Osaamisperusteinen rekrytointi -blogi: Not planned, but powerful: what an all-women team taught me about leadership and learning

During my internship with the Competence-Based Recruitment Project, the City of Kuopio’s employment initiative funded by the European Social Fund Plus (ESF+) and run in collaboration with Talent Hub Eastern Finland and Savonia University of Applied Sciences, one detail stood out to me from almost the first day: every single member of the team was a woman, led by a woman.

For many people that might be unremarkable. For me it was quietly inspiring. I come from Bangladesh, and here in Finland it feels more common to see women in leading positions, something I noticed straight away and kept noticing. Seeing it up close does something: it makes the idea of stepping up feel possible. It’s the kind of thing that quietly pushes a woman like me to try, to keep learning, and to want to build something of my own.

I couldn’t tell whether it had been planned that the team was all women, so I asked Sanna Salmi, one of the project’s recruitment coordinators. She laughed and admitted she didn’t know either. She only learned the team was all women after she’d been chosen. “For some reason, only women were selected,” she told me, “and I don’t know why.” What she was sure of was that it hadn’t been about gender at all. It was about backgrounds. Some of the team came from entrepreneurship, some from job placement, and some had worked as experts and public officials within employment services. Together, she said, that gives them a broad, collective perspective on the entire employment landscape. “Together we complete each other.”

A leader who keeps learning

The person holding it all together is the project manager, Heidi Kauppinen, and she became one of the quiet reasons the internship stuck with me. What struck me wasn’t authority in the traditional sense; it was how much she was still learning. She leads while developing the work, solving problems as they come, always adding to what she knows. I hadn’t often seen leadership look like that: not someone who has all the answers, but someone visibly growing into the questions. It turned out I wasn’t the only one who noticed. When Sanna spoke about what she’d gained from the project, she talked about learning from the women around her, Heidi among them. Inspiration, it seems, ran in every direction on this team, including from the top.

Superpowers on the same wavelength

Watching the team work, I was struck by how independent everyone was. Nobody depended on anyone else to function; instead, they complemented one another, and once they’d gotten to know each other well, they had learned to draw out each other’s strengths. Sanna put it nicely: “We all have our superpowers, and we teach each other all the time.” Over the project’s two and a half years, she reckoned she has learned as much from her colleagues as she has brought herself.

I want to be careful not to round this up into a simple “all-women teams just work better” story, because that isn’t what Sanna said. Asked directly whether being all women changed how they worked, she was honest: in their case, she thought, it was about the individuals. The team would function just as well, she said, even with men involved. But she did think it added something. “This kind of female energy can sometimes be very powerful,” she said, meaning a shared wavelength, where everyone is curious, everyone gets excited about a new idea, everyone wants to try things. Their specialities differ, but they run at the same pace. As a woman joining that team, I found I could meet it easily, and I told her so. She agreed at once.

What I take with me

By the end, Sanna herself had become one of the people I looked up to, and honestly, so had the whole team. Not because being women made them remarkable, but because of what they modelled: strong, capable people building something together without egos in the way, a leader who keeps learning out loud, colleagues who teach each other as they go. As Sanna said of this kind of work, when you spend your days helping people, no two days are ever the same.

For me, that mattered. Seeing it up close gave me a clearer picture of what a team, and a leader, can look like, and a quiet sense that I could aim for something similar. This team happened to be all women. What made it worth remembering was that each of them brought a real strength, kept growing, and pointed the same way, and that they let me see it up close.

By Ananna Das, Project Intern- Internship Reflection . Ananna has worked as an intern in the Competence- Based Recruitment project