Mindful Managers

by Madiee Games

Mindful Managers

Introduction

I think of mindfulness as the ability not to be yanked around by your own emotions,” says Dan Harris, ABC Nightline anchor and author of 10 Percent Happier. “That can have a big impact on how you are in the workplace.”

As a leader, one is expected to have a lot of skill sets: self-awareness, empathy, optimism & a high Emotional Quotient (EQ) are a few musts!

As Daniel Goleman, psychologist and author of Emotional Intelligence describes it: “Star leaders are stars at leading themselves, first. If you can’t fine-tune your own actions – keeping yourself from blowing up or falling to pieces – you’ll be poor at handling the people you deal with.”
Ultimately, mindfulness gives you the ability to manage yourself more effectively, which then allows you to manage your team to the best of your ability. Remember: Your team follows your example, so you must start with yourself to lead others well.

What Our Program Does

‘Mindful Managers’ is a Gamified Corporate Programme that is based on carefully researched scientific mental models & curated in collaboration with some of India’s top Corporate Coaches. 6 modules spread over 6 months, this programme is a sure-shot way to develop star leaders within your organization!

Driving with Trust

Employees who trust their leaders will move mountains for them and be more engaged in the business. In today’s business environment, building trust might just be your most important responsibility as a leader.

Outcomes Achieved:

  • Identify adversarial situations, when a lot of people choose what they think is best for them individually, but the sum total of the decisions creates a worse outcome for everyone.
  • Use mental models like MRI, Hanlon’s Razor in their professional and personal life to help empathize.
  • Detect mental models that explain common errors in thinking like fundamental attribution error, and self-serving bias, and re-assess situations.

Mental Models:

Creative Lateral Thinking

This is the most valuable skill in difficult times. Lateral thinking is solving problems through an indirect and creative approach, using reasoning that is not immediately obvious and involving ideas that may not be obtainable by using only traditional step-by-step logic.

Outcomes Achieved:

  • Use the principles of Lateral Thinking to approach situations/problems in a creative way.
  • Distinguishing integrative and distributive negotiation, and explore strategies to ‘Expand the Pie’
  • Evaluating the needs of all competitors, and assessing their alternatives

Mental Models:

Big Picture Thinking

Communicating the big picture acts as the North Star. It serves to reinforce the real reason for the activities people do everyday. Big-picture thinking can be crucial for achievement in the workplace because knowing what to focus on can help you budget your time efficiently, manage stress levels and create actionable, achievable goals.

Outcomes Achieved:

  • Define group culture and consistently engage in winning hearts and minds towards your desired culture and associated vision
  • Assess and identify challenges with respect to lack of big picture thinking and/or attention to details.
  • Identify activities leading to short-termism, technical debt, and devise a plan to overcome them in the long run.

Mental Models:

Outsmart Your Bias In Decision Making

When making decisions, we all rely too heavily on intuition and use flawed reasoning sometimes. Lets learn to fight these pernicious sources of bias by learning to spot them and using research driven techniques to overcome them.

Outcomes Achieved:

  • Identify and detect various cognitive / unconscious biases affecting our day to day thinking and decision making.
  • Recall Parkinson’s Law and use forcing functions strategically to avoid analysis paralysis.
  • Select proven strategies to overcome cognitive biases.

Mental Models:

Effective Delegation & Art of Feedback

If you’re not providing timely and effective feedback, you are not being the best leader that you can be. Learn the brain science of feedback, including how our brains learn and why we are wired to connect to each other.

Outcomes Achieved:

  • Watch out and identify common psychological failure modes like imposter syndrome and the Dunning-Kruger effect
  • Appraise and give feedback that challenge directly, care personally.
  • Properly delineate roles and responsibilities using the model of DRI (Directly Responsible Individual)

Mental Models:

Mastering Persuasion

Persuasion is a delicate art form. Persuasion power can help you get more of the things you want faster than anything else you do. It can mean the difference between success and failure.

Outcomes Achieved:

  • Evaluating the needs of all stakeholders, and assessing their alternatives
  • Classify deals with respect to Lewicki and Hiam’s Negotiation matrix
  • Convince people to join your side by persuading them through use of influence models like reciprocity, commitment, liking, social proof, scarcity and authority, and watch out for how they are being used on you.

Mental Models:

Deepak Varma has over 18 years of corporate experience in Fortune 500 companies like Hewlett Packard, Wipro and Airtel in the sales, marketing, operations, account management domains.

Deepak has been the President at Toastmasters and an Advanced Communicator Bronze. 

Deepak is also the Director at a NGO namely Heartfulness and has trained over 5000 people across multiple geographies in India and Africa in simple techniques of relaxation and meditation free of cost.

A counselling psychologist by profession, Abs specialises in addressing mental health concerns of adolescents, young adults, and adults including stress & time management, relationship counselling, substance abuse, domestic violence, perinatal problems, depression, loneliness, anxiety, sexual issues, identity crisis and work issues, among others. She believes that therapy can hold different experiences & meanings for each individual, thus using an eclectic approach with her clients.

Aditya’s passion lies in Career and Business Strategy. He loves Supporting executives and professionals with career obstacles such as self regulation, goal directed persistence, task initiation, planning/prioritization, role transition, organization and time management.

His clients share from the experience about their coaching engagement  that they feel his coaching is an experience that is engaging, highly energizing and making learning fun. He has a strong determination to offer something different, with the intention of helping others succeed in their walks of life.

His accreditations includes him being an Associate Certified Coach (ACC- ICF),Brave Spirit Icon 2017 I Youth Icon Recipient 2016 I National Service Excellence Award 2016 I National Education Award 2015 

His experience includes 50,000+ hours that involves facilitation/presentation/training/consulting on a wide variety of topics globally across Dubai, Sri Lanka, UK, Canada, Indonesia, Australia, USA. He has successfully engaged with over 1,00,000+ participants from diverse backgrounds working on a national and international assignment since 2014.