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Pictures, Music and Movies by Fernando Salvetti and Barbara Bertagni
1. Case: The introduction of a new corporate leadership model The organizational context of reference is a multinational company providing services to banks.The described case has been dedicated to the top management of the firm and characterized, first, by an initial phase of “Socratic dialogue,” a philosophic method used to explore the characteristics of efficient leadership. A dialogue which took place in a particular way called “maieutics” and which requires from the educationalist to be silent as much as possible, just to facilitate wide and tight confrontation between the interlocutors, starting from their experiences and their personal beliefs. In this case, the dialogue was focused on the efficient leadership and, with the purpose to raise the discussion, the instruments utilized were a series of particularly evocative pictures of history and news (from David’s Napoleon to a few representations of Jesus Christ), from a few pieces of music containing a lot of variations on the same theme (most of them performed by Gidon Kraemer and by his orchestra, the Kremerata Baltica) and by short movie strips with characters facing moments of particularly intense work life (from Wolf with Jack Nicholson and Michelle Pfeiffer, from Presumed Guiltless with Harrison Ford and from Mediterranean with Diego Abatantuono). The interpretation and re-interpretation in a group of art pictures and photographs, as well as listening to the selected musical themes and sharing of some rules of interpretation of “musical” speech, or else some raid in the plots and in the montage of a few movie strips, a bit within the movies and much outside, searching analogies with the firm reality… all these are “metaphorology” exercises, facilitating a quite open confrontation and an analysis of the organizational context of reference with the instruments of aesthetics and of cultural anthropology, average and adapted due to the knowledge of the organization of the firm by the educationalist himself. In fact, through the exercises of “metaphorology” it is easier to explore not just “one” reality, but “the realities” we live in. Not “one” world or “the” world, but “a world of possible worlds”: in other words, we live in a firm world, but not only that, in many worlds characterized by their specific constellations of important meanings, values and criteria. Meanings, values and criteria that the exercises of listening to the music and of visual analysis of representations and movies enhance rather easily and thanks to which, therefore, the educationalist can start the confrontation, the deconstruction and re-construction work which opens lot of ways of world-making. The discussions in the screened pictures and the behaviors in the movies as well as within the pieces of music, listened and compared with each other to find out similarities and differences, created new conditions to start a preventive deconstruction of many individual models of efficient leadership, as proposed by the various participants and then another conceptual re-definition of a leadership model as shared by means of the discussion on 37 possible attributes of the efficient leader and aiming at finding out 8 distinctive characteristics. And thus at the end of a hard day of work characterized by a climate of very lively and stimulating confrontation and discussions. To sum up, this is what came from it: the skill to make the most of
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people by developing their capacity, assertiveness, capacity to motivate for reaching targets, a decisionmaking capacity especially as to problem setting and solving, as well as in regard to the tendency to activate business transactions, the capacity to assimilate and be able to share various cultural experiences, orientation towards results, orientation towards innovation, especially meant as mental flexibility and tendency to delegate. After this first day, more than two months have elapsed, during which the educationalist could reelaborate the acquired information and “listen” to a few significant voices within the organizational context. This is in order to face another 3 days’ work meant for the discussion of the leadership model emerging from the new internal document dedicated to the Performance Announcement Process (drawn up in the States at the level of multinational groups and then propagated to the various national corporate entities). The P.A.P. contains a list of 13 fundamental competences, subdivided into 3 macro areas:
People, namely the capacity to build relations, to communicate efficiently, to practice a leadership which, especially at the managerial level, is strongly orientated towards coaching and the empowerment of the members of the team.
Work, which especially pertains to time management and flexibility, and also the mutual respect and other leading values as to the ethicality area.
Information, implying his capacity to have a wide, systemic and multi perspective horizon, and problem solving.
The P.A.P. implications have been the object of a deep analysis as a consequence of either direct situations of life spent in the company, experienced and related by the participants in working groups, or else referring to the main topics coming from the Socratic dialogue at the beginning, or the projection of a series of post-modern designed pictures with provocative, breaking off slogans, especially planned to raise (through a strong visual representation, based on a style, unusual for that cultural context) resistance, “unsaid” and gossip, in order to bring in and discuss anew the main topics coming out during the said days.
The whole of it with the aim to find good reasons to share the new leadership model: a target reached by facing the leadership themes not with an approach of how to by presenting more advanced and sophisticated models and used in more important organizational environments, but considering it from the why point of view, therefore inviting the firm leaders to improve their competences in this environment through a better grasp of why they act as they do. The why point of view that the exercises of musical “metaphorology,” both artistic and cinematographic, help a lot