This book is about the power of our rational and emotional minds in our work lives. It demonstrates the essential interconnection between them for motivating us to work and for making us effective leaders. Using the metaphor of the Rider for the rational mind and the Elephant for our emotional mind, the reader instantly sees the differences between them in size and power. They serve different but interconnected functions and when they are positively aligned our work engagement and productivity improves dramatically.
This alignment happens when our Elephant mind “reads” our situation as one where its deep neural needs for certainty, compliments, choice and consideration from others are fulfilled. This supports our Rider or rational mind (the home of our thoughts, speech and sense of self) because it is driven to know that we are of value, have some influence and can demonstrate competence in every situation. When managers communicate this, employees’ Elephant minds flood their Riders with the emotion of motivation. They energize employees’ conscious commitment to achieve. Moreover, when Elephants read persistent, positive emotional connections with others, they learn to trust them and trust is the basis for full engagement in our work.
Most managers have to “wake up” their rational minds and consciously create the conditions for trust with their employees because their deeply learned habits for enacting the role of manager are centered on acts of control rather than connection. This is the paradox of the Elephant mind. The same mind that drives us to connect with others contains in its long-term memory everything we automatically access to control others when we become managers. In most organizations control is a fundamental assumption behind management. The problem is that managerial control contradicts connection so employees protectively disengage.
This book shows managers how to “wake up” to this problem and change the way they communicate to re-engage their employees in the work. It gives managers simple butpowerful techniques for becoming mindful and connective and for getting “out of control”. It also clearly describes what managers must do when positive connections with their staff are threatened by difficult situations. I show them how to re-create positive connections in these moments by: (1) slowing their reactive emotional mind, (2) becoming consciously mindful in order to see “what’s really going on,” and (3) changing what they say and how they say it to re-establish neural alignment.
This book also shows leaders how to manage their minds to: (1) make more powerful decisions, (2) ask others to change and actually get it to happen, and, (3) organize change programs in the workplace that really change things. Mindful Management makes it clear: to lead people, first manage your own minds then engage others’ minds to build trust. This book shows you how.