D.NEWS®  mobile version   May   2023

New work, old evaluations?

Potential identification as a turning point in the culture of development

COVER

TEAM FINDINGS

Cultural tips from the Dasein EMA Partners Brazil team

TEAM FINDINGS

An Ode to Perseverance

Tip from the Director of Dasein EMA Partners Brazil, Daniel Rezende.

With the dream of living off sports, sisters Yusra and Sarah Mardini flee from a war-torn Syria and seek refuge in Europe. This is the starting point of the film “The Swimmers,” inspired by the story of the young Syrian women who had to swim across the Aegean Sea. According to the tip’s author, Dasein EMA Partners Brazil Director Daniel Rezende, with a powerful story of overcoming, dreams, and hope, they continue to live their lives even in the chaotic environment that surrounds them.

“The Swimmers” is an ode to perseverance, willpower, love of life, love of family, emphasizes Rezende. “It is a film that should be shown to every young person because it is a great lesson. Human and emotional in the sincerity with which it views the entire story. It also shows the sad reality of the horrors of war, the real and cruel routine of people who go through it every day. Families separated in search of better living conditions and who need to go through horrors to achieve a minimum of dignity. A great film about the best and worst of human beings.”

What: film “The Swimmers.” Where to watch: Netflix.

 

Overcoming Insecurity

Tip from consultant Jovaneide Sales Polon Batista

Abandoning excessive self-criticism is not simple, but it is possible as shown in the book “Self-Compassion – Stop Beating Yourself Up and Leave Insecurity Behind,” recommended by psychologist and consultant Dasein, Jovaneide Sales Polon Batista. The work, signed by Kristin Neff, “brings comfort to all of us who experience an avalanche of changes, feelings, and thoughts that always put us in a condition of lack. Of not being good enough, of not being competent and strong enough to fully meet the different roles we experience throughout our lives.”

In addition to bringing an approach to the dilemmas experienced in her own history, at the end of each chapter, the author suggests practical exercises to overcome self-criticism and feelings such as sadness or inadequacy for not achieving our internal demands. “She reinforces three essential elements of self-compassion: self-kindness, embracing our vulnerabilities, being gentle with ourselves; recognizing our humanity, we are not alone and we experience the same issues and feelings daily; and maintaining mindful awareness, balanced awareness, without ignoring or exaggerating pain.”

What: book “Self-Compassion – Stop Beating Yourself Up and Leave Insecurity Behind.” Where to buy: online or physical bookstores.

 

Champions who Inspire

Tip from Dasein | EMA Partners Brazil Associate Consultant, Luzete Campolina.

Analyzing the path of champion coaches, their challenges, and achievements in sports is always a good inspiration for personal and professional life. With this in mind, Dasein | EMA Partners Brazil Associate Consultant Luzete Campolina recommends the documentary series “The Playbook: A Coach’s Rules for Life.” According to her, the Netflix production reveals the rules these professionals use to achieve success. “They are inspiring stories that address team development, overcoming obstacles, motivation, guidance towards results, decision-making, and resilience.”

“As an associate consultant at Dasein | EMA Partners Brazil, interviewing numerous executives, I have the constant challenge of gathering behavioral evidence that allows me to understand the functioning dynamics of these professionals. They have the great challenge of developing people, leading and inspiring teams considering strategies that seek to generate results for the various stakeholders impacted by organizations. This is a great challenge for me and an even greater challenge for executives who are leading teams and guiding organizations towards success.”

What: series “The Playbook: A Coach’s Rules for Life.”  Where to watch: Netflix.

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LEARNING FROM EDU LYRA:

"It doesn't matter where you come from, but where you are going. And you can go wherever you want."

LEARNING FROM EDU LYRA:

Encouraged by his mother, Maria Gorete, Edu Lyra found the necessary stimulus to create what is now a reference in social entrepreneurship worldwide: the NGO Gerando Falcões. Born in a favela in São Paulo, Lyra started selling his own book “Jovens Falcões” door-to-door. With the money earned, he founded the organization that has already impacted more than 700,000 people in 5,000 favelas across 25 Brazilian states.

Although his story is an exception in the communities of the country, he works hard to change this reality: “I don’t want a person from the favela to win. I want the favela to win collectively and integrally.” Follow below for more about this great story.

We need to learn the initial lesson of citizenship and respect for others, urgently inserting racial inclusion into the ideals of our society.

At the head of the Gerando Falcões Network, you have drawn the attention of major executives and companies to the reality of young people in impoverished communities. Leaders such as Jorge Paulo Lemann, Rubens Menin, and Guilherme Benchimol, for example, support your initiatives. Several other leaders praise your management conduct (inspired by the Ambev model). How was the construction of Gerando Falcões’ management conduct, and how was the path to mobilizing the country’s main companies?

“We have been investing in technology and innovation for a long time. We invest in platform, code development, cloud capacity expansion, and the formation of our Communication team. In addition, we have a range of incredible partners who, in times of crisis, contribute immensely to disseminating information. In these moments, we know who has created good teams and built relationships of trust with donors. Gerando Falcões is audited by KPMG, with public financial statements and reports. We are transparent with our donor base, and people see value in that. During the last campaign, we mobilized 44,000 individual donors and created instability in the bank’s system. In other words, we use technology to its fullest potential to scale impact solutions at the forefront.”

I don’t want a favelado to win. I want the favela to win collectively and integrally.

Despite the increased presence of black men and women in universities, only 3% reach executive or management positions in companies, according to IBGE. It is consensus that investing in education is the best way to prepare young people from favelas for leadership positions. However, being qualified is not enough, as many lose the competition due to discrimination. From leader to leader: how to break the barrier of prejudice in companies?

We need to learn the initial lesson of citizenship and respect for others, urgently inserting racial inclusion into the ideals of our society. It’s not enough to just make a post on Black Consciousness Day. It is necessary to set goals. At Gerando Falcões, 70% of the total leadership is female, and 63% of women hold high leadership positions. In total, 39% of all employees are black women.

Through a social development ecosystem involving education, employment, sports, and culture, Gerando Falcões Network has been changing the fate of thousands of young people who live in Brazilian favelas. Tell us more about the backstage of this strategy as a way to inspire other professionals and companies.

To think of a long-term strategy and have the strength to put it into practice, one of our initiatives was to expand our work, sharing our knowledge with other NGOs that have the potential to generate transformation in their territories. More than a thousand social leaders have graduated from Falcons University.

Currently, we have almost 14,000 favelas in our country, and in order for our work to be relevant, we need an operation on a large scale. In addition, we need to have a model with goals, performance indicators, management rituals, all based on data, and this helps us a lot to think about future solutions.

At Gerando Falcões, 70% of the total leadership is female, and 63% of women are in high leadership positions. In total, 39% of all employees are black women.

You are a great example, not only for young people, but for leaders in various sectors. In your journey, who were the people who inspired you?

My mother has always been my great inspiration. She always said, “It doesn’t matter where you come from, but where you’re going. And you can go wherever you want.” And I believed in that. My life experiences also served to make me think about my purpose and mission. I lost friends to violence, and I visited my father in prison many times. I overcame poverty in my own life, now I want to overcome it on a large scale with my team and our partners. I don’t want a favelado to win. I want the favela to win collectively and integrated.

We are sharing our knowledge with other NGOs that have the potential to generate transformation in their territories.

“Poverty will become a museum piece.” Thinking about the power of this message, please share the future plans and development of the Gerando Falcões network.

Our goal is to bring poverty from the favela to the museum, not the favela itself. We want a complete transformation, which is the proposal of Favela 3D (Dignified, Digital, and Developed), a viable solution to overcome poverty in Brazil and that can be a public policy for this mission. We need to solve our urgent and crucial problems. We are the last generation that has a chance to change the future.

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OBSERVATORY

Communication in ChatGPT Times

Like thinking, communication must be exercised, not automated.
OBSERVATORY

“Writing is easy: you start with a capital letter and end with a period. In the middle, you put ideas.” It was with his customary irony that Chilean poet Pablo Neruda drew attention to the arduous task of communicating well – whether through writing or oratory.

A critic of the “divine gift,” he demystified, in various accounts and works, talent as an essential element of writing. In its place, the requirement for dedication, practice, and continuous work. According to the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, communicating ideas with fluency is more of a skill that can be built and improved, rather than a vocation that a person has or does not have.

If it is practice that leads us to develop and improve competencies, would it not be prudent to put into perspective the digital automation of important exercises for our evolution, such as communication? Between us, yes. Especially in the face of the frenzy created by ChatGPT and its meteoric growth.

The technology that was missing?

As an antidote to communication creative blocks, it promises to organize, through texts of various styles and formats, ideas with a beginning, middle, and end. All in seconds. Developed by OpenAI, an American artificial intelligence research company, ChatGPT has been used to write presentations, announcements, difficult emails, articles, and whatever else is on the user’s confused mind.

Using the Transformer Neural Network (a method that teaches computers to process data like the human brain), the technology is capable of understanding and processing natural language, answering questions and generating texts to the customer’s liking, in an intelligent and humanized way.

It has also proven to be a good source of research, as it brings together billions of texts from the internet, including famous sources like Wikipedia, Reddit, and social media. For many, the technology that was missing – which explains why it is the fastest-growing platform in history (with over 100 million monthly active users in two months, surpassing TikTok, which took nine months to reach that number). That’s where the problem lies.

Writing is easy: you start with a capital letter and end with a period. In the middle, you put ideas.

Thinking is an exercise

Once we delegate certain activities to a robot, we stop performing them ourselves. This is the “Google effect”, associated with the low exercise of memorization. According to a study by Harvard University in the US, the constant use of search tools harms memory by creating user dependency – since information can be accessed at any time, there is no need to store it in memory.

The excessive use of digital search engines has harmed something essential to human development: the learning process.

If the data were trivial, it would be fine – the brain would have free space to store what matters. But the excessive use of digital search engines has harmed something essential to human development: the learning process. This conclusion is the result of a study conducted by the digital security company Kaspersky with 6,000 people in EU countries.

When given a question, 57% of the survey participants tried to suggest an answer on their own, but of that percentage, 36% ended up using the internet to elaborate their response. At the end of the study, 24% of the participants admitted to forgetting the information soon after using it to answer the question. In other words, a good part of the participants did not learn from what they had just researched.

The future of learning

Just like learning, writing is a path to be traveled, with challenges and discoveries. During the journey, new information is presented, solutions are found to solve problems, and this content is related to each person’s baggage, creating connections that become learning experiences. It is no wonder that writing is considered one of the great landmarks in human evolution – in addition to recording historical facts, it is an exercise in understanding the world.

The absence of this process, when there is excessive use of automation, is one of the major concerns, especially when it comes to the new generation of professionals. It is undeniable that young people who grew up using the internet have an enormous capacity to find information very quickly. However, this speed is often linked to a lack of depth and difficulty in elaborating good arguments. As we know, shallow answers do not solve problems.

Inspire yourself, but don’t copy

Far from taking away the merit of the technological advancement represented by ChatGPT – in addition to being a milestone for artificial intelligence and natural language processing, the tool contributes to innovations in several areas involving customer service and relationship (an evolution of chatbots), data analysis and consumer interactions, among others.

Its answers, often well-structured, can serve as inspiration for constructing arguments. That is, creating from the results that technology delivers is an alternative that can enrich your work – very different from copying. As ChatGPT uses billions of sources and data from existing content, you would be delivering a reproduction of web information – a point that has been generating many questions around security and ethics with information.

If it is practice that leads us to develop and improve competencies, wouldn’t it be prudent to put the digital automation of important exercises for our evolution into perspective?

It is by communicating in your own way, with authenticity, that you put your personal brand in what you produce. This is a characteristic that counts a lot for the future of any professional. As research indicates, communicating with empathy remains one of the most sought-after soft skills in the world. It is essential for engagement, development, generating trust, as well as avoiding a series of relationship problems – especially in routines that promise to digitize more every day.

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DASEIN INVITES: RODRIGO RONZELLA

The challenge of starting a diversity journey in the company

DASEIN INVITES: RODRIGO RONZELLA

The social and technological advances of recent years have posed an even greater challenge for human resources management in companies. How can we balance internal and external demands? How can we transform ourselves, as companies, institutions, and individuals, and keep up with the visible progress in various areas?

For over five years, I have led the HR department of a century-old company in a vital sector for the economy: CPFL Energia, one of the main players in the segment in the country. In addition to seasonal and ordinary demands, our agenda has been incremented, especially in the last three years, with a series of challenges that we have already begun to face. We recognize that the world is changing rapidly, and we want and will keep up with this evolution.

This transformation involves the need to increase diversity, equity, and inclusion in the company. We started from a scenario in which, throughout the energy sector, male predominance was visible, especially in operational areas. We needed to change and asked ourselves: how do we take the first steps?

In 2020, the company had five women electricians in field operations. Our challenge, initially, was to increase diversity at the front line, focusing on women. We entered 2021 with a goal: to train more women in our courses. Since 2012, CPFL has been offering free courses for electrician training. To reach our goal, we then decided to create exclusive classes for women. There were two classes in 2021 and six more in 2022.

The results are already visible. We started 2023 with 111 women electricians working in the field, a growth of 2,120% compared to 2020. This year, new schools exclusively for women are scheduled, which will allow us to increase the number of women electricians in our operations in São Paulo and Rio Grande do Sul.

This agenda has no end. We are confident that it is possible to increase the diversity of our operational and administrative staff, and we will continue to create concrete actions that allow us to make progress step by step.

But these advances will only truly change the culture of the company and the sector if there is internal engagement from all employees, from the CEO to the analyst, from the Board of Directors to the field electricians. Fortunately, the diversity agenda finds an echo at CPFL and, in 2020, we structured “CPFL +Diversa”, a structured program that works on diversity and inclusion in an integrated way and focuses, at this moment, on the demands and needs of five specific social groups: generations, LGBTQIAP+, women, people with disabilities, and black people.

A diverse company is a reflection of the equally diverse society we have. In 2022, we held the first Diversity Week, with training and exchange of experiences with each of the groups. These moments are important because they allow people who had little or no contact with the topics to get involved. In the case of leaders, for example, training and improvement work needs to be intense and constant, so that everyone who holds positions of management, coordination, and supervision can put into practice everything we have planned in terms of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Our experience in this important and long journey of diversity is certainly only the beginning. Today, it is one of the most important pillars of action of HR and is connected to broader commitments of the company. In November 2022, CPFL Energia launched the new ESG 2030 Plan, composed of 23 goals, including diversity.

A diverse company is a reflection of the equally diverse society we have.

All of these discussions, actions, and demands teach us a lot. Companies today, which want to continue to be relevant tomorrow, need to keep up with these changes that come from outside to inside. A diverse company is a reflection of the equally diverse society we have. A diverse team of employees, in the most diverse senses and possibilities, can better serve customers, better understand their demands, and increase our value to them and to society as a whole. I am part of this story and this is one of the greatest legacies I want to leave in my management!

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SLOW DOWN

Playing Dart

By Luisa Sá Lasserre
SLOW DOWN

It used to hang on the wall in the living room. It was one of those round targets to play darts, which my son had received as a birthday gift. We would randomly throw the red and yellow arrows at the black background. There were no rules or scorekeeping. Trying to hit the bullseye was just a game, a stroke of luck.

My game is different: with words. By choice and by profession. It’s been that way since I was a child. I hardly ventured into balls, teams; very little with board games. I switched courts for notebooks early on. My sporting instinct is too literary and too little literal.

At home, I removed the black frame from the living room and put it in the kids’ room. I thought it best to remove the game whose rules I didn’t understand from the scene – even though it’s easy to learn them on the internet. Losing the target in the game is easy; what I’ve seen out there is worse: many people shooting information randomly, missing the target of communication.

Writing is like playing darts. Each idea launched into the text is like an arrow aiming at the center of the circle. You need to know how much each one is worth to set the right strategy and score points. Like the player who sets the arrow’s goal on the target, you plan the destination of your text. Who is it talking to? What is the main idea? How will this content resonate with the reader?

These are basic questions that define where you want to go and provide support for knowing where to start. Every text is a path, but you need to chart the route for the reader. It’s not their responsibility to figure out the route alone. You need to signal the trail, give clues, pull them along and walk together.

While information is impersonal, communication is interpersonal. It’s not enough to write a text that’s just informative, if it doesn’t communicate with the reader. It’s necessary to think about the reader, how they will receive and understand the message. Communicating is about establishing a conversation, building a relationship.

According to the father of modern management, Peter Drucker, 60% of problems in a company are caused by communication failures. What does this tell us? People have difficulty understanding and making themselves understood. That’s why assertiveness in oral and written communication is so important.

I’ve seen this happen up close. Sharp demands for a task that wasn’t executed due to the simple lack of clarity in what had been requested in the first place. When there is no clear direction in the information, there is a lack of understanding and an abundance of personal interpretations.

You need to get straight to the point on the subject and convey confidence in what you’re saying, with clarity and objectivity, if you want to be assertive. Don’t be dry or boring. A good conversation or a good text has to have some spice.

If you want to hit the target, you need to understand the rules. Not to be bound by them, but to know how to play and throw the darts with a specific goal in mind. A well-written text starts from a defined premise, but leaves room for the reader to construct their own reflections.

To be assertive, your text needs to hit the bullseye of the idea. Only then will you hit the reader right on target.

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