This is the English-translated transcript of the Italian-language podcast that you can find on Spotify by clicking here.
Listening time: 9 min 2 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, Andrea Bassi, HR Director of CREDEM, tells us about (R)Evolution, a journey that involved 40 top managers and 1,000 middle managers with the goal of evolving people, the managerial role, and preparing the ground for cultural evolution and the Teal organization. Enjoy the listening!
Andrea Bassi: good morning to you who are listening to this podcast, I am Andrea Bassi, director of Human Resources at the Credito Emiliano banking group, and I am pleased to share with you a project that we have carried out with PRIMATE, with whom we have been collaborating since its inception and with whom there is a historical relationship because, in addition to the consulting value of the professionals who work there, we share their attention to the future and their ability to decline innovative issues into concrete competitive advantages for people and companies. It therefore gives me pleasure to tell those who are following this podcast about one of the many projects we have carried out together and which, because of its scope, we have called (R)EVOLUTION. (R)EVOLUTION was a project to train and evolve our entire management. A first “revolutionary” element, because it had never been done before in CREDEM and because we know that it is almost never done in other companies as well, was to start this project by involving Top Management, starting right from Top Management. In turn, a small group of Top Managers would participate in the design, then they would all participate in the training activities and the practical experimentation of the content as we proposed and did it. Having validated the training in this way, Top Management naturally became the sponsor of the initiative, which gradually expanded and then, over a couple of years, involved all our management (i.e., about 1,000 people). We wanted this project because today, we certainly, but also many companies, live in a very strong and very rapid transformation context, in which one can no longer work as one did in the past. Today, those in managerial roles feel that they can no longer use the management approach, the muscular approach, the “command & control” approach that allowed them to succeed in the past; however, at the same time, those in this situation do not yet have an alternative model of reference. We believe that in order to be successful in the future and to respond effectively to business challenges, market evolutions, competitor growth, and new customer and employee needs, we need a flexible, responsive, and fast company with autonomous people in execution. Launching these initiatives then allowed both top and middle management to have an institutional space, a space in which to question the evolution of their role and, also guided by Primate, to explore and slowly consolidate new ways of exercising it and being leaders. Among other things, we started to think about this project differently than in the past by also starting from a different concept of manager and management. Because usually manager was for us associated with head of people, today the concept of management has to evolve and embrace a broader definition: for us, a manager is also someone who manages important complexities without managing people, but manages, for example, budgets, suppliers, important projects. Then talking about Middle managers and Top managers, another revolutionary element is that, with this project, I would say that the bosses “came down from the pedestal” and began to open up to a different relationship with employees, they remained the point of reference for their teams, but they are no longer the ones who decide everything and organize everyone’s activities without listening to others’ point of view. They have opened up to a relationship that considers the person in 360° and not only for the role or the skills and results they bring, thus adopting a principle of TEAL, that of wholeness (which PRIMATE introduced us to back in early 2017, and so now more than 5 years ago). This capacity for empathy and closeness, has helped us a lot in positively overcoming the pandemic and smart working, also because bosses have become more and more accustomed to it (although we are still not perfect and there is still a long way to go), but they have become accustomed to trusting people and have given them more and more space and more autonomy. We see this change, for example, in meetings, which are no longer meetings where the leader gives directives, he speaks only and there are never any questions from the participants. Today, bosses know the importance of working to build an environment with high psychological safety, which is inclusive and facilitates the participation and contribution of all people because, in order to achieve challenging goals, we need everyone’s contribution, energy and ideas (and ideas have no hierarchy; in fact, they often come more from co-workers than from bosses – if activated through active and open listening). (R)EVOLUTION has made us work in a new and different way, then, on the culture of error; this was a big problem of ours because we have always been perfectionists, we want to have everything under control, but this, however, slows us down, does not facilitate experimentation, does not facilitate innovation, and does not allow us effective learning from experience. This project has led to a gradual evolution of our corporate culture, which is shifting from “competitiveness to collaboration,” at all levels, thus between people, offices, branches, services and companies in our Group. Finally, I would like to close this sharing of mine with a reflection that I believe is very important. Just as we told ourselves (R)EVOLUTION is a very innovative and challenging project, in the same way we also have to tell ourselves that not all managers will be able to make this evolution, to make this progress, in a short time. Those who will not succeed, however, must know that they will soon be obsolete and will be destined to be replaced, perhaps by a robot, because if I am a manager only by working on efficiency and organization, I will be destined to succumb very quickly. Thank you for listening!
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!