Introduction to Mindful Management

Welcome to this course on Mindful Management. If you want to improve your ability to manage effectively, you’ve come to the right place.  Let me get started with a question!

What would happen if you spent more time on the job smiling and less time trying to increase productivity and profitability?

You’re probably laughing and thinking something like, “I’d get fired!” or “The work would come to a stop!”

Actually, just the opposite would happen. I’m going to prove to you that smiling leads to greater productivity and profitability. Not only that, but also taking time to get to know your team and chatting with them conversationally can make a similar difference. In this course we’re going to learn how to be deliberate about our interactions with our teams, how to be mindful managers, and why that makes such an enormous difference in the bottom line.

It’s all part of being engaged in your job and helping your reports to be engaged in their work as well. Why is this so important?

Research shows that employees who are engaged stay longer on the job, do better work, and save the company money, to name just a few of the benefits.

I call every manager-employee relationship at work the critical couple because the quality of the connection between them, emerging out of everyday talk, is critical to unit and organizational success. The connective quality is a state of trust and the productive out- come of trust is engagement in the work.

Large-scale studies show that we don’t manage the way we need to if we’re going to get our employees to have the maximum amount of enthusiastic engagement in their work. Relatively few managers understand the simple acts of communication that can motivate people to do great work, despite the fact that they may have already been trained in best practices.

To really make the changes we need, we have to understand what’s going on in our brain that sabotages our communication as managers, so we can take those same processes and make them work for us.

And that’s what you’re going to learn about in this course that’s likely different from any management training you’ve had before. We’re going to dig into the research on how our brain works so we can truly change how we behave as managers.

You probably didn’t realize you were getting a side course on neuroscience, did you? But trust me, I’ll take you through it gently! And once you learn more about how your brain works, about how you have more than one mind, you’re going to understand employee management in a way few people do.

I hope you’re saying to yourself, “What? More than one mind?” Yes, that’s what I said. In video two we will delve into the neuroscience that will help us understand management in an entirely new way. But first we need to understand how the large studies of engagement defined engaging management and why it’s so important. In this first video, we’re going to move from the general to the specific, because the last study outlines 12 specific behaviors that managers use to engage their staff. Of those, I am going to ask you to focus on the most powerful 5 in your everyday life as a manager. These behaviors do impact the bottom line and are critical to learning how to engage our employees. And they also suggest why smiling a bit more is important.