This year showed me how much each individual in the organization matters, how much it can influence the company’s culture.
It was a very difficult year for everyone. Who says it was only a year of opportunities I think is talking nonsense. It is good to recognize the difficulty brought by uncertainty, stress, lack of relationship, human contact, inability to see colleagues, friends, to be close to loved ones. This year forced us to bring our true face to the surface. In hard times, when we are not doing well, when the company is not doing well, we see who is beyond the social masks, how well we keep our balance.
It was difficult for me and my colleagues. But we had the intuition to establish some team routines from the first week of isolation at home. We met at the weekly virtual breakfast, we had the Discipline of Excellence every two weeks. We took care not to forget our birthdays, we went out this summer together, we listened, we made great efforts to reposition, rethink courses, learning. I’m not talking about me, I’m talking about them. Because they did all this. They were not demotivated by the offers made to which they did not receive an answer even today, no matter how much they asked, about negativity, the low activity in the spring, on the contrary: they did pro bono webinars, they learned how to deliver online, they were themselves to online courses, webinars, to become better.
If the adjustment efforts were just pushed by me, I was probably now with my shoulders bent. But in this crisis it was different. We have seen that we have managed to live according to the principles that we established many years ago, discussed so many times, and that we have on the walls, at the office. There are no more words on the walls, they are internalized.
The company’s culture is given by the way each person shapes the behaviors that we ourselves said we wanted in Interact. This year we saw that every person is implicitly responsible for the Interact culture. And that’s not a small thing at all. On the contrary: it makes me a satisfied managing director.
