BELONG To People

It's like hurdles that make you bring out your best

• CHALLENGE
• GROWTH
• BELONGING

The wish to grow and, at the same time, the fear of resting on her laurels, carrying out a routine work that slowly makes ambitions fade away and be thwarted. In summer 2004, after graduating in Business Administration, Claudia Sammaritani had already figured out what would be the rhythm of her future career. A long, passionate hurdles that, from the start to the finish line, required dedication, training and strong goodwill every day. However, Teddy did not seem to be one of companies she wished to work for, maybe for that feeling of defiance that drives you to take preconceived decisions and dismiss clearly beaten tracks looking too easy.  “It seemed to me too easy”, says Claudia. “In Rimini area everybody works at Teddy and I wanted something more, something different”. However, summer went by quickly and so September and October. Claudia was not able to find her ideal destination, so in November she decided to put away her unconventional thinking and sent her CV to Teddy. In a matter of days, she received a call with a job offer that removed any doubt or uncertainty. “Monja Pasolini called me, she is the current head project advisor for the company of Titantex corporate group”, remembers Claudia with a little bit of emotion, “to talk about a job offer she said could sound a bit ‘weird’”. The role was about mapping processes within the company. As a fresh graduate it was not something weird to me because it was a subject I knew and loved”.  

So, in November 2004 Claudia joined Titantex, the company that at that time was Teddy parent company. Since the very first days Claudia understood that it was the right choice. She found a stimulating working environment where you truly need to run and face challenges and obstacles to jump over every day. In her case, her job was to spread the culture of a process-driven way of working. A subject very dear to Vittorio Tadei, who had understood the importance of this particular aspect of business management. Having everyone be in the conditions of experiencing their own job with a wider vision that can take into account of all the steps in the production and distribution chain and not just of one’s own single task. “It was an exciting job that allowed me to understand first-hand what being entrepreneur of yourself means. Even though I was the newcomer I felt free to suggest my ideas and even to make mistakes. I felt people had full confidence in me. Just think that, after a few months I had been hired, I was sent to New York with a senior colleague to carry out some checks in a store we had. Could you wish more than that?”.

Claudia has been working at Teddy for almost 20 years and it would be easy to think that sometimes routine might have prevailed.  However, you would be wrong. And she herself highlights it. “At Teddy I truly feel at home and I believe it is the right place for me because I am constantly recalled to reinvent myself, to make use of all my resources and my initiative, launching myself even into projects that maybe I would have never chosen”. After years spent mapping processes, during which many things happened -  she married and had two daughters - Claudia joined the Communication & People Care team to serve as a project manager.  She is in charge of managing company organization charts in a correct way, aligning roles, people and organization structures. Furthermore, in the latest years she has also been working in a human resources project aimed at the organization of development courses targeting employees. “At the beginning I had some doubts because I have a business education, so just to say I do love working with figures and carrying out analyses. On the HR side I felt less confident though. However, I had to change my mind and today I am happy and truly satisfied with the choice made. Every year we come in contact with 80 people for the assessment of 900 employees and each assessment always requires to be individually checked. There is no way of getting bored”. Life played a nice trick on Claudia: in the end the company she wanted to ignore and did not want to consider as a workplace has become a drive for her human and professional growth, the mainspring that always makes her go a little further, even in work situations she would have never imagined to experience.