Concepts

Positive Emotions – how to create a space

The creation of a space both from a physical and time perspective enables self-reflection, the sharing of experiences and knowledge, a sense of belonging and connectedness to individuals, the team and the community. This space allows for a greater frequency of positive emotions to help facilitate a change in mindset, as well as fostering greater levels of trust, collaboration and oneness. Developing an appreciation in young people as part of any Positive Leadership Module regarding how emotions can impact their problem-solving, critical thinking, respect for diversity and willingness to cocreator with others will further enhance their appreciation of these life skills. Equally as important is the development of young people’ ability to identify the drivers of some of their behaviour.

Engagement – how to afford different opportunities

Providing participants with the opportunity to: a) fully engage in the direction the team wants to go; b) connecting it with their own and the community’s purpose; c) building on their self-communicated strengths; and d) creating an open dialogue, enables the building of a generative environment in which all have a voice and input into driving solutions. This environment, in turn, generates greater collaboration and a sense of a ‘One Team’ culture. The context in which beneficiaries live and the expectations for their future requires them to not only develop an appreciation of team work, but also build an understanding of how you build a consensus and active participation with others. While the Life Skills Curriculum introduces beneficiaries to the importance of teamwork, Positive Leadership enables and empowers them to build diverse teams.

Relationships – how to move beyond challenges

Moving beyond the initial challenges each person may have to identify the individual and the human always results in a successful team partly fuelled by the strength and dynamic of the team relationships. Therefore, creating a connection beyond the role they fill encourages greater connectedness, a desire to support and encourage each other, and a willingness to go ‘the extra mile’ for each other. Beneficiaries have faced, and will continue to face, multiple challenges moving forward. The Life Skills Curriculum provides young people with opportunities to work towards enhancing their resilience and self-management, and Positive Leadership builds on those foundations to develop an appreciation of how to build HQCs upon which young people can rely while striving for success or dealing with challenging situations. Positive Leadership provides tools that encourage beneficiaries to build relationships in a manner that provides individual and collective support.

Meaning – how to fuse purpose

How to fuse individual purpose with that of the team and, in turn, with the purpose of the community. Meaning moves beyond ‘What is my role?’ to ‘How can I add value?’ while feeling challenged and having a sense of belonging to a common cause. Even within beneficiary communities there are competing demands and expectations. While the Life Skills Curriculum enables beneficiaries to appreciate the importance of cooperation, participation and negotiation in striving to deal with those demands and expectations, Positive Leadership provides tools that enable individuals to create an alignment around a shared purpose, thereby creating an individual and collective connection.

Achievement – how to recognise success

How to recognise where the successes are and why. Appreciating that the success of the individual feeds the success of the team. Identifying what the collective targets are, what the implications are for each individual, and how through supporting each other each success adds to the momentum of change and creating value. While successes in each of the partner programmes are celebrated with beneficiaries through graduation and the receipt of certificates, developing an ability within an individual to identify and acknowledge personal and collective strengths is an important component of Positive Leadership. Maintaining a continued and positive involvement by beneficiaries with local partners and their communities is essential for sustained success. Building a personal capacity to celebrate success and maintain personal motivation is an important skill set for beneficiaries as they mature through a variety of programmes and encounter setbacks in their daily lives.

Source: IE School of Human Science and Technology, EXMPLS

Positive Development

This is a radical change in emphasis regarding how we lead, manage and develop individuals and teams. The approach examines how one creates a positive and generative environment with processes and practices that enable optimal performance with human strengths at its core.

Training Mindware

This concerns how to achieve a competitive advantage by rewiring the way we think and behave in the workplace. Regular mindfulness practice is fundamental in helping individuals to cope with the challenges of modern life.

Behavioural Fitness

This is a new area of professional development focused on training behaviour at work. Every one of your days at work is composed of many small ‘moments of truth’ – behavioural moments in which an individual and their colleagues interact with others, think and reason, make judgements about people or data, and take decisions. Developing appropriate behavioural fitness levels increases the likelihood of sustaining professional success.

Positive Leadership requires a whole range of new tools and frameworks that are fundamentally human-centred; empower creativity and innovation; encourage team work and co-creation; and enable a wide focus and higher achievements. A positive leader has high-levels of positive self-awareness and a deep understanding of the needs of others.

Any modern Leadership role requires a significant volume of self-awareness. In our studies participants repeatedly referred to the positive impact our curriculums have on their own personal development through a more developed level of self-awareness. We encourage the development of the individual on a more holistic level beyond ‘the successful performance in the context of the workplace’, and additionally towards the development of active and generative leadership focused on care and respect for human beings, which has a direct correlation with the development of positive leaders.

Source: MBSAT, Young, Juan Humberto, 2017

Mindfulness for leaders and applied in the workplace.

What is mindfulness?
Despite widespread perceptions, mindfulness is actually not just about stopping for a few moments and relaxing, although this is also very important. Mindfulness is about present moment attention, metacognition and non-reactivity. These important skills emerge from a regular mindfulness practice. But why are these skills particularly relevant in a corporate environment?

Present moment attention brings focus, authenticity, and intention to leadership. It produces much more data and details that are critical for good decision-making. It also exposes our tendency for automatic behaviour, which is a useful skill of the mind to save time and energy but often results in suboptimal actions and decisions.

Metacognition is the ability to recognise your own feelings, thoughts, impulses, and sensations. By being more aware of ourselves, our thinking patterns and mental models, we can avoid making decisions based on old memories and habitual patterns. We become more deliberate in our actions and choices.

Non-reactivity is a very important skill of a good leader. More often than not, we react before we even notice that we are reacting. By developing the skill of non-reactivity, we develop the ability to step back and create the necessary space and distance from the issue to give better and a more adequate response.

How does mindfulness fit into the workplace?
Mindfulness in the corporate environment is not new. Many high-profile organisations, including large corporations, financial institutions and even governments, have introduced yoga and meditation classes for their employees and created physical space (quiet rooms) for meditation and relaxation at the workplace. The well-recognised benefits are better focus, efficiency and effectiveness, resilience, and productivity.
The good news is that the capacity for mindfulness can be trained. What makes mindfulness training stand out from other leadership training interventions is that the capacity for greater attention can be trained and embedded in the context of everyday action. This greater attention will help to manage reactive emotions and stress, to train working memory, to perceive reality beyond a leader’s blind spots, and to cultivate empathy which will lead to better decisions and innovation.

Mindfulness at Serrano 99
As active mindfulness practitioners, we offer a range of programmes specifically designed for teams and leaders in a competitive and fast moving environment. The programmes provide an insight into what it means to be mindful, and a personal experience of being present in the now. Just becoming more aware of how our mind works and learning to observe can have a significant impact not only on our leadership style, but on our quality of life in general.

We also link mindfulness to personal effectiveness as well as leadership effectiveness ,and demonstrate their organisational relevance.