Case
Learning Experiences Design; Facilitation
Servdebt + Way Beyond: A partnership on two fronts
At Servdebt, we worked with leaders to reposition feedback as a genuine development practice, and with credit managers and lawyers to embark on a learning path based on emotional literacy and regulation.
The Role of Feedback in Leadership
With the aim of helping leaders integrate feedback as a regular practice, as conversations that contribute to the continuous development of their people, we facilitated three workshops on feedback for 55 Servdebt leaders.
Starting from the premise that "an organization is a network of conversations aimed at coordinating actions to achieve results," we worked on the distinction between discussion and dialogue, experimented with Bohmian dialogue practices, and created conditions for rich conversations by building trust and psychological safety.
Through practical exercises such as "Volleyball Feedback," participants experienced feedback not as something positive or negative, but as essential information for growth, balancing support and challenge in a constructive way.
The workshop culminated in the realization that when we fail to offer feedback, we are robbing the other person of part of their potential for development and improvement.
We debunk common myths about feedback
We have repositioned feedback as a collective learning practice: the intentional sharing of observations that are outside the person's field of awareness, offered with the genuine purpose of promoting development.
Some examples of myths are the ineffective "feedback sandwich" or the idea that giving feedback is a difficult conversation.
Discovering Emotions: emotional literacy and emotional regulation
On the second front of the partnership, the aim was to support credit managers and lawyers in developing knowledge that would increase their emotional literacy and improve their resilience and self-regulation skills in the context of their daily work.
Specifically, the challenge was to help these individuals manage more demanding conversations with greater confidence and effectiveness, applying strategies for better emotional regulation and self-regulation.
Identify and map emotions
We started by listening to people: we held focus groups in two locations, with two different groups, to understand what was already working and what needs emerged from people's daily lives.
From there, we designed a path that started with recognizing emotions and moved toward conscious emotional regulation in a professional context. The importance of mapping emotions was the starting point.
We worked on the key idea that emotions are messengers and that, when we listen to them, they become allies. We looked for predominant emotions and, curious, tried to find the best words to translate them.
Identify triggers
The next step was to look at how we all have emotional triggers that activate us and how there is an essential discovery to be made when we talk about emotional regulation: between emotion and behavior, there is a small space in between, which we must pay attention to, because it is from knowing what happens there that we can consciously choose the best response. For example, during the conversations we have.
From there, we moved on to emotions in conversation. Now, if all conversation takes place within an emotional state, if we don't speak based on what we say, but based on the emotional state we are in, then we need to learn to recognize where we say what we say (emotions and perceptions). We asked the groups to share and explore real cases from their daily work.
Finally, we also explored the emotional emergency kit together: concrete practices for emotional regulation such as breathing, naming it to tame it, distinguishing between facts and interpretations, and others that participants identified and shared.
What we found along the way
We felt that those present were attentive and willing to participate and share. There was openness to vulnerability and a clear understanding that this vulnerability was part of the process.
We see how much fun they have together, and how this can be an important indicator of a healthy work environment, where moments like these reinforce trust and create safe spaces for conversations that bring people closer together.
We achieved our goal of providing opportunities for sharing and reflection and helping people feel listened to and valued.
What remains is the web
, which opens as a continuation.
With these sessions, we believe we have helped people increase their emotional literacy, feeling more capable of: recognizing emotions, understanding what they are and what they are for, mapping the main stress triggers in the workplace, and identifying existing internal resources.
They also gained greater awareness of the importance of mutual assistance protocols in stressful situations and ways to strengthen bonds and trust with the team.
We also realized that people would have liked to leave with a more robust set of practical emotional regulation tools that could be immediately applied to their specific work context.
This is a clear opportunity for future work, a step in a longer journey of development and care for people, and with important lessons on how to further deepen the practical component in very specific business contexts.