Preparing Future Leaders for Mental Health Challenge: Teaching Management Graduates share Experience
As the world becomes increasingly aware of the importance of mental wellbeing, SPJIMR continues to be at the forefront of this essential conversation. We proudly launched VISHWAS back in 2016 under the visionary leadership of Prof. Vidyut Lata Dhir.
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00:00Hello everyone, it's a pleasure to be here. I would first like to help you understand
00:05how we took this journey to design this course for future leaders for helping them to deal
00:10with mental health challenges. The whole journey started like this with my colleague Dr. Amit
00:16Jain. We started this journey while we were trying to interact with our students or with
00:22employees in organizations and when we would ask them questions about why they were not
00:25able to meet the deadline and give us reasons for that. Many times the reasons that they
00:30gave us were that there were either some external things that happened in their lives or some
00:36physical illnesses. Pushed further to understand was there any reasons that they could give
00:41us to deal with their vulnerabilities or mental health. They were shy because they felt that
00:46they were not feeling psychologically safe to share those. And as we discovered this
00:51insight gave us an understanding that I think in today's world we need to really bring
00:55out certain kind of interventions where we can help our managers to deal with mental
01:00health for themselves and for their employees. So we started this whole journey and try to
01:06understand that since mental health has become such an important force, SDG goal number three
01:12aligning to that and the volatility of the business world around us only accentuated
01:17the whole stuff. So we wanted to understand how we could do it. The best way to do is
01:22to bring in some kind of role models from entertainment and sports who are actually
01:27sharing their life stories and bring that in to help managers de-stigmatize and bring
01:32their awareness forward. And to share the message that it's okay not to be okay at times.
01:38As we went further into the journey we wanted to also understand that leaders, there are
01:43a lot of things floating around today about anxiety and depression and other things that
01:47we loosely use these terms without knowing actually what they mean. So we got in a lot
01:51of mental health professionals and experts through their videos and their lectures to
01:56discuss what actually was the meaning and how do you identify things which were dealing
02:02with mental health illnesses. Amit and I decided further that we need to kind of not only look
02:09at mental illness because absence of mental illness does not mean that you're mentally
02:13well. So we wanted to get in something more proactive in the whole picture. We started
02:17intervention at our institute which is called Vishwas which means creating a psychological
02:22safe space. And keeping that in mind we've been doing this from 2015 trying to create
02:26a safe space for our students. We want to take it further for our managers and corporate
02:31world. So we try to understand how subjective well-being was as important to understand
02:36and what it meant about mental health and positivity bringing satisfaction and meaning
02:41to people's lives. And leaders need to kind of ingrain this for themselves and for their
02:46team members. We also wanted to understand that you know while we are not making them
02:52as therapists okay we're not making them as psychologists but there are certain insights
02:56that we get from a lot of CBT, RABT kind of interventions and therapies. There's some
03:03insights that we can develop through simple exercises which help managers themselves and
03:09leaders themselves to kind of draw insights about themselves and also about the team members
03:13mental health. Okay and how to kind of deal with it in a more proactive manner. We further
03:19went and to understand that you know the world around us is also creating certain kind of
03:24best practices and there are certain organizations out there, there are case studies out there
03:28which kind of bring in the importance of mental health and how they are dealing with it is
03:33something that we brought and we brought in a lot of experts from the industry or in otherwise
03:37to kind of help our students understand how they were dealing with that in their organizations
03:41and how they and our students and other employees and organizations can take this forward. It's
03:48the era of technology and we all want to leverage on technology. So we want to understand how
03:52we can kind of reach out, scale up our intervention to reach out to more set of people across
03:57the globe, across the world by helping us to leverage on the and you know using positive
04:02technology interventions to reach out to people through helping them kind of ameliorate loneliness
04:09and isolation across the world. So what are the lessons we have learned like lots and
04:14lots of lessons. I think it was a very very interesting course and I think Amit and I
04:18would definitely kind of we do believe that this should be something a very important
04:22part and parcel of every b-school education and not only that I think corporate world
04:28should also kind of embrace this with open arms because it is the need of the art and
04:33while today's world we are talking about loneliness as the next epidemic, we are also
04:39going to talk about isolation and FOMO and all these kind of things which are not really
04:43deep mental illnesses but actually they are hurdles into our everyday life and an organization
04:50if they have to function they have to deal with these situations also. So that is something
04:54that we learned. We also learned that it should be part of executive education. We realized
04:59that positive technology trying to create interventions of using technology to help
05:03leverage and reach out to people. We also realized that certain insights from therapies
05:08can help leaders to deal with teams and nurture mental well-being and I think overall I would
05:14say that a lot we have a long way to go we just taken the first step forward but I think
05:20it's an important step and as a psychologist and I think my colleague Amit would really
05:26that this is extremely extremely important piece to take care of and thank you very much
05:30for listening and please reach out to us in case you think that you know you have
05:35certain other interventions and if you like what we're doing and can we kind of create
05:39a movement around proactive mental well-being across the globe. Thank you so much.