This is the English-translated transcript of the Italian-language podcast that you can find on Spotify by clicking here.
Listening time: 18 min 36 sec.
Speaker (Lia Piano): Welcome to the PRIMATE podcast. In each episode we share transformative projects and evolutionary paths that people and companies have taken with us. In this episode Gianluca Magnani, Corporate HR Director of FIDIA Farmaceutici, tells us about a bottom-up corporate culture design intervention that is involving 1,400 people in Italy and 11 countries. In FIDIA, today, each person is therefore called upon to make his or her own strategic contribution and to put the co-designed culture on the ground, on a daily basis.
Marina Capizzi: Hi Gianluca. Thank you for being here with us to talk about this frontier project, “Culture to Grow”. Let’s get straight to the point: this is a three-year project that aims to build the culture of FIDIA Farmaceutici by involving all, and we really mean all, the people who work at FIDIA in Italy and around the world, that is, in the 11 countries where you are present. Before we get into that, though, I wanted to ask you if you would tell us who FIDIA is and what is the path that the company is engaged in.
Gianluca Magnani: yes, thank you Marina, hello to you and hello to everybody. FIDIA Farmaceutici is an Italian multinational company based in Abano, in the province of Padua, operating in 12 countries because from January we will also have a new Subsidiary in Poland; present in the United States, Europe, Middle East, Africa with its own subsidiaries and in more than 100 countries worldwide. We are the number 1 company for the production of hyaluronic acid; our CEO says hyaluronic acid is to FIDIA as Nutella is to Ferrero; this is to tell what our know-how is on hyaluronic acid and I would say more generally on regenerative medicine. This theme of regeneration is not only a business theme, but we will see it come back right in the projects we are going to talk about. We are about 1,500 people, we have more than 100 commercial partners, more than 1,300 patents and more than 300 clinical trials mostly focused on our hyaluronic acid. We have all the stages from research to development, to production, to commercialization; we arrived, me and the colleague in charge of Italy in 2018, and when we asked the CEO what he expected from us, he said, “I would like you to help me on this path of developing Fidia in the logic of becoming a real multinational company and figuring out how to be able to go at the speed that business requires.” We were new, in the company; the first project we called “VOLA” was born. “VOLA” stands for the competencies we defined through listening to people: Vision, Openness, leadership and accountability. These are skills that affect all levels of the company, even leadership, I would say, especially leadership. Why? Because everyone in the company, in their role, in what they do every day, has to take responsibility for their actions, because if I take care of what I do, I do it even better, and this also helps us to take leadership of our own actions, to overcome also the logic of the traditional top-down hierarchy and also the logic of silos, which was and still is to some extent one of the issues we are facing that to some extent limits our cross-functional integration. We started in 2018, COVID to some extent slowed us down in this path of change but we started again by accelerating this path with the “Culture to Grow” Project, a three-year project that, as Marina said, involves all FIDIA people. With this project we wanted to challenge people further because we asked everyone for a contribution on the strategic level as well: a contribution to create the culture of FIDIA – because culture is what guides people’s behavior – and so we felt it was essential to start from that by asking people what to do. This is a multi-year project, as I said before, over several years, as we said it is bottom-up, in the sense that it starts right from listening to people, we started from the analysis of the status quo, we looked at the results, and from the results a varied culture emerged, with anachronistic elements, but it seemed absurd to drop a culture from the top and we wanted, instead, people to design it, because if people don’t feel it as their own, it has no value. So that’s what I would say is kind of in a nutshell the path that we started together with you.
Marina Capizzi: Yes, there are two very important elements: the first is that you have decided to design your own culture, so you have made culture an entity to work on in an explicit and conscious way; the second is that you have decided to do it, precisely, by involving everyone –we are talking about a real involvement that is repeated several times in these three years. Why this choice, Gianluca, to invest so clearly to design culture?
Gianluca Magnani: Because we need a strong culture, which is consistent with the project: the company wants to grow fast, and to do this, however, there needs to be a culture that to some extent supports this development path, because through the same culture we are able to better direct people’s energies, have consistent approaches, skills and behaviors that go in the same direction even though each one is unique; this helps us to imprint a greater speed to our way of working, even integrating new business realities, because we grow through acquisitions as well. There is the theme of well-being and the theme of execution, because these are two themes that feed off each other. The culture we expect is a modern culture, it must be oriented toward openness, listening, collaboration among people, but also flexibility and continuous learning, because these are the only ways we can succeed in dealing with constant changes, in a changing economic scenario, and be able to respond effectively to the demands of different markets. Here, this culture has to stimulate people to express themselves freely, to do things without fearing the judgment of others, and to take, I was saying this earlier when talking about leadership, responsibility for their own actions, and a little bit of everyone – and first of all team leaders – to embark on an evolutionary path: leaders without being afraid of losing control over their employees, but employees without being afraid to take the initiative and also make mistakes, which is part of taking responsibility.
Marina Capizzi: so, this culture that will become the culture of FIDIA, which has been built with everyone’s input, is a modern culture, a culture born to support – as you said – the ambitious and important growth project of your company. Tell us what values have you identified and why did people choose them?
Gianluca Magnani: Yes, so let’s start from the path. We started this path by listening to all the 1,400 people in FIDIA who worked together in heterogeneous groups; that is, we did not want to work by function, precisely because – we said it before – one of the themes was that of cross-functional integration, so we asked people to work all together and we asked them all the same questions: we asked them all to give their input. After this initial phase we did focus groups where we tried to bring to synthesis what had emerged during these first workshops. We did some further focus groups with management as well, to see if they were aligned with what had emerged from the work of the workshops, and from there we came to draw those values to which you referred. What are those values? Well, first of all, the theme of connection emerged. Connection as the willingness of our people to talk to each other, to listen to each other, to involve everybody else, to align internally to make our relationships fluid and to manage all situations synergistically, simplicity – which is the opposite of the concept of hierarchy – both of simplicity in contacts, and vertically, so somehow trying to break a little bit what is the classic hierarchy that slows down processes; but also horizontal, and here again we come back to the theme of cross-functional integration, so stimulating people in some way and the courage to innovate our usual behaviors. Positive energy, which is giving and asking for help from one’s colleagues, cultivating trust, positive emotions that can also make FIDIA attractive to those who want to work with us; and last but not least, the theme of valuing the people in the company. Valuing people, how? By giving them more responsibility, by giving them autonomy, by growing people as well as somehow growing pride in being FIDIA. This is a theme that came out really strongly from the people. We also asked the managers, what they thought the values of FIDIA should be, and it was good to see that there was a complete alignment and that means that everyone at all levels thinks this is important for FIDIA. Managers are asked something more, because we said, “okay, you are a collaborator and you take your commitment as a collaborator, but you as a manager have to make an additional commitment in this evolutionary process, because you have a role of coordinating people and here you are expected to take responsibility as a leader and we also asked people to take responsibility collectively as a manager, that is, to make a commitment all management to all FIDIA collaborators.
Marina Capizzi: Sure, we have dedicated a specific strand to managers, but it is very integrated with what we are doing with everyone else. Recently, your CEO, dr. Carlo Pizzocaro did a beautiful post that was called “Everyone’s Leadership,” telling a little bit about this choice to invest in aspects that create the future of the company. You said, with this project we have raised the bar, right? We asked people to make a contribution on the medium- to long-term construction of the company, so a strategic contribution, in fact. Tell us how people in FIDIA reacted to this strategic call?
Gianluca Magnani: Well, I would say that the first very very nice thing was the fact that with this project we somehow released energy. It was like a feeling of having the reins loosened, it’s like a car that had a bit of a handbrake on and it’s as if we let off the handbrake and this energy – which could not be expressed – had a chance to be channeled. It was nice because day after day, week after week we saw that the contributions were growing and people felt to some extent proud to be part of a project that is innovative in the way, but also in the content that was going to be defined.
Marina Capizzi: We were saying that it is a three-year project, because culture cannot be redesigned overnight. We are still within the first wave and we have come to define culture with its values its principles and behavioral competencies into a coherent whole based on the well-being of all stakeholders and execution. This is kind of in summary the framework that came out using everyone’s input. Now what will be the next steps? Because for the moment it is a new culture on paper, even though it is built, as we have said many times, by listening to everyone.
Gianluca Magnani: That’s right. The next steps will be precisely geared toward translating all of this into consistent actions and behaviors, but in order to do that, upstream of that there is a fundamental issue for people to be able to express themselves freely, for them to be able to make their contribution: it is the issue of Psychological Safety. People need to have the peace of mind to be able to express themselves, and so the theme we will be working on in the coming weeks is really aimed at understanding how free people feel to be able to express themselves in the company, to give and receive help; that is, how many people feel free to take initiative and also to make mistakes, which are related to taking the initiative. This issue of Psychological Safety becomes fundamental because the results of this survey will be made known to the teams so that they will become aware and can find their way of working in coherence with those values and culture that is FIDIA’s. So, what we have defined as values, concretize it into action that will transform our way of working and practices in the logic of being able to – and here we come back to the CEO’s initial question – go at the same speed as the business, indeed, if possible, be even faster. We are a company that still has the size to be able to go fast. Here, if we can eliminate those limits that we have highlighted, which are the limits of inter-functionality and therefore hierarchy, and allow us to go even faster, surely FIDIA can grow at the speed that even the CEO to some extent expects.
Marina Capizzi: So, after co-designing this culture, which is a modern culture, because it stimulates openness, transparency, collaboration, with the Psychological Safety survey we are going to do a return to the individual teams of what is the index of Psychological Safety today perceived we would go to work precisely on the conditions that foster this openness, this confrontation. What’s next?
Gianluca Magnani: Now we want concrete actions of the teams, results that are the fruit of what the teams feel is important to them. FIDIA is the leading company in regenerative medicine; here, to make FIDIA a company that is able to constantly regenerate itself and therefore to some extent be an organism that constantly and quickly adapts to changes in the market; to be attractive both to its employees, but also to the people who to some extent come in contact with FIDIA – so all stakeholders – and nurture the well-being of everyone: of our employees and our subjects. This is because we expect to become a company that can build its future also thanks to the contributions of all those who to some extent participate in the development of FIDIA, so the collaborators, but also all the context outside the company that to some extent is in contact with the company itself.
Marina Capizzi: Gianluca thank you, thank you, thank you for this testimony and thank you for this opportunity that you give us to measure ourselves on such an ambitious project and such a frontier project – as dr. Pizzocaro himself said. Thank you, thank you also to everyone who listened to us.
Gianluca Magnani: Thank you!
Speaker (Lia Piano): Thank you for following this episode of the PRIMATE podcast and if you would like to learn more about this topic, please contact us at info@primate.consulting, we will be very happy to answer you!