All our people share the same vision and same values: confidentiality, neutrality, impartiality, respect for human diversity and trust in the capacity of all people to achieve self-development.
The name of our company was developed with those values in mind, through the fusion of the two Portuguese words
“convir” and
“gente”.
“Convir” means:
“To acknowledge a fact as real, to accept, to admit, to agree upon”, “To agree with somebody else’s interests” and
”To be adapted to someone’s nature or characteristics”. The main meanings of
“gente” are:
“Human being, person”, “An undefined and indiscriminate set of people”, but also a
“Set of people who have common characteristics”. The association of the two words is thus a symbol of a key reality: to
collaborate in the corporate world, people have to
acknowledge that they are
different but with a
common business objective. When confronted with a difficult cooperation situation, our natural reflexes bring us to forget those common objectives and get into a destructive mode, with all associated
costs.
Why is it more important now than ever to better manage collaboration?
First of all, because in the deep economic crisis that we are living, organizations have to improve their
risk management and have to
better control costs.
Second of all, because we live in an
interconnected world, where every one of us has the right and the possibility to express his/her creativity by a click of a mouse through social networks, blogs and soon-to-come other inventions. Business managers have to adapt themselves to the fact that in the corporate world, “human resources” are first of all human people who expect
to have a freedom of spirit and expression at least equal to the one they can have in their personal lives. We are deeply convinced that to survive to globalization, “managers 2.0”
have to:
- Reduce fear and increase trust: mistrust demoralizing and fear paralyses;
- Reinvent the means of control: traditional control systems ensure high levels of compliance but do so at the expense of employee creativity, entrepreneurship and engagement. We need to rely more on peer review and less on top-down supervision;
- Expand and exploit diversity: we must value disagreement and divergence at least as highly as we do conformance, consensus and cohesion;
- Empower the renegades and disarm the reactionaries: sitting monarchs don’t usually lead revolutions.