THE WHY WAY FOR COMPANIESThe Why Way Academy:
Leading by Heart
Managing others well means, first, managing yourself well.
It’s not about being in the world. It’s about being with the world—with other people. And those partnerships are sustained by listening, caring and using the imagination—all characteristics of good leadership.
Our Offer
A robust selection of courses, seminars, workshops, and inspirational interventions designed to benefit managers and the corporate cultures they lead.
Inspiration
Nurturing awareness & creativity in leadership:
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Our Inspirational Interventions stimulate thought around managerial themes drawing inspiration from diverse perspectives, humanistic culture, science, art, and managerial literature. The lessons can be brief inspirational cycles of a half hour or longer. They’re given in person, sometimes with the performative involvement of artists, live on-line or by podcast.
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Our dialogs involve meetings with members of the cultural community from diverse humanistic, scientific, and artistic disciplines with the goal of transforming ideas and cues into stimuli and ideas for managerial development. Over the years we have involved the brightest personalities on the Italian and international scene. The dialogues start from macro themes which are then fine-tuned according to the client's priorities.
Re-education
Fine-tuning leadership techniques:
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Managing Emotions
Custom-designed education combining courses, workshops and/or interactive webinars which interweave classic educational instruction with exercises, laboratories and dialog on the subject of “Empathetic Leadership: Managing Emotions”.
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Group dialog sessions, for same level or mixed-level participants, for learning to conduct quality exchange and group discussion that develops low-conflict, high-creativity, generative collective thinking. Starting with the rules of Philo School supportive communication and the inclusive communication guidelines of physicist David Bohm and psychologist Marshall Rosenberg, we’ve developed a flexible method that adapts to the unique situations and diverse personality mixes of each group.
The fundamentals are:
1. The statements and ideas of others are welcomed as expressions of their self and beliefs.
2. The dialogue is not a competition between my truth and other’s truth but a chance to include both.
3. Listening to others is open, which means it tends to suspend any substitutive interpretation of the type "What I heard is just a cover for something else."
4. The contribution and feedback from the listener tend to be expressed as an neutral offering, which means the possibility that a different perspective may uncover other aspects of what we have said, and these other aspects can be freely considered or overlooked by the discussant.
5. The temptation of destructiveness in confrontational refutation must be suspended and reexamined in silence.
6. We have always the power to listen without judging.
Transformation
Becoming Captains of Change:
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Working on managerial behaviors, mental attitudes and styles of leadership, we help managers become aware of the impact they have – and can have—in their work environments through words and actions. Managerial styles can have a direct impact on a company’s ability to survive change and needs constant fine-tuning.
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Our Change & Development Courses are realized over time and combine classroom time with labs, individual exercises and working in teams. They’re designed to attune people to the changes that are necessary in a period of rapid evolution marked by continual unpredictability and turbulent market conditions.
Our approach is always tailored to the needs & starts with in-depth conversation.
Our methodology
SUPPORTING CHANGE
We use (CSI) Corporate Social Innovation®, a method that supports businesses as they undertake collaborative journeys of innovation and change by alternating periods of inspiration and group planning.
INSTRUCTION
We enrich classic classroom experiences by combining them with individual and group exercises, which may include creative and performance-based workshops that make use of artistic and musical stimuli.
ARTS AT WORK
We practice an approach of unifying groups, with the Arts as a means of sparking discussion and shared vision. We harness the Arts’ power to catalyze rich emotional exchange, engage, entertain and prompt reflection.
Consultancy approach
LISTENING
Transformation can’t happen without listening, which means being able to ask the right questions and stay receptive to the needs, history and vision of the client with a clear mind, free of preconceived solutions. In this way, we create a new space that helps both us and our clients to more deeply understand the road to follow. The relationship grows out of mutual listening.
STUDYING
Our philosophical, artistic and scientific training leads us to draw on content, experiences, stories and reflections that uniquely influence the questions we ask ourselves and the solutions we find when designing truly impactful paths for learning and transformation. After more than 20 years of consultancy, we never stop studying, never stop enriching the experience we share.
CONNECTING DOTS
What’s special about our approach? Alchemy. We blend culture and management, theoretical studies and professional reality, scientific method and poetic vision to unique effect. Taken together, and handled with open-minded care, tremendous tools for discovering those new and promising possibilities that often hide in plain sight, waiting to be uncovered.
“You don’t have to be a manager to lead by heart, but to be a manager today, it’s vital to understand what it means to take care of yourself and others.”
—Valeria Cantoni Mamiani