At the moment, mothers are facing an impossible choice between children and work. They are paying the price for a society that still doesn’t support them, balancing resistance and sacrificial spirit. More than ever, they are asked to take a step back. They’re using their caring and resilient nature to use their motherhood to support the future: their children.
Sensitive warriors is a phrase coined by Federica Giardini. It’s the name we gave to our latest Life Ready Conference. It was a follow up to our recent conference with CEO fathers.
CEO mothers perhaps fight against a double stigma. Are they too much of a CEO at home and too much of a mother at work? Turns out, that’s not the case. They told a positive story, with over 500 participants commenting and thanking them for having opened their eyes in a positive way.
But let’s begin with the data. Our survey of over 1,500 Life Based Value webinar participants has shown that 63% of people need to be reassured about their future and 44.5% want to be involved more in finding solutions. People want managers to collaborate (26%), be knowledgable (26%), respectful (17%) and empathetic (13.5%), and as lockdown measures are lifted, people expect their managers to share more (70%) and listen (68%), but also take risks (60%).
Nearly all participants (89.8%) believe that in times of emergency it’s possible and necessary to use “generative” power: a power that knows how to map out the future, planting ideas and projects that survive.
So what does motherhood have to do with it? A lot, even if psychoanalyst Erikson explains that: “Simply having a child doesn’t guarantee that the parent will develop a sense of generativity. The prerequisites for its development include faith in the future, faith in humanity and the ability to care for others. Instead of raising children, you can work to create a better world for other people’s children at the same time”. Here are 5 generative power takeaways that emerged from the conference:
Livia Cevolini, CEO at Energica Spa, manufacturer of high performance electric motorcycles, and mother to her two year old daughter: motherhood gave me a new purpose, as she now focuses on green energy as “I want to make sure that she lives in a better world”. She feels energized by this new personal dimension. She also feels it has helped her to better understand others and their talents.
Isabella Fumagalli, CEO at BNP Paribas Cardif, by becoming mother to two children she has “geared up”, feeling responsible for creating a better world for her children. From her conversations with them, from hearing their “authentic questions” she has learned the importance of a sense of truth. In this phase of lockdown, Isabella sees that her colleagues are much more than professionals too. Every person has multiple dimensions that offer new perspectives on their work. Each experience brings them closer to the company.
Roberta La Selva is CEO at Ogilvy Italia. Motherhood taught her how to balance everything with a light-heartedness that having lots of “playgrounds” gives you. She’s rethinking priorities and learning while she teaches. She’s honing her empathy and mental agility as she constantly adapts to new situations. “Such as speaking at conferences from my balcony, as all the other rooms are occupied!”.
Elena Riva, co-owner and Presidente of Panino Giusto SpA, has three children with their father, and who is also her business partner. She underlines that this “togetherness ” is important. She likens the company to a fourth child that wouldn’t have been possibile if she’d done it alone. With her three children – and 450 employees in her company – she has discovered the importance of diversity in having a multiplying effect. As a leader and mother, it’s important to recognise both your children’s and employees’ independence. She defines herself as a “custodian”: a very patient custodian, that plants, insists and perseveres with trust, knowing that the harvest is coming.
Susanna Zucchelli, General director of Heratech, didn’t tell us how many children she has. However, she was clear that motherhood has strengthened her leadership within her company. She is responsible for the Engineering Department, Remote Control structures and Labs as well as service and process management. Her leadership focuses on maternal and “wraparound” behaviours, that release “bio-resilience” that’s particularly useful during this phase. Having children has given her a long term vision, and the ability to ask for help when she needs it. “And if they don’t want to help you, you make them!” she said, with the practical air of someone who manages challenges on a daily basis.
Here’s to all the sensitive warriors: all the women who work and care for others at the same time. If they can find synergy and balance between these two areas, and leave behind their mum-guilt, they become a force for change. And as the New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinta Ardern said, they also reveal kindness and ability to stay together.
This blog post was written by Riccarda Zezza and was originally published on Alley Oop Blog for Il Sole 24 Ore. To read the original article in Italian, please click here.
We have reframed the crisis and studied it at length. We wanted to understand if it was similar to other life transitions that train our soft skills. The answer is yes! Introducing our new program Lifeed Transitions. It’s designed to support HR teams and managers in supporting their colleagues through this new phase (which involves everyone at the same time!).
If we think about all the ‘life transitions’ that we face throughout the course of our lifetime, we realise just how many they are. Perhaps it’s starting a new job, moving house, the birth of a child, wedding or moving in with someone, a period of being unemployed, a new job, career development or a loss. On average we’re living longer and going through more life transitions than ever. So, in a way, we need to get used to them!
The pandemic has triggered a life transition too. It’s different from the others because it’s a collective life transition (according to the World Economic Forum 2.6 billion people across the world have experienced a lockdown situation), because it was completely unexpected and leaves us facing uncertainty for the future.
People that go through a life transition can either come out the other side feeling weaker or much stronger. It depends how they go through it. Just like every other transition, this one can also be “seen as an ‘opportunity for development’, for individuals and organisations that welcome it”, explains Prof. Pier Luigi Bresciani, one of the leading experts on life transitions. This is because when going through life transitions, people rediscover their resources to build a strategy in response to the ‘crisis’. These resources might include motivation, interests, self-representation, attitudes and skills.
If not correctly managed, the crisis triggered by the pandemic could generate depression, stress and burnout. Negative emotions can be contagious, and could potentially taint the second half of 2020 for at least one in four workers (according to World Economic Forum data). For companies, this results in reduced productivity, and in extreme cases, absenteeism. That’s why if we don’t use new language, if it’s not clear how old stereotypes can be broken down and there is no space for people to express their needs, it could have a negative impact over the long term, even after the emergency is over.
Lifeed Transitions means:
Lifeed Transitions is now available on Lifeed, the digital platform that already hosts our programs for new parents and caregivers. This program extends our selection of online programs, which over 10,000 people have already benefitted from.
This program is suitable for the entire corporate population, regardless of their role or professional level.
3 months, with a weekly 45 minute session that people can independently complete at their leisure.
Just like our other programs, Lifeed Transitions is based on our Life Based Learning method. During the online sessions, users have access to reading materials, multimedia micro-content, self-narration exercises that increase self-awareness and orientation. Users then complete real life “missions” to train certain skills and meta-skills.
At the end of each module, users have access to a corporate room where they can share their ideas and suggestions with their colleagues to build on their corporate culture and find new ways to overcome the crisis and favour the return to the “new normal”.
Lifeed Transitions trains key soft skills that are difficult to learn in the classroom, but these same skills make the difference in the workplace:
Companies have access to a real-time dashboard, so they can monitor their employees’ participation while respecting their privacy. They also receive regular AI quantitative and qualitative sentiment reports that summarise people’s needs.
If you are thinking about Lifeed Transitions for your organisation, find out more and fill out the contact form. We would love to show you the potential of this new training journey.
Optimistic, inclusive and kind. The best managers know how to pull together humility, collaboration, culture and they aren’t afraid to talk about their fears. They’re enthusiastic, able to find meaning in the mission. The concept of management must change after covid. We tried to identify the hallmarks of good leadership behaviors, in collaboration with high level managers. We did so at our latest Life Ready Conference titled ‘Managers in shock: will the anti-fragile management style survive?’. At a time when social distancing measures are in place and the economy is suffering, power is concentrated around caring for others rather than using force. Tomorrow’s leadership behaviors require courage and vision for the future.
So what type of power do we need today? The majority of people in business need reassurance (63.4%) and an action plan that involves them (44.4%), as well as being able to feel safe (40%). “Right now, there’s a general feeing that we’re beginning to trust that power is knowledgeable and it’s not something that you need to defend yourself from. There’s a power model that adapts and one that requires you to see opportunity”, explains Riccarda Zezza, CEO of Life Based Value. “Today we can see many people adapting, but in the next phase of the transition, that we’ll soon see, people want to be able to see opportunity within their company: not a higher power that makes sure everything goes back to how it was before, but that learns from what has happened and goes beyond it”. The ideal manager shares and listens. In times of crisis, where you’d expect many people to want to tread cautiously, they’re actually looking for a leader who is willing to take risks to move forward. An “anti-fragile” leader.
The concept of anti-fragility, coined by mathematician and philosopher Nassim Taleb, was born out of the idea of trying to find the opposite of fragility. It doesn’t have an opposite, as strength and resilience stay the same when reacting to a sudden turn of events. “When faced with increasing and intense stress levels, those who are anti-fragile take on new skills that they didn’t have before”, underlines Raffaele Guerra, Executive Vice President of Capgemini.
“So that’s why the relationship between anti-fragility and innovation is so interesting: Taleb says that, when faced with an external event, people tend to overreact, or rather have a stronger reaction than the situation needs, creating an ‘emotional supply’. So they tend to accumulate a lot of motivation and good will, which is a great springboard when doing something new”.
It’s what’s happening today as we’re in the middle of the emergency, with around 70-75% of companies moving to working remotely in lockdown. This was made possible through the abandonment of top-down leadership behaviors, which couldn’t work in this situation. “The anti-fragile approach worked, as it’s bottom-up and messy: managers have found new ways for their teams to work remotely, diffusing the idea throughout their companies. Trial and error: you learn by trying new things and making mistakes, even small ones. You need to make a lot of mistakes before you achieve the end result”.
Errors mean we can learn lessons and improve next time around. Collaboration hasn’t affected individual isolated cases within the company, but it’s gone so far beyond that, often touching suppliers and clients too. It’s something that’s typical of companies that class themselves as innovative. “An innovative culture pushes us to manage the company in a non-hierarchical position, caring for and valuing each other and tolerating errors, even encouraging them”, continues Guerra.
34% of CEOs in Italian companies find themselves experiencing this first-hand, playing their part in transforming their companies through the digital revolution. “Having different cultural behaviours and different ways of reasoning are fundamental aspects of tomorrow’s leadership behaviors. We don’t know what the future status quo will be, we just know that it will be different from what we are currently experiencing”.
Once we’ve come out the other side of the crisis, former managerial models are likely to be superseded by individuals’ actions. Which human characteristics must managers have to allow people to work when uncertainty levels are running sky high? And what will allow them to support others without succumbing to it?
If the initial reaction to the crisis is restructuring the organisation and cutting wages, perhaps a different approach would be to involve employees beyond their daily sacrifices and into the future success of the business. “We need to rediscover the generosity of doing business”. According to Maria Elena Cappello, Member of the Board of Tim, Prysmian, MPS, Saipem, Eni Enrico Mattei Foundation, the coronavirus has accelerated companies’ digital needs by at least 15 years. “We need courageous leaders that are able to quickly bring ideas to life. Companies that have an entrepreneurial and digital spirit need to be able to make a lot of mistakes, but also able to process them quickly enough to understand the mistake and pivot again. We need digital leaders”.
This type of approach would allow for managers to feel less alone, for those who are often painted as a single person at the top. It’s through times of crisis that leaders should be transparent and able to include management when looking for new solutions. “It requires younger people to be involved across all levels of the business. Less hierarchy and more ideas flowing around, because the new beginning will be based on a different mechanism to the ones that are already known to us”.
Managers will have to accompany young people that are capable and diverse, including them in a war room scenario as they focus on the plans for overcoming the crisis. “Leaders must be able to anticipate leaving the crisis behind, which is only possible if you have your team close by that you can build a new company culture with. Today’s leadership behaviors focus on doing everything quickly, looking especially on what tomorrow’s business will look like”.
Managing the Covid-19 emergency has taught us some important anti-fragile lessons. It’s shown us where we’ve made mistakes and where organizational models can be improved. For starters, we can’t plan too far in advance any more.
“Even the best planning models find it difficult to plan for unexpected events. We soon realised that we needed to rely on managers’, supervisors’ and employees’ abilities to challenge plans by generating new ideas”. Fortunato Costantino is the People Care & Union Relationship Manager at Q8. He’s convinced that the pandemic has highlighted the importance of establishing quality human and professional relationships. During the emergency, the company choose an approach based on direct and transparent communication with its employees. They’ve also launched a new information channel called You’ll never work alone.
According to Costantino, top-down management styles can compromise creativity. “We need managers that know how to share objectives and strategies. We need managers that value employees’ contributions and encouraging them to exercise leadership behaviors through healthy debates. It doesn’t mean favouring anarchy or weakening the organisational structure, but rather valuing talent”.
Post lockdown managers will also need to listen, be open to change and value mistakes. “They can’t be experts resting on their technical knowledge. They need a holistic view of the organisation and able to share leadership behaviors”. It’s no longer for the privileged few: it’s everybody’s responsibility.
So, the first step is gaining trust. Christophe Poitrineau knows it well as the Supply Chain Director at Carrefour. At the beginning of the pandemic, the supply chain found themselves under pressure from both consumers and producers. “This crisis isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon”, he admitted.
“We still have a few months where we need to sustain this rhythm. So the first thing to do is regain trust, guaranteeing processes and security measures”. The second step relates to the collective dynamic. For Poitrineau, this means sharing information with the whole team in daily meetings. This provides continuity in process.
“The most relevant thing for managers is support. It’s important to be on the field, find solutions and not leave people in difficult situations. They can eliminate structural distance between those who work in offices and those who are more operational”. It means it’s key to have shared data, making it easier to have a shared vision and making the right decisions. The situation changes each day and a good leader must be ready to react and anticipate events. “The risk must be absorbed within each day, forgetting about future plans. On the other hand, it’s a chance to return to working on new projects and having a shared future plan that involves the whole group”.
Sharing is a key word in new beginnings. Cristiana Scelza, CEO of Prysmian Russia, has often caught herself saying it when talking about her experiences in the Oil&Gas market in Brasil, the country that was shaken by corruption in the national oil company. In Moscow, companies have a high proportion of female workers but are still dominated by masculine and aggressive behaviour. “The manager isn’t alone. If they believe in diversity and inclusion, they are able to trust their team, which in turn will support them. At the same time, leaders have to be able to filter out their demons. They can’t transmit fear and anxiety, without giving a constructive message”.
“Resilience isn’t enough any more”, said Scelza. We can’t think that we’re going back to the world we lived in before. In times of crisis, we must look to the future. “Crises are a constant around the world, they accelerate everything and make you skip the initial phases. But we have all the tools we need to overcome them. It’s not easy, but there is great opportunity”.
It all depends on how you react to different events. Or how you would like to react. We can learn to be anti-fragile too. “It’s not about being adaptable, because we don’t know what we need to adapt to. It’s more about plasticity”, explains Valeria Cantoni, Founder of ArtsFor.
“I contain multitudes” Bob Dylan sings, picking up one of Walt Whitman’s lines. By becoming more aware of our multitudes and richness of resources we can put them into practice. Then we can create space to see what’s at the heart of the matter.
“Lots of companies continue to tell the same narrative and live off the founder’s story. But the world has changed and the story needs to be updated. The people who make up the company need to tell it. We need to get away from what Luigino Bruni defines as a ‘famine of narrative capital’”, continues Cantoni.
“Managers that make the difference are those that concentrate on the quality of their relationships and language within the company. We need inclusive and authoritative managers that know how to say “I don’t know” and ask for help. We need managers that experiment, favouring a continuous learning environment where it’s okay to make mistakes. Managers that are aware of their interior bias and their own resources. The best managers need to narrate and know how to tell their own stories.”
“The time has come for us to follow our destiny as a community. Not just in terms of responsible decisions, but in terms of survival within the organisation. By learning new things, we can train our experimentation skills. From there we can keep track of them and share what we’ve learned with our colleagues”.
Originally published on Italian publication Parole di Management
Caregivers are becoming more visible at work. But 50% of working caregivers still hide their multiple family care roles from their employer. As part of their talent development program, Veolia wanted to improve the work-life balance for their caregiver employees. They did this by choosing Lifeed. Using Life Based Learning methods, workers have begun to understand how their family care experiences can boost their careers.
“At Veolia, many people have a family. Our average worker is 45 years old. As parents or children, we’re constantly put to the test. We have to negotiate, compromise and manage complex situations. With Lifeed, we can see how these same skills can be applied at work, improving perseverance, self esteem and performance. All these things are essential for our work and colleagues. The reverse is also true: often we find ourselves using office-learned skills at home too. This just goes to show that our personal and working lives can compliment each other”. – Emanuela Trentin, CEO
Veolia is a global company, with over 3,000 Italian employees currently taking part in Lifeed. Our programs offer employees the chance to take part in a new learning journey. The platform also creates opportunities for people to connect other like-minded professionals. “This wouldn’t have easily happened with our ‘classic’ communications channels at work’ explains Trentin.
“Collaboration and shared objectives favor synergy. They also improve the corporate climate. We chose Lifeed because the company’s ethos is all about bringing different worlds and ways of living together, to bring out the best in people”.
Tenderhearted warriors. We’re talking about the mothers that are currently faced with the impossible choice between their children and work. They’re the ones that are personally paying the price for a society that still heavily relies on their resistance and sacrificial spirit in order to maintain its precarious balance. Now more than ever, mothers are being asked to take a step back. Society is asking them to channel their caring and resilient strength to support the future: their children.
Tenderhearted warriors is the title of Federica Giardini’s essay on female strength. We used the same title for our digital conference hosted by Alley Oop – Il Sole 24 Ore and Lifeed. It was the sequel event to our previous conference held with a panel of “CEO dads”.
Throughout the conference we asked if CEO moms faced a double stigma. Were they seen as too much of a CEO at home and mothers at work? They told a much more enlightening story. Over 500 participants thanked them for having started the day so positively.
But let’s get started with the data. We recently conducted a survey of over 1,500 Lifeed webinar participants. They told us that right now 63% of people need reassurance about their future. What’s more, 44.5% want to be more involved when defining new solutions. The desired power model is a mix of collaboration (26%), knowledge (26%), respect (17%) and empathy (13.5%). People are also expecting their managers to share more going forward (70%) and to listen (68%), but also, more surprisingly, that they are willing to take risks (60%).
Nearly all participants (89.8%) say that in times of emergency, it’s possible and necessary to use “generative” power. Power that maps out the future, planting ideas and projects that will ultimately outlive them.
What does this have to do with mothers? It turns out, a lot. Even if psychoanalyst Erikson adds that simply bringing a child into the world doesn’t necessarily develop a sense of generativity. The prerequisites for developing it are faith in the future, belief in the species and the ability to care for others. Instead of raising children, they can also simultaneously work to create a better world for others’ children too”. Here are five ideas surrounding generative power that emerged from the conference:
Livia Cevolini, CEO of Energica Spa, manufacturer of high performance electric motorcycles, and mother to a two year old daughter. Becoming a mother gave her a new objective, so much so that she now focuses on green energy.“Because I want her to live in a better world”. Aside from receiving wonderful energy from this new personal dimension, she also believes her ability to understand others and value their talents has improved.
Isabella Fumagalli, CEO of BNP Paribas Cardif says that becoming a mother to two girls has “taken things up a gear”. She feels responsible for creating a future for her daughters. From her conversations with them, and their “authentic questions” she has learned more about the tiring but essential quest for truth. Over lockdown, Isabella has discovered that the people in her company are more than professionals. Each of them has multiple dimensions that open up new perspectives on the world and working together, as well as the chance to draw people and business closer together (while she isn’t speaking, Isabella hugs and kisses her daughter as she passes by the screen).
Roberta La Selva, CEO of Ogilvy Italia, became mother to Michele and Arianna. She discovered how to rebalance everything that having lots of “playgrounds” gives you, redistributing the weight and learning while she teaches. Empathy and mental agility are key soft skills that she’s constantly putting into practice as she adapts to new situations, “For example, having to speak at a conference from my flat’s balcony, because all the other rooms are in use!”.
Elena Riva, co-owner and President of Panino Giusto SpA, has three children with their father, who also co-owns the business with her. She highlights that this being “together ” is important, as the business is a fourth child that she would never have been able to make happen alone. With three children – and 450 employees in her company – she has discovered the value of diversity and its ability to multiply everything around it. As a leader and mother, recognizing independence in her children and employees makes her feel like a “custodian”: a patient custodian that plants, insists and patiently perseveres, knowing that the moment of harvest is coming.
Finally, Susanna Zucchelli, General Director at Heratech believes that becoming a mother has helped her in her leadership role at a hard company. She is responsible for the engineering department, remote and laboratory divisions and management of processes and services. Her maternal attitude reveals a “bio-resilience”, which has been particularly useful for her employees at this difficult time. She adds that having children has given her a long-term vision and the ability to ask for help when needed. “And if they don’t help you, you make them!” she concluded, with a practical edge that people tend to acquire when they face concrete challenges in their day to day lives.
So here’s to all the tenderhearted warriors: to all the women that work and care for others. They are fortunate if they find synergy in this delicate balance and they are at an advantage if they leave guilt and imposter syndrome behind, that our society so often directs at them. They are able to use power without force, but as the New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinta Ardern said, kindness and the ability to stay together.
This post was written by our CEO, Riccarda Zezza, and originally published on Alley Oop Blog on Il Sole 24Ore
We are all going through a life transition. It’s as though we are all going through a forced period of ‘leave’. We’re at home, continuing to work, and lots of our roles are overlapping and accumulating. Just like every transition, the current Coronavirus pandemic has required us to rethink things, both at a personal and social level. Not only that, it’s affecting how HR teams are approaching talent management too.
To better understand how companies are preparing for life after Covid-19, we met with 4 Human Resources Directors from 4 different industries that collectively manage 10,000 people. We asked them how they imagined the return to “normality” and how they are preparing their talent management for life after Covid-19. Here’s what they had to say during our Life Ready Conference held on the 2nd April.
“As complexity continues to rise within companies, talent management has become essential. Inevitably, even in this unique situation we are going through, the spotlight falls onto the HR director. Those who haven’t yet been a part of decision making processes have started to talk with the higher levels of the leadership team. It’s become a chance for HR to play a leading role within the company.
Looking at the bigger picture, leadership in general has been put to the test. It’s allowing us to identify the key factors that make a true leather, aside from any performance evaluation tools that we use. The crisis has highlighted leaders that are able to give a clear direction, without any vagueness, and able to provide strategic positivity to their communications. These two characteristics allow you to achieve key results.
This crisis has also given us flexibility across the board. Technology has been accelerated by Covid-19 and will bring us back to a world where delegation and objectives will be essential to talent management. We hope that remote working will become commonplace, but it needs these two elements to be able to work effectively”.
“Over the past few years, we’ve been on a journey with Life Based Value to value parenthood experiences, taking account of motherhood and fatherhood. When I started my career 20 years ago, motherhood was a taboo; now we know it’s a huge source of resources for organisations. Talent management teams are aware of that, thanks to the data we’ve been able to give them regarding improved skills and productivity levels following periods of maternity leave. Thanks to this crisis, we’ve been able to translate the maternity experience across the whole company; is as though we were all on a period of leave together, which can become a great opportunity.
Organizations are held up by four main pillars: economic, organizational, cultural and psychological-emotional. In all crisis experiences, not just the one we’re currently going through, you need to prioritize and focus on the psychological-emotional pillar within the organization. Organizations are made up of people who have feelings, fears, anxieties and reactions. All leaders need to manage the the psychological-emotional element too, even though they are also just as worried about the future of the company. In Danone, we’ve made a global commitment: Danone has declared that nobody will lose their job because of Coronavirus.
In this way, we have left space for people to express their creativity, and we’re re-writing our Business Model with them to introduce new ways of working. Every person across every level can have a creative idea, but they will only express it if management creates a trusting and comforting environment. Let’s put ourselves in other people’s shoes and care for their whole beings, not just seeing them as professionals. That’s the only way we can see a great return.
I believe that this crisis will leave us with so many more ideas. All of the solutions that we’ve found during this time will eventually become part of our company’s heritage”.
“Since the beginning of the pandemic, we’ve made a series of urgent and necessary steps in talent management. We’ve safeguarded people with health protocols and introduced remote working for all employees, as well as adopted salary integration tools. Psychological safeguarding layers on top of that, which is something we’re working on right now. We’re about to start a listening space and a range of seminars on personal balance. Work is a key part of our lives. We’ve seen huge disruptions to our routines over this time: we’re forced to live indoors, often in a small space with our family, which requires a different type of balance.
The first steps are the most complicated and difficult ones to define. Because we don’t know long the social distancing rules will continue for, but we also know that ‘it will be difficult to travel across the metre that separates us’ (to quote the head of Protezione Civile, Angelo Borrelli). The question we must ask ourselves is how can we maintain social distancing, but still boost inclusion? This is one of our objectives. For example, think about how valuable a coffee break can be: when will we be able to do it again? And how will we replace it?
The areas that our company needs to work on are the following.
In summary, my mantra for the future will be: new skills and sharing. We need to reinvent ourselves, and those who have been generous with creating and listening to their network will create a clear competitive advantage”.
“Up until yesterday, when we were able to experiment with lots of different training methods, we ‘played’ with soft skills training, such as creativity, being open, innovation, showing initiative and entrepreneurialism. All of these skills, that we’ve been training on paper up until now, will become our new ways of working in the future.
But training isn’t the only aspect that we need to rethink. Another area of talent management is internal communication. We are now communicating with our employees each day through our corporate intranet: we are translating new laws, modules and simplifying information that the government has provided to make it easy for our employees to understand. But that’s not all…we also have an app. It’s usually used for corporate events, but we’ve converted it into a way of feeling closer to each other. Each week we suggest a new talking point, and we can all contribute in a continuous way. It’s also a way of generating new ideas on how to manage returning to ‘normality’ once this is all over.
On this topic, we’re also looking to network with other businesses. Especially those within our own sector. We want to better understand what they are doing and discover new ideas that we can adapt to our own company.
Some of our previous choices have been key over this period, others have needed to be thought through again. For example, two years ago, we opened our new headquarters. At the same time, we gave all of our employees a laptop and experimented with unlimited remote working. We’re trusting that our employees use their common sense with it.
Another key point for us is that we have the chance to teach other countries something new. We’ve been considering ourselves a small Business Unit, performing well but looking at the bigger companies within the group. Now we’re still a Business Unit, but one that can teach something to the bigger players. Partly because this happened 4 weeks earlier in Italy. But also our innovations and ideas have become other people’s best practices”.
Caregivers are becoming more visible than ever at work. We’re talking about those that care for family members, disabled or dependent relatives without any pay or formal training. In 2018, there were 12.7 million caregivers in Italy: 40% of the working population. It’s a social and demographic aspect that has a great influence on the world of work. Just like Harvard Business School’s The Caring Company report states, over 50% of caregivers hide this role from their employers, as if it was a stigma. This has a negative impact on both on an individual’s personal life and their career
Recognising and valuing diversity is key to MSD Italy, and employee inclusion is also high up on the list. The company has recently started working with Lifeed, transforming caregiving experiences into soft skills that can also be applied at work.
“30% of our working population is over 50 years old, and we know that lots of them dedicate part of their time to caring for elderly or disabled relatives”, explains Michele Ceresani, HR Executive Director at MSD Italy.
By using Lifeed, MSD want to improve key behaviors relating to diversity.
“We’re looking closely at inclusion, innovation and collaboration outside of traditional organizational silos. We believe that these learning journeys can help us to strengthen a range of skills. Skills such as empathy and listening, risk and error management, collaboration and alliance creation. We’re sure that it’s going to help us manage change. In addition, the company is also focusing on giving and receive feedback, as well as flexibility. We’re discovering a wealth of existing skills that simply need to be brought into focus”
MSD Italy wanted to draw on the learning potential hidden in everyday experiences. So, that’s why they chose Lifeed to help them make this a reality. It’s all about accelerating and strengthening skills on a daily basis.
We brought 7 key opinion leaders together: men, fathers and managers at large corporations. We invited them to talk in a live stream that lasted over an hour, talking directly from the comfort of their own homes. With great transparency and humility, they shared with us how fatherhood has influenced their concept of leadership behaviors. We discovered that their children, 19 collectively in total, proved to be the best training ground for soft skills that they had ever experienced. Here’s what they had to say.
“The way that I work changed when I became a father. When you become a parent, you rediscover some of your values. Social responsibility is one, or rather the sustainability towards new generations. The coronavirus pandemic has caused us to go through a sort of transition together. It’s made us understand that it’s important to carry these same values through to the company. We can create a long-term osmosis of material values, those typically found on end of year reports. They can become strategic elements for those same companies.
The corporate climate is key. You need to make sure your colleagues are happy and engaged, you need to find harmony with patience and conviction. Just like you do with children. We are all fathers and mothers, but we seem to forget that when we walk through the office doors. But if we started to act in the same way, with the same virtuous behaviours, the other colleagues would do the same”.
“Fatherhood has taught me at least 3 important things.
The first: I have 3 children and they have taught me that in leadership, just like at home, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach. You need to change your approach depending on the person and their age. The same goes for employees – we often use standard approaches for everyone within a business.
The second (that my wife suggested!): fatherhood does a CEO good because it keeps their ego at bay. It keeps their feet flat on the ground and keeps them rooted in everyday normality. For example, I’ve learned that with my children I’ve only got 5 seconds to get their attention before they go back to looking at their phone screen. Within the family context, roles accumulate and change on a daily basis as we all grow and evolve together.
Finally: the current situation has made me realise that we need to trust each other, children want to be reassured to know they are doing the right thing, just like employees do”.
“I want to set something straight: children are forever, jobs come and go. Once I’d changed my first 1,000 nappies, I understood that work should no longer be an excuse for not spending more time on my new family role. So I decided to change my schedlue, recalibrating strengths and energies. For example, I stopped working the weekends, I learnt how to prioritise better. And this awareness was a great trigger for personal growth.
Another reflection that links parenthood and my professional life is the quest for leadership guidelines. In my team, this means: giving direction to create a unified purpose, knowing how to channel energy to be more efficient and celebrating success and failure. These three elements can also be seen in parenthood.
There are so many parallels. But there is one difference: the leader is by himself, the classic business model works with one lone leader. But in a family context there are two of you: this partnership is extremely profound and effective, and should really be translated into the business context”.
“I’ve been a father for a long time, I had my first child when I was just 26 years old. Becoming a father much earlier than taking on my first managerial roles at work has had a strong impact on my leadership style. With my first daughter, we had a few issues that meant she was hospitalised, and after we had had her we struggled to have any more. This situation taught me that you can’t keep everything under control, not even at work. There will always be an element of the unexpected. They taught me that in life you have to work as though it all depended on you, but knowing that you don’t determine the outcome.
Fatherhood also calls to the topic of freedom, I call it “freedom management”. By that I mean stimulating freedom to bring about better results. That might be obvious with children, but it works in business too: as a CEO I think we’ll be remembered for the big things and ideas that we left within a company, not for the higher or lower margins”.
“Becoming a father is a choice, and it’s not always an easy one. Becoming a father has opened me up to experiences that have changed my way of being. I’m a manager with a technical background with little human elements, so launching into life with an emotionally-charged child had a great impact on me. For example, he’s brought me optimism and faith in the future – that you need a lot of when there’s uncertainty in business.
When children come along, they throw their emotions straight at you. They are innocent and this changes everything: they give you straight-talking feedback, which doesn’t work with them or with your colleagues, but I can see the same look in their eyes. So if I make a mistake, I say sorry more than I used to.
Constantly raising the bar doesn’t work either. When you teach your child to dive into the pool, it’s almost automatic to want to correct them to perfect their moves. But this will probably make him lose his enthusiasm. It’s the same within corporate leadership, we all need achievable and realistic targets, but also a culture where it’s ok to make mistakes”.
“There is so much overlap between being a parent and leadership roles. I continue to learn each day from these two roles: I’ve learnt to make the best of my time, which is often little for my family, or keeping a better distance from problems and developing empathy, putting yourself in somebody else’s shoes. There isn’t a better training ground than fatherhood to hone emotional intelligence!
Over the past few years I’ve also developed the ability to think laterally: so avoiding just looking at cause and effect, but focusing on the solution rather than the problem, just like my son does when he’s doing his homework.
Finally, there’s the idea of continuous learning , that works in both your personal and professional lives”.
“I became a father after I became a General Manager, but I’ve learnt so much from it. First of all, I’ve learnt that the best negotiator in the world is my 5 year old son: he will continue to ask for something and wear you down until he gets what he wants. He taught me that you often need to move from ordering to negotiating.
I’ve learnt to say ‘yes’ a lot more than I say ‘no’. Even when I’m tired and I don’t want to play that game for the millionth time, I realise that it’s a moment that I’m never getting back.
I’ve learnt that in leadership, I need to move from setting rules to setting an example, which is the thing that makes us most credible at home and at work. Last but not least, delegation. If we keep doing things for our children instead of teaching them, just like with our employees, they will never learn how to do those things for themselves”.
With over 100,000 employees, Danone are committed to globally investing in their talent. They have devised a range of flexible policies that truly support and value people throughout key life transitions.
It started through the launch of their first Global Parental Policy. For the past few years, they’ve offered consistent support to all employees from pregnancy right up to the baby’s second year of life. After seeing the positive return on investment, the company was then keen to apply this same method to other parts of the workforce. They are currently implementing a package that focuses on supporting family caregivers. These initiatives have quickly become a best practice for parental policy within the HR industry.
“After implementing our parenthood policy 8 years ago, 100% of Danone mothers are now returning to work after maternity leave. 40% of promotions go to those same mothers too. What’s more, our birth rate currently sits at 7%. That’s 11 points ahead of the Italian national average (currently at -4%)”. It’s what Sonia Malaspina, HR director South Europe Danone Specialized Nutrition, had to say about the policy. Lifeed (previously known as MAAM) has been a part of the policy since 2017. To date, we’ve focused on taking expectant mothers and new parents on a learning journey to value this unique life transition.
“Thanks to the program for new parents, we’ve seen incredible and measurable growth. So many skills have improved. Skills such as priority management (+35%), decision making (+15%), delegation (+35%) and managing complexity (+10%) as well as empathy (+35%) and mental agility (+20%)” continues Sonia Malaspina.
These statistics show how the knowledge and skills of a caregiver can also improve management skills. It’s why Danone are now extending initiatives to caregivers too. It’s an opportunity to value and support employees that look after elderly parents, disabled relatives and dependent loved ones.
Caring for someone means that each day you are using skills that are essential in the workplace too. Skills such as problem solving, time management, empathy and mental agility. These are the skills that employers want the most. They enable people to keep a competitive advantage over machines.
– Lifeed CEO and founder, Riccarda Zezza
Lifeed is based on scientific research and data, and our latest caregiving path is no exception. Taking care of family members at home, or looking after an elderly, ill or dependent relative trains your soft skills. It’s a concept that has been validated through a number of scientific research studies.
According to Harvard Business University research, 73% of workers are involved in family care activities in the US alone. In Italy, Istat studies reveal that 30.5% of over 50s are caregivers for elderly parents. These statistics have paved the way for our latest digital program, dedicated to those who are caregivers.
It’s the first and only program for working caregivers. The soft skills training program transforms care experiences into soft skills. It follows the same learning format as our program for new parents, which has been used by over 8,000 mothers and fathers across 70 companies to date. We’ve seen skills improve by up to 35% and engagement rise by 85%. Above all, this new program allows caregivers to discover the new skills and resources that they are developing. It boosts their wellbeing and competitive edge at work.
What’s more, the new program also allows participants to train skills at work that can also be applied at home. In other words: stress management, risk management, decision making, empathy, delegation, leadership, self-belief and self-fulfilment.
Using the Life Based Learning method, Lifeed offers 9 digital modules enriched with interactive content and “real life” missions. It’s an opportunity to transform life experiences into a training environment.
For further information, contact us!
