About us

In the nineties, Tuff’s co-founder Karin Tenelius found herself coaching thousands of unemployed people during a recession in Sweden. She developed a groundbreaking method, Strengthening Dialogue, that is now used in job centres around the country and taught internationally to professionals supporting others (job coaches, teachers, social workers).

Karin was also inspired by the idea that employees in organisations should have more autonomy and accountability, like Semco in Brazil. She began experimenting with coaching organisations to work without management hierarchy. (You can read more about these cases in the book ‘Moose Heads on the Table: Stories About Self-Managing Organisations from Sweden’.)

Through years of experiments

Through these years of experiments, Karin realised that what was needed for managers to be more involving and for employees to take more responsibility was not theory, but practical training in new mindsets and abilities.

With this in mind, Tuff Leadership Training was founded in 2003, with a name that reflects the challenge of actually learning a new way of being and behaving.