Who is speaking
Who is Rosa Bava of Huawei Digital Power, and what did she want from a Wibo cross-cultural leadership programme?
Rosa Bava is Chief Operations Officer at Huawei Digital Power. She took a Wibo programme on cross-cultural leadership because she wanted to know where her leadership stood and which practical tools could make her more effective.
Huawei Technologies is a Chinese multinational technology group, founded in 1987 and one of the world’s leading players in ICT, with an ownership model in which the company is fully owned by its employees. Huawei Digital Power is the group’s business unit for combining power electronics with digital technology for clean energy, with solutions ranging from smart photovoltaics to energy storage, electrified mobility and data centre infrastructure. Huawei Digital Power operates in more than 170 countries, relies on an international network of research and development centres and holds a large portfolio of patents in digital energy. In Italy its solutions serve hundreds of thousands of homes, thousands of businesses and hundreds of utility-scale plants.
Within Huawei Digital Power, Rosa Bava looks after Huawei’s large global European customers for delivery and service on solar and batteries. This is how she describes her role.
della parte delivery and service dei prodotti di Huawei per le rinnovabili, quindi per il solare e per le batterie
[of the delivery and service side of Huawei’s products for renewables, so for solar and for batteries]
Rosa Bava has 20 years of experience and trained as an engineer. From the first days in the classroom she turned the programme’s methods and goals into an Excel sheet. In her daily work at Huawei Digital Power she coordinates teams of more than five nationalities and often deals with cultures she has never met before or knows only in part.
Rosa Bava did not start from a specific problem. She wanted a clear view of where she stood as a leader and tools to handle complex situations faster, more effectively and with more personal calm.
The experience
What did Rosa Bava of Huawei Digital Power learn in a Wibo programme built on theory, role play and the trust triangle?
Rosa Bava describes the Wibo programme as a mix of theory and practice, with sessions she lived through first-hand.
The classroom days included role play and concrete exercises alongside the theory. Rosa Bava sees this as very different from other programmes she has taken, including an MBA at Politecnico di Milano, a leading Italian university.
Of the tools introduced, Rosa Bava remembers one above all: the trust triangle, also called the collaboration triangle. It is a model for identifying the pillars of effective communication and, where the context allows, for building a climate of real trust. It stayed with her from the very first moment.
What changed
What changed for Rosa Bava of Huawei Digital Power in online meetings with five-plus nationalities?
After the classroom days, Rosa Bava began running on her own the online meetings of a group of more than five nationalities, which until then had been coordinated differently.
For Rosa Bava this was the first test of the tools she had learned with Wibo. She chose to use them openly, telling the Huawei Digital Power team what she was doing and why. Alongside, she kept evaluating the programme’s methods and goals in a systematic way.
Asked about the most concrete benefit, Rosa Bava names a leap in awareness: the chance to reflect on her past behaviour, to understand how she had acted in business and multicultural settings, and to have the tools for increasingly ambitious challenges. In her experience a leap like this happens rarely, and the last time is linked to Politecnico di Milano. That it happened again with Wibo is, for her, a sign of how significant the programme was.
Why Wibo
Why would Rosa Bava of Huawei Digital Power recommend a Wibo programme, and how does she describe it in three words?
Rosa Bava would recommend a Wibo programme starting from a principle the course itself taught her, the value and the duty of recognition.
For Rosa Bava, speaking openly about the benefits she received helps colleagues who could gain from them, and is part of every manager’s responsibility towards people and towards those who invested in the training.
Asked to sum up the experience in three adjectives, Rosa Bava chose universally applicable, effective and inspiring. Universally applicable, because it concerns the leader and, even before that, the person, and explains why we act and what we can do to improve our actions. Effective, because it offers practical, concrete techniques. Inspiring, because the more inspired a person is, the more motivated and happy they are to apply what they have learned.
