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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BUSINESS BOOK AWARDS 2022
Uncover the secret to achieving peak mental performance in the ground-breaking new book, The Hidden Edge: Why Mental Fitness is the Only Advantage That Matters in Business
Join eminent leadership and team development expert, Jodie Rogers on an inspiring and insightful journey into managing the most important asset of all – the human mind.
Packed full of engaging stories and fascinating real-world case studies, The Hidden Edge: Why Mental Fitness is the Only Advantage That Matters in Business, applies key psychological concepts to the modern business world. If we want businesses that are agile and adaptable to change, we first need people who are. Jodie will teach you how to leverage perspective, mindset, values and emotions to master your mental fitness and thus improve business performance. A business case is even laid out within the book showing exactly how enhanced mental fitness can positively impact the bottom line of your business.
This book not only has the power to improve your own life, but shares resources you can use with your teams to develop an engaged, resilient and more productive workforce.
The Hidden Edge: Why Mental Fitness is the Only Advantage That Matters in Business employs simple yet powerful exercises, tools and techniques you can implement each day to:
- Regulate your thoughts, emotions and feelings to stay calm and in control during stressful situations.
- Understand how values and beliefs influence decision making (both at the individual & team level) and how to leverage them for performance
- Cultivate the resilience required to navigate setbacks and change
- Develop the mental agility necessary for an ever-changing workplace
If you are a forward-thinking business leader, HR professional, or anyone looking to accelerate growth, enable change and improve adaptability in your organisation, The Hidden Edge: Why Mental Fitness is the Only Advantage That Matters in Business is the perfect guide.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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Table of Contents
COVER
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
PREFACE
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
INTRODUCTION
Part One: Leadership and the Hidden Edge
1 Under the Skin of Leaders and Their Teams
What is Mental Fitness?
If Mental Fitness is ‘the Hidden Edge’ of Business, How Can It Be Harnessed?
Notes
2 The Business Case for Investing in Mental Fitness
Mental Health: The Magnitude of the Problem
The Tip of the Iceberg
The Cost of Doing Nothing (or Not Doing Enough)
The Benefits of Taking Action: The Bottom Line
The Benefits of Taking Action: A Mentally Fit Workforce
Notes
3 The Future of Fit Businesses
Part Two: The Power of Meaning and Emotions
4 Perception: Do You See What I See?
The Science of Vision
Changing Perception: The Ladder of Inference
Notes
5 The Stories We Tell Ourselves
Note
6 Everything Is Connected
Our Thoughts Affect Our Feelings
Our Feelings Affect Our Thoughts
Both Our Feelings and Our Emotions Affect Our Behavior, and Vice Versa
The Present
The Past
7 Emotion and Decision Making
Understanding That Our Emotions Matter
Have You Ever Been ‘Hangry’?
Applying Learnings to Your Life
Notes
Part Three: Owning Our Thinking
8 Navigating Thinking Traps
Identifying ‘Thinking Traps’
The Committee
Positive Thinking and Interpretation
Note
9 Fear Response and Neuroplasticity
How Heavy Is Your Glass?
Note
Part Four: Limiting and Empowering Beliefs
10 The ‘Rules’ We Should Be Breaking
Why Do We Form Limiting Beliefs?
Beliefs and Teams
Spotting Limiting Beliefs
How Does Our Focus Reinforce Our Beliefs?
11 How to Reframe Limiting Beliefs
Reframing Technique
Part Five: Values: Principles We Live By
12 Values and Decision Making
How Do Our Values and Beliefs Differ?
13 Uncovering Your Values
Uncovering Your Values
14 Using Values to Navigate Conflict
Using Values for Decision Making
Part Six: Stress and Performance
15 Stress and Control
Changing Our Relationship with Stress
Explaining the Matrix
16 Overcoming the Amygdala Hijack
Four Ways to Take Back Your Amygdala
Note
17 Flow Versus Frazzle
How to Tackle Disengagement
What Happens During ‘Frazzle’?
What Happens When We're in ‘Flow’?
Managing Stress: In the Moment
Managing Stress: At Work
Managing Stress: At Home
Notes
MENTAL FITNESS IN PRACTICE
Unilever: A Case Study
CONCLUSION
This Is Just the Beginning …
INDEX
END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT
List of Tables
Chapter 2
Table 2.1 Global statistics on the scale of mental health illness.
Table 2.2 UK statistics on the scale of mental health illness and work-related s...
Table 2.3 Return on investment: mental health and well-being programmes.
List of Illustrations
Chapter 1
Figure 1.1 The Mental Fitness Spectrum.
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1 Factors affecting business performance.
Figure 2.2 Benefits to having engaged employees.
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1 Young woman/old woman.
Figure 4.2 What do you see?
Figure 4.3 Can you see the cow?
Figure 4.4 What's the emotion?
Figure 4.5 Emotion word map.
Figure 4.6 The Ladder of Inference.
Figure 4.7 Example of the ladder of inference.
Figure 4.8 How we climb the ladder.
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1 Fact to fantasy.
Figure 5.2
.
Chapter 6
Figure 6.1 Internal impacts.
Chapter 8
Figure 8.1 Common thinking traps.
Figure 8.2 Recognising your Committee.
Chapter 9
Figure 9.1 Neuroplasticity explained.
Chapter 10
Figure 10.1 How to spot a limiting belief.
Figure 10.2 The Reticular Activating System (RAS).
Chapter 11
Figure 11.1 Reframing your thinking.
Chapter 12
Figure 12.1 Aspirational versus non-aspirational values.
Figure 12.2 Recognising incongruence.
Chapter 15
Figure 15.1 Mapping your stressors.
Chapter 16
Figure 16.1 Amygdala hijack.
Chapter 17
Figure 17.1 The Yerkes–Dodson curve.
Figure 17.2 Stress response.
Figure 17.3 How stress affects the heart.
Guide
Cover Page
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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The Hidden Edge
Why Mental Fitness is the Only Advantage That Matters in Business
Jodie Rogers
This edition first published 2021.
© 2021 by Jodie Rogers
This work was produced in collaboration with Write Business Results Limited. For more information on Write Business Results' business book, blog, and podcast services, please visit their website: www.writebusinessresults.com, email us on info@ writebusinessresults.com or call us on 020 3752 7057.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is Available:
ISBN 9781119807735 (hardback)ISBN 9781119807759 (ebk)ISBN 9781119807742 (epub)
Cover Design: Wiley
For my dad,
Peter Matthew Rogers:
May your soul and spirit fly into the mystic
PREFACE
This book is the product of working inside and alongside businesses for the last 20 years. But it's not just my career experience that I've poured into the book, it's also my personal experience. I've seen what a lack of ‘mental fitness’ and even basic mental health can do to people. I grew up in a small fishing village in the north of Ireland where thinking about your thoughts, emotions, or behaviours was not a done thing (still isn't). I was a teenager during ‘the troubles’ where bombs and shootings were a routine part of life. Self-actualising, or any form of personal or professional development, was not generally on the top of people's lists, nor was mental and emotional well-being. But people fought, they believed that more was possible, that what you had wasn't all that there was. There was always hope.
My childhood was idyllic. My two brothers and I spent our days outside exploring, climbing trees, swimming in the sea, building makeshift huts, plotting against imaginary foes, inventing submarines, and flying go-karts. Yet, at the age of 11, I distinctly remember my twin brother, Johnny, slipping into a form of childhood depression which lasted for a year or so. There were many potentially contributing factors; reflecting on it today he believes it was because academically he was a square block being forced into a round hole. It was also the first year we had ever been separated (as I went to an all-girls secondary school at 11). The teacher who told him he was ‘only good enough to build walls in the mountains’ didn't help either. Small and not so small things can have a disproportionate impact on our life. One single comment can impact our belief in our capabilities and subsequently our performance, if we let it. But it was my parents' firm belief in him and his own inner resolve that saw him through that period.
My mum and our older brother Naithin were determined to find him something practical to focus on (none of us are what you would call ‘natural academics’). Naithin discovered a film and photography course and, even though it was miles away, my mum drove Johnny there every day. It was this course that gave him a glimmer of hope, a chance to do something practical instead of theoretical like most of what is offered in academia. He flourished. Today he is one of the most successful people I know. He's a wildlife cameraman and has travelled the four corners of the world, working on natural history documentaries like One Strange Rock, Earth's Natural Wonders, and Blue Planet for the BBC, National Geographic, Discovery, Netflix, and Apple TV. You name it, he's done it. He could have easily fallen through the cracks. Many of my friends and family (including myself) have experienced a mental or emotional challenge at some point in our lives, one that has had an impact on how we show up in life and work. You have too.
How do I know? Because you have a mind, and you know very little about it. Besides, if you met someone who told you they had never ever had any form of physical illness in their life, not even a cold, would you believe them? Of course not. It's the same for our emotional and mental well-being. But I don't want to focus on how and where things go wrong. I want to focus on how and where we can set ourselves up for success.
I've spent much of my life in despair at how little is done to enhance, strengthen, and leverage our inner resources, and how little is even known by the general public about our ‘inner game’. I'm on a mission to change that, because the knowledge, the exercises, and the tools all exist. They are just not easily accessible or packaged in a way that is engaging, practical and, dare I say it, enjoyable!
That changes with this book.
My business, Symbia (www.symbiapartners.com), has been working in this space for the last decade. We work with senior leaders and their teams at Unilever, Coca-Cola, L'Oréal, Mondelez, and many more. Our company vision is to positively impact the lives of one million people in the next 3yrs, and we are on track to achieve that. Everything we do is based on the belief that there is untapped potential in everyone. We are our own brakes and our own accelerators. I've spent years shaking and waking people up to their limiting beliefs, the thinking traps in their minds, the emotional patterns playing out in their lives. If we only knew a fraction as much about our minds as we do about our washing machines, we'd be laughing!
In this book, I've sought to curate and blend a number of schools of thought from neuropsychology, behavioural economics, emotional and social intelligence, positive psychology, and so on. I've packaged it in an ‘easy-to-grasp’ way and brought it to life with real-life case studies, data, anecdotes, and stories from my life and my work. My career began in qualitative and quantitative research; as such, I've interviewed tens of thousands of people over the last 20 years. Every project we work on for our clients starts with a diagnostic phase. Therefore, we have gathered a lot of insight and can see the macro patterns and trends playing out in the companies we work with. I've weaved that insight into the book so you can see how the viewpoints are validated.
It's worth saying though, that I'm not coming to you as an expert, I'm here as a fellow human. I'm championing Mental Fitness because I truly believe in it, because I've had to practise it and rely on it as a way of life. Like you, I'm not immune to life's challenges; life throws us all curveballs, no one can change that. It's how we respond to them that matters.
I've had a pretty good life: the daughter of art teachers, a decent education, and an idyllic childhood: the sea outside my front door, mountains outside my back door. I've travelled the world for adventure and for work. There have been ups and downs, but nothing like 2020.
Like most, my business was affected. Clients postponed workshops, cancelled team sessions, or just completely disappeared as they dealt with the impact of COVID-19. I had a team to support in a time of crisis. My husband's business and income vanished overnight. We live in Spain, so we were in an extreme lockdown situation; no daily exercise for us. There were helicopters in the sky and police patrolling the streets (which reminded me of Belfast in the old days). My two-year-old and four-and-a-half-year-old were not allowed outside of our apartment walls for 45 days. Trying to run a business with two little people with intense cabin fever was enough to impact anyone's stress levels and performance.
But the hardest part of 2020 wasn't any of this.
In January, my dad was diagnosed with cancer. He passed away in May, when we were all still in lockdown. I couldn't get back to Ireland to see him. If he had passed away at any other moment in his 73 years of life I would have been by his side.
2020 kicked my ass, but I kicked its ass back.
What happens to us rarely kills us; it's the story we tell ourselves about what happens that takes us down.
It's easy to stay focused on the ‘car crash’; we're designed that way.
The negativity bias insists we pay attention to the negative things because they could be threats to our survival. We therefore need to consciously make an effort to see the positive things that are in plain sight.
This year, I could get lost in the negative story – if I shared it, people would sympathise – but it doesn't serve me. Although my business was affected by the pandemic, we have bounced back, our team has doubled, and we've brought on five more major corporate clients. The crisis gave us laser focus. We're busier than ever (businesses are finally realising the importance of mental fitness in playing the long game). My goal for the year was to travel less, move some of my business online, and spend more time with my kids. I didn't want a pandemic to deliver it, but mission accomplished all the same. I've also finally birthed the book that has been inside of me for the last seven years – there's a lot to be proud of, yet it's easily missed.
So, my mission with this book is for you to take away one key insight, exercise, anecdote, or tool that will positively affect your life – although I'm confident you'll take away much more than one. With everything that I share I've also shown how to apply it to teams because this is the work myself and my team do every day at Symbia.
I truly believe that we all have untapped potential within us. When we work on and enhance our ‘mental fitness’, we unlock possibilities in ourselves and in our teams that we didn't know were there.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you to my family and friends and everyone who contributed to this book and to the friends, colleagues, and clients who let me brainstorm and experiment with them. A special thank you to everyone who took part in my interviews: Tim Munden, Marcus Hunt, Nathalie Slechte, Dr David Wilkinson, Shawn Conway, Mathew McCarthy, and Aldo Kane, and our financial services clients, who all provided excellent insight on the topic of mental fitness in business and in life, bringing new voices and different perspectives to the book.
Tim Munden, you deserve mentioning twice. I'm immensely grateful for the work you are driving on the inner game in Unilever. Thank you for trusting me and my company Symbia as a partner on this important journey. I am extremely grateful to Stan Sthanunathan and Gemma Bumpstead of Unilever who were pioneers in bringing mental fitness into the Consumer & Market Insights (CMI) function and honoured us with permission to include the case study at the back of this book.
A special thank you to Ann Suvarnapunya for creating all the images for the book and being heavily involved in all of our Mental Fitness offerings at Symbia. Also, thank you to Suzy Hegg, whose brilliantly analytical brain was a great support when creating the Mental Fitness business case.
To friends, colleagues, and clients of Symbia who have trusted us with their leaders and teams around the world, we thank you for the partnership and the opportunity to have a positive impact on your people.
Gratitude to Georgia Kirke and Kat Lewis, who have skilfully navigated the minefield of mental fitness and expertly helped shape it into the book it is today.
Many thanks to Annie Knight and all of the Wiley team who helped turn a major life and business goal into a reality.
Last, but always first, to my husband, Johnny Nunes, and our two boys, Theo and Finn. How you created space for me to write this book during a global pandemic is a mystery, but I am eternally grateful for your never-ending support. You always said you were my number one believer – I know that's the truth because I've felt it every step of the way. To infinity and beyond ;-)
INTRODUCTION
The book's title, The Hidden Edge, Why Mental Fitness is the Only Advantage That Matters in Business, is deliberately provocative. I felt it was important to ignite debate. Too often we just default to external factors being prioritised in business, budget, business plans, investment, market dynamics, and so on. These matter – of course they do – but they are not as important as the people who sit behind them. If we want businesses that are agile and adaptable to change, we first need people who are. Flexible business models are meaningless if we don't also have agile mindsets and behaviours. Your people are your business's most important asset. If we want resilient businesses, we must build resilient teams, and to do this we need to empower them with the knowledge and tools to understand and leverage their most important asset – their minds. This book is the first step.
When athletes are training, they know that success is dependent upon more than just their physical performance – their mindset, i.e. staying focused, motivated, and confident, has a critical role to play. This is often referred to as their ‘mental game’ or ‘inner game’.
We all have an inner game. It refers to everything that goes on in our minds: our thinking patterns, our emotional regulation, beliefs, mindset, and so on. It's a combination of these factors that drives our decisions and influences the outcomes in our lives.
Much like physical fitness, the strength of our inner game – our ‘mental fitness’ – varies throughout our lives and is equally something we have to work at.
Just as we exercise our muscles to become stronger, through focus and practice we can modify and strengthen our mindset and thinking style to help us bounce back from the setbacks and challenges that come our way. In business, the level of mental fitness in the individuals who make up your organisation is your business's ‘hidden edge’. In other words, mental fitness is a competitive advantage in business.
Negative thinking patterns play a significant role in depression and anxiety. If we make no attempt to work on them, our ability to self-regulate diminishes, our emotional resilience becomes fragile, and, overall, our mental fitness suffers. Whether we are talking at the level of organisations, teams or the individuals within them, when ‘mental fitness’ suffers, so does performance.
It's important not to weaken our mental fitness but, equally, we need to be putting in effort to enhance it. Being more aware of our thinking style – and using techniques to avoid thinking traps and manage self-limiting beliefs – gives us more control over how we respond to the events and situations in our lives.
Our minds are our most important asset. But do we take time to look after them? Have you ever stopped to notice your thought patterns? Are you aware of the effect they're having on your life?
The ways we think about ourselves or the world can help us or get in our way, support or harm our health, enable or inhibit our success at work and in our relationships. Our inner game can play for us or against us – it can hold us back or propel us forward. So, the question is: Have you mentally set yourself up for success? Are you and your team ‘mentally fit’ and prepared for the challenges ahead?
If you can master your thinking and your mindset, you can release confidence and potential within your employees that they didn't even know was there. It's this that will amplify their personal presence and impact both in life and in work. It is this that will keep them flexible and creative in the face of uncertainty.
The challenge is that most of us have not been taught this. The education system doesn't have it as a topic on the curriculum. Unless you are working in the field, have a natural curiosity for the topic or have found yourself in therapy at some point, it's unlikely that you have come across both the knowledge and the tools necessary to navigate and influence your cognitive and emotional experience of the world.
This is why it's such an important topic. People aren't naturally learning about it, and there's no mandatory reading, which seems ridiculous when you think about it because there absolutely should be!
And this lack of understanding shows up in companies of all sizes, industries, and locations all around the world. I've worked with leaders and their teams in countries on every continent across the globe over the course of the last decade. I've helped companies in industries from fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) to aviation, finance to telecommunications, entertainment to marketing, supply chain, R&D functions, and many more. I've worked up and down the food chain with everyone from interns to CEOs. Irrespective of the many variables that set one company apart from another, I have observed the same set of blind spots in all of them when it comes to mental fitness.
The first is that leaders come to me with a multitude of culture- and business-related goals and challenges that they think they need help addressing, but they are not usually the ones that really do need addressing. Companies do not always diagnose their issues correctly to begin with before settling on a solution, and so, the wrong things repeatedly get addressed. Or at least, the real issues are not being tackled and therefore continue to fester.
For example, leaders will often say of their organisational challenges:
‘We need to increase productivity!’
‘We need to refresh our strategy.’
‘We need to define roles and responsibilities.’
‘We have to create a “ways of working” manifesto,’ and so on.
Indeed, these may be the outcomes they seek, and they are possible to achieve, but they are not enough on their own to ensure ongoing productivity, happiness, and creativity from everyone throughout the organisation at every level. Because they are all tangible and visible, whereas we need to equally explore what lies underneath these. What beliefs, values, and mindsets are within the people working towards the business goals? If I were to take every brief of this nature at face value, I could deliver exactly to such expectations as the ones listed above, and the clients would be happy upon delivery, but their challenges wouldn't be resolved.
Here are the four fundamental reasons why:
The person who perceives the team's challenges and has the authority to act on them and do something about them is usually a leader. By the very nature of their position, they don't fully know what is actually happening ‘on the floor’. It's much like when parents of teenagers don't have the full picture (and I'm not saying company executives are like teenagers). It's simply human nature to shield details from those in authority.
By focusing on the assumed best solution – for example, the new strategy, organisational chart, roles, and responsibilities – there is an underlying assumption that the ‘problem’ presented is the right one to be solving.
Briefs for change created by leaders, usually, unwittingly, work on the ‘symptom’ level and rarely seek to uncover the ‘cause’, because the symptoms are confused
as being
the cause.
In the fast-paced world that we work in, results and outcomes are favoured over process. This means that the time in the journey from current Point A to desired Point B is crunched to accelerate outcomes. Because of this, the outcomes are diluted and often superficial. I find that the more energy and focus are invested in the ‘how’ (the journey from uncovering the underlying cause to introducing solutions), the better, more impactful, and longer lasting the results, every time.
Team and company leaders' perceived challenges are valid. They are very valuable indeed. But they must be considered as just one input. Other valid perspectives on the real issues with teams and culture also include those of each member of the board, leadership team, wider team and people who work with the team.
Only with that complete bigger picture and a view of the teams ‘inner game’ can you start to build a view of the mental fitness levels within your company, separate symptoms from cause, and know where to focus your energy. You can then point at core problems, reframe them and do the work to really know which challenges need to be solved first. More often than not, core problems are not always immediately visible, because they are at a mindset level. Therefore, seeking to work on both the visible and invisible obstacles to performance can be a game changer for any team.
Mental fitness is grounded in emotional and social intelligence, and it's this insight that then prepares us to embrace change, be resilient in the face of setbacks, and effectively manage emotions, ambitions, and behaviour. It's a journey, one of self-discovery and awareness, and one which can (and does) take years.
In the following chapters, I seek to show you how and why this insight matters. I will demonstrate how small but significant changes to your perception, thinking, and mindset can make a difference to how you experience, and subsequently show up in, life and business. My intention is to demystify the workings of the mind by sharing some basic neuroscience and behavioural psychology and showing you how to use this knowledge to unlock behavioural change within yourself and your teams.
I encourage you to read this book with yourself in mind first; play with the subject matter and complete the exercises for yourself. In doing so, you'll see the power that small tweaks to your perception, thinking, and belief systems have to completely change your experience of life. Once you've experienced this insight first-hand, take it to your teams and to your organisation. I have a number of ways I can support you in this, which you can find at www.symbiapartners.com.
A word of caution though: the temptation is to think ‘I know this’, and it's true that there's a chance you will have come across some of the thinking I'm going to share with you in different ways at different times. But here's the thing: are you actively using this knowledge to help you manage the stresses and pressures of business and work life? Have you applied the understanding to help you navigate conflict? Is it being leveraged to enhance confidence? Are you using it to help yourself out of ‘thinking traps’ and self-criticism? Are you applying it to get the best out of your teams? Are you actively using your values to make decisions that are both right for you and for your business? Knowing (or simply having heard something before) is not enough. Changing your behaviour because of what you know, is.
Most boards consider any topics related to our inner world (emotional, social, mental) the ‘soft skills’ that are distracting from what really matters – business metrics and results. But it is the wise and empathetic leaders who know that these skills are the real skills that matter. Empowering your people to leverage their most important asset, their own minds, is fundamentally the best investment any company can make.
If you told me you'd read 500 books about how to fly a plane, I still wouldn't get in a plane with you in the cockpit. The mistake many of us make is that we stop at knowing. This book is designed to encourage application.
As a result, I have made sure to include a variety of exercises throughout the book. These have all been trialled and tested in our workshops over the past decade, so I know them to be effective. You can also access further electronic resources here: www.symbiapartners.com/mentalfitnessresources.
I don't want this book to be a complete workbook, but I do want you to begin applying what you're learning as you're reading. This book, however, doesn't sit alone. It supports my Mental Fitness live workshops (which I've been running in corporate organisations since 2016), my interactive webinars (for a variety of clients including Coca-Cola, Peet's Coffee, and L'Oréal), and my successful Mental Fitness online course, which (in various bespoke versions) has already been implemented with great success in Unilever, Jacobs Douwe Egberts, and a prominent global bank – so you're in good company. If you want to learn more about this work, you can visit www.symbiapartners.com.
But for now, settle in, suspend your assumptions, biases, and beliefs, open your mind, and be willing to think differently.
For most people to have their wellbeing enhanced, they want support when they need it. This is why, in successful organisations, I've seen wellbeing moved from being a token about having medical insurance or gym membership to being truly practical: what can I receive today to make my job easier? What allows me to perform better? What allows me to switch off so I can have family time? When your company gives you the resources that actually help you be better, that's what makes the difference.
– Marcus Hunt, Head of Global Health Services, EMEA, Johnson & Johnson
Part OneLeadership and the Hidden Edge
In this first part of the book, I'll explain exactly what mental fitness is and how it is different from mental health and mental wellness. Mental fitness is very much focused on strengthening and enhancing our inner game for performance, and anyone can practice it.
We're also going to dive into the details of the cost of failing to do work in this space, as well as the benefit to individuals, businesses, and society if we invest time, energy, and money in empowering people with the knowledge and practice to work on their mental fitness.
Having spent the last 20 years working in and with businesses all over the world, I know that the best way to make a case with a leader is on business terms, which is why I've spent time building a business case for investing in mental fitness, which you'll find in Chapter 2. A more comprehensive version is available for download at www.symbiapartners.com/mentalfitnessresources. We've also gone beyond the conceptual and provided a real-life case study of what happened when 300 people within Unilever went through our programme. This case study appears at the back of the book.
This has been designed for anybody who wants to present the business case in their company. We've done the work for you; please do take it and use it. It will allow you to highlight why it's fundamentally important to invest in the minds and hearts of the people in your organisation. You have to remember that your people are your biggest assets, but within them their minds and their hearts are their biggest assets. These are largely untapped inner resources which represent a competitive edge for your business.
In Chapter 3, I paint a picture of what the world would be like if we all took the time to invest in our mental fitness, and how that would impact decision making, clarity, focus, and performance under stress.
1Under the Skin of Leaders and Their Teams
Companies of all shapes and sizes have comprehensive and varied strategic plans, a multitude of business objectives across markets and sometimes industries – enough to keep the most efficient and driven executives continuously busy.
But if you were to distil the objectives of most global companies (decent companies with ethics, anyway) into just two areas, they would simply be:
To drive revenue, profit, and growth
To look after their people
In times of crises or uncertainty, these goals become even sharper. In times of stability and calm, they are in cohesion with each other. Unfortunately, in times of challenge, they are often in tension, if not in direct conflict, with each other. They become a paradox that leaders need to navigate, a polarity to be managed.
During the years that followed the economic crisis of 2008, when many companies were facing business challenges, and of course during the global pandemic of 2020, leaders expressed deep concern for their teams and guilt about the things they were being asked to deal with.
The pressure to recover revenue or ‘recession-proof’ a business inevitably has a personal impact on the workforce. No matter which way we cut it, we often unconsciously forgo our well-being in the pursuit of revenue. In times of challenge, an urgency and intensity builds up around scenario planning, rewriting strategy, data crunching, and forecasting endlessly in an attempt to predict an unpredictable future.
During the lockdown of 2020, one corporate leader told me, ‘I can't wait to go back to the office so I can work less.’ It was said in jest, but, like all good jokes, relies on some truth to be funny. This didn't come from a lazy person or a procrastinator. In fact, it came from a senior leader who was working around the clock and close to burnout.
I understand it. When Europe started locking down due to COVID-19, I had several conversations with leaders on what they were about to face. Looking after their people while mitigating revenue loss had become the paradoxical challenge at the forefront of their minds. As we continue to face into and plan for an uncertain world, this challenge needs to be managed skilfully and thoughtfully.
In an article by Sheryl Sandberg (COO, Facebook) and Rachel Thomas (Co-Founder, Lean In), published during the height of the first COVID-19 lockdown in May 2020, they said:
Only 40% of employees say their companies have taken steps to increase flexibility since the pandemic began, and fewer than 20% say their employer has rejiggered priorities or narrowed the scope of their work. That's not enough. Leaders and managers should move any deadline that can be moved, take a second look at targets set before the pandemic, rethink the timing of performance reviews, and remove low-priority items from the to-do list.1
But the truth is, the deadlines that can't be moved, the targets that can't be adjusted, and the ever-growing to-do lists are part of the stark reality that teams and business will be dealing with for the foreseeable future as we move into a faster-moving future and an increasingly unpredictable world.
So, while as leaders we may not have much control over deadlines and targets, what we DO have control over is how we can help our teams respond to and take on such gargantuan challenges.
And it's not just for times of heightened uncertainty like an economic crisis or a pandemic. The reality is that adaptability is one of the most important skills of the future. Actually, it always has been. As Charles Darwin pointed out, it's not the strongest species that survive but those most adaptable and responsive to change. That includes us humans, too.
Change used to take a long time to fully occur, certainly regarding how humans have lived on Earth. We were hunter-gatherers for several million years. We then moved to an agricultural way of life which lasted 12 000 years. The Industrial Age lasted only 100 years, and now we find ourselves in the Information Age, which has only been underway for a few decades, and several consultancies (including Deloitte and Boston Consulting Group) are already predicting the ‘future of work’, also known as the ‘Augmented Age’, could be upon us in less than 10 years.
The world and its workforce are changing at the fastest rate in history and will continue to do so. We therefore need to prepare our people to be agile in the face of that change. That requires mental flexibility, emotional regulation, self-awareness, and stress management, among a number of other competencies, which just aren't being prioritised enough.
