Peoplerise and Ubi Sistemi e Servizi worked together to develop a path that involved over 100 people and lasted 3 years.
the need of the client
How can high-potential people get involved:
- to develop their individual leadership?
- as a team to help create innovative projects?
- to learn how to do large-scale team work?
what we did
The first two editions focused on Team Coaching as an opportunity to build a non-hierarchical and non-conventional contact between Top Management and high-potential people. The belief that the Management leadership style is a knowledge that can be spread and enhanced through storytelling and sharing, allowed the transfer to the participants of the project a wide range of ways to exercise the distinctive and representative skills of the managerial style of Ubi Sistemi e Servizi.
In the third year, the path developed into a Team Working project, which allowed to bring into play the capacity and the useful competences for the realization of business improvement projects.
We interviewed Paolo Pareti, at that time Head of Human Resources at Ubi Sistemi e Servizi, creator and sponsor of the management path, to share with you the most interesting aspects of this project.
Enjoy watching or reading the article below!
the results of the project
The first thing I’d like to ask you is what role the project played in the managerial development of UBI.S?
It had a fundamental role because it essentially created 3 things:
1. A strong sense of belonging on the part of both the people who participated as trainees in this project and the coaches, who felt that they were an active part of the process of growth, development and accompaniment of younger resources. Not only from a hierarchical point of view, that is, through organizational activities, but also through the role of tutor, mentor and coach for these younger colleagues.
2. After that, it had an important echo, because these 90 people who have been involved in this project for 2 years are opinion leaders within the company. So their enthusiasm, their participation, their activism has also influenced their colleagues who have been excluded for personal reasons, or for different organizational reasons, certainly not meritocratic.
3. Third, from this project we identified an important part of new managers: out of the 90 people who participated, 20% went on to hold a position of responsibility over the course of these 24 months.
the experimentation possibilities
For those who participated in the project, what do you think were the opportunities for experimentation in terms of skills, business values, and management technologies?
Some of the participants were not aware that they had certain abilities within their professional backgrounds. This project therefore served to release a series of energies and skills, and was useful for comparing managerial practices among colleagues. In my opinion, it was very important in terms of developing and enhancing those skills that each of them had within themselves.
the involvement of top management
Could we say that the top management that participated in the project embraced the saying that “you learn by teaching”?
I would change this saying by highlighting the fact that by teaching, one participates and perceives a series of weak signals. Perhaps top management has not learned anything from a managerial or technical point of view, but they have reached an awareness, a sensitivity to certain phenomena that, in the day-to-day management of the business, could not emerge in such a strong and overwhelming way. It was certainly a good thing – also for top management – to get closer to more distant professional figures. We have involved young people, who in many cases do not have relevant roles in the company from an organizational point of view, but who have the pulse of the situation, who feel the sentiment of the company. The project was therefore also very important in terms of the climate, the perception of what the company lives and thinks on a daily basis, beyond the official, more institutional moments.
the impact of the project
What triggered this project that went beyond expectations, even your own personal ones?
Like all projects, like everything we do in life, we have to believe in it all the way to the end. The top management, the manager-coaches, the human resources department believed in this project, but above all, these 90 young people believed in it, and they participated actively, with great passion, dedicating personal time to this project. So it worked because we put a lot of passion, a lot of dedication and because we all put ourselves on the line for something new, we didn’t know how it would turn out. Then it definitely went beyond our expectations, it didn’t just accelerate the capabilities that we wanted to develop, but it had a benefit in a much broader context.
the sense of the project
In the economic environment we live in today, what does it mean to have a development of people in the company?
Developing people in the company means giving a message of hope, a message of solidity, a message of trust. It means that the company believes in the future, that it has ambitious and important projects. In order to support these projects and to improve the company, there is a need to develop young, talented people, who are good and willing, with a strong sense of belonging, and with a mutual trust. Because if the company trusts its people, they must trust the organization and the management that guides them. Even in a time of crisis, we must never abandon the logic and processes of growth and internal development. This is an important message, which certainly has an impact on the business, because you have to worry about regenerating management over the years. But it definitely has a significant impact in terms of climate and perception, because a company that develops is a company that looks ahead, that doesn’t play defense, that wants to stay on the market by attacking it, not just protecting itself from the pitfalls. To develop and make people grow certainly in many cases removes many alibis and this is surely important.
