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 One Leadership 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.
1 Under 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.
In an increasingly complex and uncertain world, we all need tools to understand and manage our most important asset – our own minds – because it's our minds that act as our brakes and our accelerators. As we face into the new world, we need to consider how we respond to change. Rarely is change actually a problem; the problem is our natural human resistance to it.
We resist it because change breeds uncertainty,
