The business came together after Tele2 acquired Alpha Telecom in 2003 and combined it with its existing Calling Card Company activities.

The prepaid market was highly fragmented. Different countries meant different communities, different retail channels, different competitive conditions and different ways of selling. Much of the business served international and ethnic consumer segments through specialist distributors, independent retailers and phone shops.

There was no single European market.

There were many markets that happened to sit inside the same division.

Fifteen Country Managers means fifteen realities

At one point I was leading 15 Country Managers across Europe and the United States, supported by HQ commercial and product teams within a wider multi-layer organisation of more than 20 people.

The temptation in a structure like that is to believe that headquarters has the complete picture because headquarters sees all the numbers.

It does not.

Headquarters sees the comparison. The Country Manager sees the market.

Good leadership depends on using both views at the same time.

The centre can see patterns across markets. The local manager can see what the pattern misses.

Standardise the questions, not every answer

One of the most useful disciplines in international management is deciding what must be common and what must remain local.

You can standardise reporting, targets, financial discipline and the questions managers are expected to answer. You can compare acquisition, revenue, channel productivity and market performance.

But trying to force every country into the same commercial method usually creates the illusion of control rather than control itself.

A distribution model that works in one country can be completely wrong in another. The relevant communities differ. Retail structures differ. Competitors differ. Customer behaviour differs.

The objective is not to eliminate those differences.

It is to understand them quickly enough to make good decisions.

Growth changes the management problem

The division grew from approximately €70 million to €220 million in revenue.

At €70 million, growth itself can dominate the conversation. At €220 million, the quality of the organisation becomes increasingly important because small weaknesses get multiplied across countries, channels and teams.

The role of the commercial leader changes as well.

You spend less time being the person with the answer and more time creating a system in which the right people can produce good answers consistently.

That means selecting Country Managers carefully, challenging them without removing their ownership, comparing performance without pretending every market is identical, and intervening when the evidence says a local explanation is no longer enough.

You cannot manage fifteen countries through charisma

Senior commercial roles are sometimes described as though leadership is mainly energy, persuasion and the ability to motivate a room.

Those things help.

They are nowhere near enough.

At scale, leadership becomes operating rhythm: reviews, numbers, accountability, decisions, follow-up and clarity over who owns what.

If every important issue has to reach the person at the top before anything happens, you do not have an international organisation. You have a bottleneck.

The difficult part is knowing when to trust and when to challenge

Country Managers must have autonomy or there is little point having them. But autonomy cannot become an excuse for poor performance.

That creates one of the central tensions in multi-country leadership.

When a manager says, “my market is different”, sometimes they are absolutely right.

Sometimes they are explaining away a problem.

The job is to know the difference.

You do that by knowing the numbers, understanding the market well enough to ask good questions and building a relationship where disagreement is normal rather than threatening.

What stayed with me

I have worked in many structures since then, from startups to executive mandates and my own businesses.

But the Tele2 period gave me a lasting view of leadership: scale does not come from personally controlling more things. It comes from creating more capable points of ownership.

Fifteen strong Country Managers are not fifteen people carrying out instructions.

They are fifteen centres of judgement.

Your job is to make that distributed judgement add up to one business.