Corporate leadership development
My work is for businesses and teams that care about engagement and sustainable performance. Fully engaged people lead their teams and themselves with integrity. Authentic leadership means knowing your values, strengths, and accepting reality with open receptivity. This requires courage and intention. How do we access that? Through personal and shared presence—which is not something that is taught, if indeed made time for, in corporate culture. The clients I work with are some of the exceptions. This is Kiwibank’s story.
What they asked for:
Kiwibank runs a leadership development programme called the Leadership Code. It codifies leadership principles and practices and shares them across a 5-day schedule, run across several weeks. One of the components of the programme is Mindfulness, and a difficulty being experienced is instalment and sustained practice outside of the programme in real, everyday business life. Perhaps, they wondered, this is because mindfulness has become a buzz word, often considered a ‘soft skill’. Yet, we agreed, it is an essential component of mental health and emotional agility – which influences organisational agility. Kiwibank asked me to consult on how to pitch and teach mindfulness in a way that would be integrated and sustained.
What I did:
- Reviewed the existing Leadership Code programme
- Redesigned the mindfulness module within the Leadership Code
- Advised how, and wrote the facilitation notes to, meaningfully weave mindfulness and emotional agility into the entirety of the Leadership Code content, so that it was received not as something to ‘do’, but so that participants experience it as a natural and easy way of ‘being’
- Designed and produced a bespoke multimedia series called Mindful Mode, to support the adoption and integration of new behaviours beyond the programme
- Created seperate guided practices for the Senior Executive Leadership Team for experiential mindfulness and endorsement ‘from the top’
All content © Tui Fleming, licensed in perpetuity to Kiwibank for use with it’s employees
Mindful Mode – a 6 week programme
A time-effective multimedia series, modularised, each module with a specific theme incorporating the science and art of mindfulness. The series runs across 6 weeks with an introduction and 5x modules each comprising:
5 Videos
To introduce and give purpose/context and the science behind each tool
5 Workbooks
To guide awareness of impact of mindfulness practice and next steps
What they said…
Mindfulness as a Way of Being
“Kiwibank engaged Tui to help us ‘land’ the practice of mindfulness with our people. Tui went beyond this, reviewing our leadership programme and offering advice on how to naturally integrate mindfulness not as a ’thing to do’ but a way of being—making what had been effortful, effortless and accessible to all. She also custom designed a modular programme to help people adopt new behaviours after the programme for sustained change. I have long been a believer in the importance of integrating hard and soft skills to development, that scale across both work and non-work life – in my view Tui’s work 100% achieves that.
One of things that sets Tui’s work apart from others in this space is the broad mix of tools and formats (video, audio and worksheets) developed and tailored to the purpose. Previously I have needed to rely on more generic offerings to integrate into leadership development programmes – Tui’s work enabled this to feel fully integrated not an add on.
So many of us know or have the heard the value of mindful practices, yet it remains in my view misunderstood or appears out of reach to many people. Tui’s work changes that – easy to understand, easy to try and easy to adopt. Let’s face it as we navigate the pandemic, changes to how we work – simple practices that everyone can access will deliver so much benefit to our people and our organisations.
Why Now?
The Government’s Health & Safety at Work Strategy 2018-2028 calls for building capability to ensure work is healthy and safe for everyone in New Zealand. This includes mental and emotional health. The Strategy refers to leadership, worker engagement, representation and participation. For mindfulness to be accepted as a critical leadership practice, and to rally engagement and participation such that the practice is fully installed in peoples’ way of working, an offering needs to tick four boxes:
- Relevant and resonant – achieved by aligning with a business values, strategy and current climate
- Go beyond mind/body – achieved by connecting to emotions
- Offered as a genuine benefit to employees – recognising they are more than their role
- Actively endorsed by senior leaders
The core proposition of my work is that I bring identity and mindfulness practices together in the context of – so with respect to – the corporate environment. Having worked with big corporates like ASB, Westpac and The Warehouse, I understand corporate climate. I don’t deliver off-the-shelf tools but rather work in collaboration with you to design and deliver fully customised assets that will reach the minds and hearts of your people.
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Get in touch today to discuss your custom authentic leadership and wellbeing programme for your people.
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