Are you curious to know what we are doing at:

Marco Polo Consulting?

By Giorgia Madonno Marco Polo Consulting

We are co-creating  a better working

environment & more engaging/ 

adaptive organizations

How to create trust in a team

Vulnerability for  team effectiveness

By Giorgia Madonno Marco Polo Consulting

 

 

The only way to create trust in a team is creating the right environment where people can feel free to put down the mask and be vulnerable.

 

 

 

Usually when at Marco Polo Consulting, we consult on the team effectiveness we work on the 5 dysfunctions of a team.

 

The first one is exactly the lack of trust.

 

On this aspect we do half day workshop:

 

1) people are requested to bring their personality profile at the workshop

 

2) after some icebreaker and explanation on why trust and vulnerability are important for the team, they share some "personal information" that make them known better by the other team members

 

3) each of them present to the others his own profile 

 

4)  they do an exercise helping them to receive feedback from the others and know their blind spot (we call it "cornice" - "frames")

 

5) in the afternoon we do individual coaching or peer coaching

Usually it works very well and people really open up.

 

After that each month we work on the other 5 dysfunctions and cross-cultural skills (if needed) with workshop and coaching + action learning de-briefing and people work together to co-create labs and prototypes on aspects important for the team's health.

 

We meet them regularly and do coaching circles to help them overcome roadblocks 

Marco Polo Consulting activities - China

Team activation workshop in Bracco-Sine
By Giorgia Madonno Marco Polo Consulting


This week  Marco Polo Consulting facilitated a 2 days workshop on team activation in Bracco-Sine in Shanghai. 

We discussed about how to engage people and build a highly performing team.

We had several exercises and discussions and worked to improve on the 5 dysfunctions of a team: absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of responsibilities, inattention to results.  

We used Cultureamp Murmur Engagement survey and we had a clear pulse of the engagement and performance level in the team, a good dashboard for leaders to start acting on their team focus focusing on the right drivers. 

The feedback on the workshop have been very positive. Happy to having been helpful.

People management training in Danieli Vietnam

Marco Polo Consulting activities

By Giorgia Madonno Marco Polo Consulting

In June Marco Polo Consulting delivered 4 days trainining on Leadership and People Management for Danieli Vietnam.

We discussed about the role of Leader in Danieli and the leadership transitions, about how to engage people and build a highly performing team.   

We used Cultureamp Murmur Engagement survey and we had a clear pulse of the engagement and performance level in the company, a good dashboard for leaders to start acting on their team focusing on the right drivers.

Marco Polo Consulting training

Cross-Cultural training Faist-Minigears in Suzhou

By Giorgia Madonno - Marco Polo Consulting


Here below some pics form our last training in Suzhou:
an advanced session on Cross-culture. 

We talked about Italian and Chinese communication and conflict management, how to be a good leader in China, Generation Y, Women leadership and Innovation in China

We also invited Andrea Fenn from Fireworks to introduce social media in China. A lot of discussion, exercises and contents. 

University EMBA lessons

MIP-TONGJI University EMBA
HR & Organizational behaviors class

By Giorgia Madonno Marco Polo Consulting



Today I started my EMBA class at MIP-Tongji University in Shanghai.

The lessons are about HR & Organizational behaviors. The EMBA students are all Chinese entrepreneurs and top managers in the industries of Design, Urban planning, Engineering, Real Estate.

During this first 4 days we spoke about Engagement and Performance, HR Business Partnership, Staffing, Performance management, Learning, Succession planning & talent management, Compensation & benefit.

Here below the Syllabus:

Leaders in different industries, organizational levels and business growth stages may encounter similar but not identical challenges in terms of people and organization, but they will have the same objective: improving performance and engagement within their organization. Taking the perspective of organizational leaders, we are going to discuss the main organizational challenges and to provide approaches, knowledge, theory and best practices to improve the effectiveness of organizations and people.

The course is structured in 2 main parts:

1)      Human Resources Management

2)      Organizational behaviour

The “Human Resources Management” part focuses on the most important processes and approaches finalized to improve performance and engagement in the organization. Human Resources can be managed having a business partnership approach and playing several integrated roles: Strategist, Change agent, Employee Champion, in addition to the most traditional Administrative expert role. We will discuss about Leaders and HR function responsibilities on people and organization. Through examples and best practices, we see how the recruitment process can be optimized in order to bring the right talents in the organization. We focus on long term plans for talent identification and development in harmony with the company business strategy. Competencies, learning, performance management, compensation and benefit are the other HR aspects the course is focusing on. 

We study how to set up the structure and manage the development of an organization, manage effectively the change, leverage the corporate culture asset and communicate internally and externally having in mind an employer branding approach.

The “Organizational Behaviour part could be defined as the “study of people’s behaviour within organisations and relative dynamics”, in other words how people and teams influence and view the organisation, in order to reach their objectives, as a group or as an individual, and therefore achieve the success of the organisation.

Lessons focus on individuals, team and organization, they show how to manage group dynamics and each person’s personal contribution, in the most positive way.

We see the value and challenges of individual diversity, and aspects linked to self- awareness and management, personality, emotional intelligence, career anchors and values, stress management, cognitive styles and cultural diversity.

We therefore cover topics related to the team: group dynamics, stages in team development, the roles in a team, the potential dysfunctions of a team and how to overcome them.

During the course there is also a session focused on Coaching theory and practice for leaders. Coaching is a very powerful approach that is more and more used by leaders and external coaches to develop talents or people who have to improve their performance in the organization. Coaching can be used to address behavioural change, lack of performance, career management, cross-cultural or communication challenges. Coaching is a perfect topic to close our course: it is both an HR practice and a managerial skill for  organizational behaviours improvement .

Some of the materials and examples discussed in class focus on situations specific to China and organization operating in “knowledge intensive” service industries; others represent global best practices and knowledge and thought not directly linked to your current environment can provide ideas and approaches that you can use to improve the effectiveness of your organization.



Cross-cultural skills between Italy and China in Shanghai by Marco Polo Consulting

Do not miss our training!

By Giorgia Madonno Marco Polo Consulting

New intercompany training on May 7th in Shanghai.

Cross-cultural skills between Italy and China by Marco Polo Consulting in collaboration with the Italian Chamber of Commerce and Adecco. Registration is open!

For more information:
Read details on ICCC website             

Capability building

Why companies in China need support for capability building

By Giorgia Madonno Marco Polo Consulting

From the "attached" article by Mc Kinsey Insight I extrapolated some key points (in black) about the challanges that multinational companies face in building capability in China. It is exactly what our clients face when they ask us for support (in blue)

Challenges:

1) Perennial challenge for multinationals: the Chinese context and culture, which may require local tailoring of global approaches. Often an effective balance between centralization and decentralization is difficult to find and companies need an help to set up a proper discussion on the topic between global HQ and local subsidiaries

2) Chinese companies generally lack a systematic approach to nurturing employees moving up the organizational ladder. They misconstrue capability building as a classroom activity, missing the impact of linking it to actual business. And they are too inflexible either to fire underperformers or to reward and promote employees, including managers, who change their behavior and adopt the necessary mind-sets. Succession planning, talent development and performance management are processes that still need to be improved in many companies in China, for this reason we are asked to support companies to set up these new processes or to improve the current ones.

3) In many Chinese companies today, capability building remains synonymous with classroom training, partially thanks to the tradition of rote learning in schools When we audit the training system of companies in China very often we have to recommend and help them to develop integrated learning systems where the traditional classroom training is integrated with experience learning, coaching, e-learning, individual development plans, communities of sharing and gaming approaches to learning

4) Historically, many human-resource departments emphasized quantity over quality, placing priorities such as cross-functional collaboration and leadership skills on the back burner. Even today, many HR functions do no more than oversee salaries and benefits, relying largely on one-to-one training in local plants. The HR competence in China is quite young, HR teams, expecially in medium companies, need support to build their capabilities and learn a more sofisticated HR Business partnership approach. Co-design and co-implementation with external HR senior experts who coach them is often the best solutions,  these programs can last from a 6 months to 2 years of part-time on-site or off-site support.

5) Most of its leaders had transferred from technical positions into general-management ones, without sufficient training or coaching on how to manage that transition Coaching programs are very effective solutions to prepare individual contributors to become managers of others and build a broader skill-set

Here some practices companies have started:

1) The venture has now set up a “corporate university” to encourage cross-functional collaboration among a range of functions—notably, engineering, finance, manufacturing, purchasing, quality, and sales—as well as better communication with global headquarters to ensure a successful launch Cross-functional collaboration is a very big challange in China, we work with teams (expecially executive teams) to enhance the trust among team members, to improve the ability to manage conflict, and to set team objectives that canalize the energies of the team on a common target instead of individual targets, this is a true silos buster.

2) Developing Chinese teaching materials to help solve problems, building day-to-day business problems around products that participants would find in the Chinese market, and localizing global training materials through culturally appropriate metaphors and examples. Cross-cultural knowledge is key for every practice in China, the biggest mistake is to assume that what works in our culture works and make sense also in another. Cross-cultural programs can help to increase cross-cultural awarness

Read more on mckinsey insight

Marco Polo Consulting training activities

Cross-Cultural training in China by Marco Polo Consulting in Pirelli and Gruppo CMS

By Giorgia Madonno Marco Polo Consulting

In August and October we delivered 2 successful cross-cultural training to our clients Pirelli and Gruppo CMS. The objective of the training was to help the teams composed by Chinese, Italian, Brazilian and people from other European countries to improve their working relationship and teamwork. We organized several exercise, games and roleplays to make the training interactive as much as possible. Here below some pics of the key moments.

Pirelli