The Hidden Edge. Jodie Rogers
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‘Mental fitness’ leverages emotional and social intelligence to enhance overall work and life performance. It empowers people to strengthen their psychological agility, emotional regulation, mindset, and resilience, making them higher performing and more adaptable in the face of challenge and change.
We know from numerous studies that emotional intelligence leads to a better ability to manage our emotions (emotion regulation) and that it is this ability to recognise (emotional literacy) and manage or regulate emotions which leads to better mental health outcomes (less stress, depression, negative thinking). This positive mental health leads both directly and indirectly to better work performance over time. We know this, so we now need to leverage it and train for it.4
Over the years, I've learned that companies face many challenges, and most of them are externalised; we point to tangible issues outside of us. But the truth is that the challenge for companies and their teams is often inside of us and always human.
Companies, organisations, businesses, teams: what are they, in their most basic form? They are simply a collection of humans, with all the emotions, thoughts, doubts, insecurities, and biases that come with being human. A big part of what drives human nature is fear. We are programmed to have a fight or flight response to fear as, historically, it's how we've survived.
That evolutionary programming is still behind our modus operandi today. It dictates our ability to respond to change, take risks, and manage uncertainty. In the workplace, as within any group setting, there are hierarchies and social systems that govern who does and says what.
It's the subtleties within these hierarchies that can often create tension. When tackling problems, some people shy away from pointing fingers at themselves or others for fear of ‘being ostracised’. Others are afraid to expose their own vulnerabilities and shortcomings, should they be thought of as weak. We all tolerate situations that we're not fully comfortable with at times, just to keep the peace. As a result, it takes a carefully managed strategy to force change.
It takes courage to identify an issue, diagnose it correctly, and assume responsibility for our role in effective change. When things start to go wrong in teams, it is, in fact, far easier to point at something external as being at fault: the strategy, inefficient budgets, resource issues, the economy. They are tangible, but they often overlook the human element.
It is necessary to focus on what it means to be human if you want to be effective in business. That's true now, in a post-pandemic virtual world, more than ever before. The reality is that the most important work you will ever do within your company is deeply human and involves working on our collective ‘mental fitness’: the emotions, thoughts, and mindsets of the people making decisions.
When we go the extra mile to understand the human behind the strategies, the hopes, fears, ambitions, and insecurities, we are able to get under the skin of what's really going on in the ecosystem of our teams. Having worked as a qualitative researcher for many years, my preferred approach to uncover this insight is to have one-on-one, in-depth discussions with leaders and their teams before any type of intervention.
Taking this approach to team effectiveness creates four key benefits:
I know exactly what is going on within the company, which gives me an authority and an edge when facilitating team sessions. This is particularly useful when we meet inevitable resistance, denial, or excuses – all of which are natural human defences.
I can uncover what beliefs, values, and mindsets might be enabling or hampering a team's performance.
We can then design a deeper session that will actually focus on what matters, make a measurable difference, and get the desired results.
By ‘saying the unsaid’ – giving voice to the unexpressed challenges that have been creating drag in the team – we put everyone on the same page.Unexpressed issues usually arise because either people couldn't pinpoint the problem in the first place or didn't want to raise the issue for fear of being seen as ‘not a team player’, or worse, losing their jobs. Giving voice to the ‘unsaid’ creates a combined sense of relief, safety, and motivation to solve the issues.
Pointing at the elephant in the room means you can finally begin to work on it.
In the hundreds of workshops my team and I have run across the world, 80% of what we do is spent working on the ‘mental game’ of business. It's spent helping teams understand what makes each of the individuals within them tick, how they problem-solve, respond to setbacks, manage stress, handle emotion, navigate their thinking, and deal with conflict. It's this deeper work that always makes the difference.
The temptation when working with teams is, of course, to work on teams. Generally, my clients want a jam-packed agenda where lots of ‘work’ is done as a collective to ‘move the needle’ or ‘create momentum’. But if you do not work at the individual level first, the team efforts will be futile. I call this working on the ‘me’ before the ‘we’.
That doesn't mean you spend months doing one-to-one coaching; not at all. You can work at the individual level while simultaneously working on the group. This is where the greatest shifts among my clients come from. But ignoring the complexities of what it means to be human means you will never be able to get a team functioning effectively.
Often this work begins when teams have come to me already facing challenges. It's rare that a team comes to me ‘firing on all cylinders’ and wanting to enhance things to the next level.
That's understandable; it's human nature to wait for a certain level of pain before taking action.
But what if you didn't have to wait for challenges and issues to appear before you ‘did the work’? What if you could get ahead of yourself and have a prevention and enhancement approach rather than always having to pay out in time, money, and energy trying to fix or cure? What could that unlock among your people?
Some of the more progressive companies out there have started to realise the importance of enhancement over cure. Unilever is one of these core companies that is trail-blazing the way and has heavily invested in training and education around the idea of the ‘inner game’, because they are fully aware of the importance of investing in the personal development of their people, and empowering them to understand and navigate their own inner world to unlock business growth.
When you have mentally and emotionally healthy people (‘mentally fit’ people), you have resilient and agile teams. When you have resilient and agile teams, you have a healthy and agile business. And when you have a healthy business, it affects the bottom line positively. The work that I do with companies, whether it's leadership work, team sessions, designing programmes for central L&D (learning and development) teams, or taking full functions through learning journeys, is underpinned by my ‘mental fitness’ philosophy, which I will explain more about shortly.
But not all companies have realised this secret. Many are yet to understand that the hidden edge of business lies in the ‘mental fitness’ of your people, and that this is the most overlooked competitive advantage in the marketplace.
In truth, some do know it and either can't access the knowledge they need to act on it or have dismissed it for the more tangible initiatives they can sell in and get easier stakeholder buy-in for. That's not a criticism; we all know how difficult it is to convince people of the importance of such topics, especially when it feels like swimming upstream. Nine times out of 10, what's missing for corporate leaders who wish to dedicate time, money, and energy into figuring this out in their organisation is something measurable and tangible: numbers, metrics, return on investment (ROI). The following chapter presents hard-to-access statistics and financial data on the cost of ignoring mental fitness in organisations, and builds the business case to incorporate the concept of mental fitness into your organisation's culture and strategy for growth. I encourage you to use this business case in your company to persuade key decision-makers to invest in mental fitness. As such, we've made