How Selectra improved manager communication and feedback with the Wibo Leadership Academy

The client

Who Selectra is: a home utilities company with 150 employees in Italy

Selectra is a young company, founded in France in 2007 and operating in Italy since 2015. It works in home utilities, meaning electricity, gas and internet, and has 150 employees in Italy.

Selectra’s work is to help customers choose and activate a contract, making the process as painless as possible, especially the paperwork.

The programme is described by Chiara Rosati, HR Manager at Selectra.

The challenge

Why Selectra’s managers needed to improve communication and feedback

Selectra’s first challenge was communication. It covered internal communication, between teams and managers and across teams, and external communication, getting the company’s values across to the public. It also covered communicating oneself, because every Selectra manager has a different leadership style and needed to be highly aware of it to work well.

The second challenge was getting better at giving and receiving feedback. Most of Selectra’s managers were individual contributors who had grown up in the company and become managers at Selectra. Many were on their first long, structured training programme.

The programme

How Selectra chose the Wibo Leadership Academy: a cyclical programme with executives from large multinationals

Selectra chose the Wibo Leadership Academy because Selectra’s HR team found its structure appealing: it was designed carefully to accompany managers over time across all the main leadership topics.

Selectra liked that the programme was cyclical, meaning it came back several times over the months to the topics managers judged most important. The names of the Leadership Academy’s executives, all in senior roles at large multinational brands, also weighed on the decision.

The impact

What changed at Selectra after the Leadership Academy: more awareness of the role and better communication

At Selectra, managers’ awareness of their role grew. As a result, their communication improved too, among themselves and within their teams.

Selectra’s participants greatly valued the chance to meet some of Italy’s top executives, for two reasons. They could learn from the executives’ mistakes, since the executives had been through all the difficulties a manager meets, and they could draw inspiration from their success stories.

Hearing real stories of failure and success gave Selectra’s managers strong motivation.