power is decentralized. Teams act as autonomous units. Internal supportfunctions operate as service platforms rather than centers of control. Users remain close to those delivering value. And strategy is not an annual ritual, but a continuous practice informed by the edges of the organization.
For Casper Kirketerp-Møller, the clearest sign of success remains deeply personal. “When someone joins and says, ‘Ican finally be myself here,’ that’s when I know we’ve done something right.” Clever’s transformation was never about organizational design for its own sake. It was about creating the conditions where people could work with dignity, leadwithout permission, and grow alongside the system they help to shape.
