This is the English-translated transcript of the Italian-language podcast that you can find on Spotify by clicking here.
Listening time: 15 min 42 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 today’s podcast, Guido Menegatti, HR Training Manager at CREDEM, tells us about “Andare Oltre” (Eng. “Going Beyond”), a widespread field leadership project implemented in 2018 that involved more than 6,000 people. Enjoy the listening!
Tiziano Capelli: Widespread leadership is a term and approach that is increasingly present in organizations. This growing attention is motivated by the fact that companies and leadership need to be effective in contexts that are more and more complex every day in which it is no longer successful to have a single thought, a single leader, a single approach to the market, and so on. Good morning, everyone, I am Tiziano Capelli, Co-Founder of PRIMATE Benefit and BCorp company, and today I have the great pleasure to have here with me Guido Menegatti, HR Training Manager of Credem, who has agreed to share with all of you a “diffuse leadership project” that we have done together. Guido, thank you, and I leave it up to you!
Guido Menegatti: Hi Tiziano, hi everyone. The project I want to tell you about is called “Andare Oltre” (Eng. Going Beyond), and in summary it was a project designed to develop autonomy, initiative, and decision-making skills in all people in the bank by paving the way for experimentation and a different relationship with error. In two words, we wanted to create “widespread leadership” in all employees. The project, carried out in several waves, involved all our employees, about 6,800 of them, over a period of 18 months, and as we said, we called it “Andare Oltre” (Eng. Going Beyond), because with it we have, precisely, gone beyond two paradigms that had been very deeply rooted in our company up to that time: the first, the one that wanted leadership as an “exclusive” activity and ability of managers, of bosses, in favor of a diffuse leadership that everyone would be able to exercise. The second, perhaps less obvious but equally important, is the paradigm that wanted training as an activity that takes place in a dedicated and separate space, typically “the classroom,” and conducted by professionals deputized to do so. With “Andare Oltre” (Eng. Going Beyond), training took place in the branches and offices where people work every day, making the daily work the object of the training itself. In short, with “Andare Oltre” we turned bosses into coaches, trainers into facilitators, and people into leaders.
Tiziano Capelli: Thank you Guido. I confirm that it was a very exciting experience and still alive in all of us. I wanted to ask you if you could tell us how this project came about, what were your goals?
Guido Menegatti: Gladly! We believe that in order to be successful in the future, to respond effectively to business challenges, market evolutions, competitor growth, and the new needs of customers and also employees, we need a flexible, responsive, and fast-paced company, with people who are above all autonomous in execution. We also know that managers can’t get everywhere, and indeed, I would argue that they don’t have to get everywhere otherwise they do everything themselves and it’s not always the case that they know how to do it best… often the manager doesn’t talk to the customer or the supplier, it’s people that talk to them and so we need to evolve people and make them leaders: leaders in what they do, people who can autonomously read the situation they are facing and make the best decisions to respond to it. I give a simple example, when a bank teller is talking to the customer, the manager cannot be present in every situation and so it is he or she, the bank teller, who has to understand the situation and see if it presents a business opportunity or a threat and act accordingly, autonomously. Going in this direction, means going beyond the traditional concept that sees leadership as a way of exercising the role of the boss, leadership is not an issue for a few but an opportunity for all! We today, and I think it applies to other companies as well, cannot afford to see our people as doers. Our desire was to get to having 6,800 leaders in the company, and this project has given us a great deal of help to go in this direction, which from being important before has then become crucial during the pandemic years.
Tiziano Capelli: I very much agree that these are issues that affect all organizations, so I hope they are of interest to our listeners. As with any project, we made choices regarding its structuring… can you tell us a little bit about those aspects?
Guido Menegatti: Yes, of course, with pleasure. So, in the meantime, we chose to develop a project with few training activities and a lot of field activities, and this for us as mentioned before was one of the innovations that this initiative brought us. So, each team, either branch team or office team, independently identified and experimented with innovations within their own reality. Innovations that would improve relationships, internal climate, efficiency and the relationship with customers. Of course, we also gave some constraints: first of all, full compliance with the laws and regulations that govern our work, but these constraints were designed solely to make it easier to implement the project. What, I would say, was absolutely very important, the experiments were chosen by the people and not by the bosses; the latter had, yes, an active and important role in the project but, if the experiments were responsive to the rules, they could not block them; on the contrary, they had to participate in them. We then trained the leaders and teams and gave them a 3-month window to carry out the experiments they chose, while also doing some remote support and mentoring. All the experiments were also shared in a database visible to everyone, and this transparency, too, in a world like a bank, where the traditional culture is one of secrecy was a nice innovation. Ah, people were involved with their whole team, branches and offices were participating with all their colleagues from their area or service area. At the end of the project, the experiments were reported and, in a final workshop attended by the relevant top manager, successes and failures were celebrated. And I must say that this sharing was also another nice innovative way for us.
Tiziano Capelli: So, a lot of new things, a lot of innovation in training activities but also a lot of concreteness? That is, has this project brought concrete results? Can you give us some examples of these experiments and their usefulness?
Guido Menegatti: Yes certainly! In the meantime, I want to say that there were a lot of them, and to give you an idea of what then triggered in practice this project, I’ll tell you some of them, maybe I’ll tell you the ones that impressed me the most. In one of them, for example, some of the teams asked the bosses, who were required to agree, to be allowed to have meetings among themselves (i.e., without the boss himself), and they organized meetings every 15 days to train each other on content… about which they did not want to let their bosses know their doubts. The result was that people trained themselves, reducing the skills gaps that prevented them from performing their roles well, and improved their and the team’s results. Another experimentation I can mention is about another organizational unit that decided to figure out how their internal customers were using their outputs (so I’m talking about things like reports, data, statistics, etc.) and they found out, by doing this survey, that made 100 when they were producing, internal customers were using 15-20% of it. So, the result was a great efficiency in their activities, and most importantly they are now only producing what they really need. Another experimentation that I really liked is the one they did at our call center, where over 70 people work who are in contact with customers on a daily basis. Since they use scripts written by marketing, but the customers do not see them, they asked them to spend a few days together and, after listening to the customers themselves, rewrite together the scripts to be used. The result was to increase the effectiveness of the scripts, thus of the business results, but more importantly to give motivation to the people talking to the clients because they found more meaning in what they had to say having personally participated in it. But perhaps, the best thing of all is that the experiments that worked have now become normal practice and that, when you don’t really know what is best to do, today it is possible to say “well let’s try it, then we’ll see if it works,” and we do it calmly because we have realized that you can make mistakes, but you learn so much and you learn things that we would not have learned otherwise. If it is possible, I would also like to reflect now on the usefulness of this project: “Andare Oltre” (Eng. Going Beyond) has allowed us to really invest in teams in a new way, nurturing people’s ability to be teams, mutual trust, the courage to experiment, and the willingness to get involved. It also allowed us to continue to evolve the role of the boss in a logic of coaching the individuals and the team, because the decisions were yes made by the collaborators, but the bosses then had a supportive role, emphasizing the value of feedback and they had to accept – something I have already said, but I will say it again, because it is very important, the core of the project itself – they had to accept the collaborators’ proposals, they could not refuse. This project also made us invest and grow in the exercise of delegation, and in particular, for each person involved, we fostered autonomy responsibility and experimentation, because people were free to improve their work, without someone (whether it was Management or the Boss) telling them what they had to do. We treated people “as adults,” and they gave us a very mature and convincing response. The project, I have to say, released an amount of energy that even we did not think was so high, in terms of the motivation and passion of all the employees. I think it happened because it involved both people in the company for a few days and people a few days away from retirement, putting in the middle, clearly, all those others. Everyone felt involved and empowered. There were teams that self-organized during and outside of working hours, teams that studied and shared solutions. “Andare Oltre” (Eng. Going Beyond) made us work in a new way on the culture of error, which is our big problem because we have always been perfectionists, we want to have everything under control, but this when you experiment with an initiative, it is not possible and you know beforehand that something will not go well or that not all experiments will go well, however, you also know that it is right to do it to learn faster, and especially to learn together. I would also say that it made the value of sharing visible to us, because in this project everything was transparent, everyone could have access to the data, see what other teams were doing, get inspiration, then, share the successes and failures that were happening, and it allowed us to experience a simple but at the same time powerful mechanism of operation, capable, for example, of overcoming the only hierarchical logic with which innovations and improvement projects had been managed until then: always lowered from the top. With this project, on the other hand, there has also been a lot of listening and valuing of many initiatives that have come from below. We have, in addition, put into practice a new management and leadership approach no longer based on the old “Command & Control,” but on the more modern “Sense & Respond.” Finally, it made managers realize that their strength is their people, the people in the team! And that they have to be good at creating the conditions within the team for people to perform at their best and give their best. That is the role of the manager, not to point out the solution but to create the conditions so that people on their own can find their own solution to get to the common and shared goal. It is a project, to close, that has opened a new road from which we have not turned back.
Tiziano Capelli: Thank you Guido, thank you for this very interesting and also very passionate sharing. I’d like to close by asking you a personal reflection: you were the project manager, the leader of this initiative… what did this project leave you with and why are you so happy and you are also testifying to us in this interview that you did it.
Guido Menegatti: Oh, to summarize this in a few words is really difficult, however I’ll try. “Andare Oltre” (Eng. Going Beyond) has left me with so many things. Above all I would say the realization of what before was just an intuition, the fact that people if you set them free and give them confidence are able to think and achieve much more than what you sometimes think. Having given it this title “Andare Oltre” (Eng. Going Beyond) and having been very involved in the design made me discover that if you have courage, you can often really go beyond. When I think back to the many teams I have seen working, young and old, women and men, together for real, I feel a surge of pride, I won’t hide it. There, I am satisfied today that I believed it could be done, because it was the first step on a new road that continues to this day and I think will continue for a long time to come. And I am proud to be one of the very many people who helped open that road.
Tiziano Capelli: Guido thank you! Thank you and all the people who made that project possible. Thank you for this testimony and I hope it was of interest to those who listened to us today, thank you and see you next time!
Guido Menegatti: Thank you all!
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!