Mental Fitness: The most overlooked advantage in business
What is 'mental fitness'?
A team of athletes needs more than just potential: they work every day to maintain the physical fitness that lets them make that potential real. On the playing field, it’s not enough to know what to do: you have put in the work to become strong, fast, and agile enough to act sooner and better than your opponent.
Most teams today aren’t athletes, but they face the same reality. For teams of thought workers, it’s not their physical ability that matters, but their mental ability. For a team of smart, well-educated people to realise their potential, they need to be mentally fit.
Mental fitness is the measure of a person’s mental resilience, agility, and focus. Like physical fitness, it is the result of training, care, and attention. Like physical fitness, it is essential to a team’s ability to work well.
Mental Fitness is the core of everything we do
At Symbia, we see mental fitness as an overlooked root cause of both success and failure, but far from the only cause. We use mental fitness as a lens to assess our client’s challenges, and a way to craft more effective solutions. Our Mental Fitness suite offers a variety of ways to engage with your people. Whether through a taster webinar session, flexible courses, or live workshops directly focused on mental fitness, or a long-term programme rooted in mental fitness and expanding beyond it, everything we do is centered on turning high-potential people into high-performing teams.
The benefits of being 'mentally fit'
Mentally fit workers understand strategies more thoroughly and execute them more cleverly. They capitalise on opportunities before their competitors have even identified them. They see challenges coming proactively, and address them before they even materialise. They are resilient in the face of adversity, pushing on where others give up. They are agile in the face of change, adjusting course without losing momentum. They shine brightly instead of burning out.
Many leaders understand the value of intelligence and knowledge, and seek high-potential employees that they educate and train. But many stop there, viewing their teams’ ability to execute as their own individual responsibility, a test of their dedication or will. Leaders of teams that truly thrive recognise the exponential impact each teammate can have, and make the mental fitness of their people a top priority.
Measuring the business case for Mental Fitness
Based on data from a variety of sources, this report can be a valuable tool for HR & Wellbeing practitioners or managers who need to make the case in their own organisations.
See Mental Fitness in action
In the past 10 years, Unilever has initiated multiple major organisational restructures, in order to remain relevant, operationally strong and agile in the new world. One global UL function in particular, CMI (Consumer & Market Insights) has redesigned itself in a number of ways in order to maximise expertise while continuing to support brand teams with market and consumer insight. Find out how we helped them to manage the expected and unexpected consequences of a major organisational restructure.
