MBC Community Area

We all spend a lot of time in meetings, whether they be virtual, in person or hybrid. The quality of those meetings and the thinking they generate varies widely. Sadly, all too often the poor quality of meetings discourages people from preparing and participating as they might, which feeds a downward, and self-fulfilling, cycle in the quality of the meetings. The second pillar of the Charter obviously speaks about a number of the issues around meetings. The changes to the Charter in January 2022 specifically focussed on the need to run meetings inclusively, taking account both of location of participants and their neurodiversity. As part of our developing programme of events around specific aspects of the Charter and related issues, we are delighted to be hosting a session with Katie Driver of the Thinking Alliance. Katie is an accredited practitioner of the Thinking Environment®, a way of working developed by Nancy Kline which aims to generate the best possible thinking in the many different environments in which it’s needed – meetings being a prime example. Katie’s session will be about enabling better quality meetings and will draw on Thinking Environment® approaches which echo much of what the Charter speaks about. You can find out more about Katie and her approach in this post from May 2022 - Yes, you can have better meetings! | LinkedIn

Roz Shafran webinar for MBC on Perfectionism Find the slide in our Signatory Resources Area

MBC Burnout Session 1

MBC Signatories call 31 January 2022 Welcoming new members, signatory updates from Jo Wilson @ Dentons and Margot Goldman-Edwards @ Firefish. General updates from Richard Martin on recent Charter updates and the upcoming Signatory survey due out this month.

Signatories call on 31 January 2022 - welcome to new members, update from Richard Martin on recent and forthcoming activity, discussion of proposed amendments to Charter wording, update on personnel changes, strategic review and planned signatory survey followed by updates from Svetlana Gurevich from Linklaters and Polly James from BCLP

MBC Signatories Call Nov 10th 2021 - Welcoming to new members, a brief overview from Richard Martin, updates from Abbey Maskell and Amy Kennedy at Akin Gump and BMO given by Richard on behalf of Theo Clarke, and a first look from Kate Dodd at the new MBC New Making introductions Toolkit which can be found in the resources section of the website.

Our Mindful Business Charter event on 7th October 2021. We welcomed 12 new signatories to the Charter. We were pleased to welcome all you to our six monthly Mindful Business Charter event to welcome new members, celebrate our progress and think about the next stages of the movement’s growth. As part of this event we had a Q&A facilitated by Richard Martin in conversation with Richard Foley, senior partner of Pinsent Masons, who spoke about the benefits of involving clients in MBC and how to go about doing so.

Our bi monthly signatory call. Thank you for Lorraine Roche @ Mathesons, Batoolah Dawreeawoo & Tanya Etheridge @ PGIM, Kate Hammerton @ Shoosmiths for sharing on this call. Find the minutes and briefing notes in the Signatory Resources

The changes businesses required of their people to adapt to lockdown changed the dynamic of the employer/employee relationship. Remote working lowered the barriers to the workplace and fostered inclusion as a result. As businesses around the world start to reopen their offices in earnest, we take a mindful look at some of these dynamics and what employers should keep in mind as the next wave of change is presented to their people. This event will feature Philip Aiken from Barclays and a panel of other MBC trustees offering a range of different perspectives.

Our bi-monthly signatories call. Thank you to Laura Tokell (Womble Bond Dickinson) and Rachel Holder (Lloyds Banking Group) for their updates

Our bi-monthly signatories call. Thank you to Lizzy Stewart (4 New Square), Lynda Clark (Morton Fraser) and Moira Slape (Travers Smith) for their updates.

An event hosted by the Law Society of Scotland with knowledge sharing and practical tips from Charter organisations. • Introduction - Olivia Moore – Law Society of Scotland • An introduction to the Mindful Business Charter – Richard Martin • Embedding MBC in a transactional team – Simon Rajgopaul - Lloyds Banking Group • A client relationship perspective - Ilona McGowan – RBS • Business incentives, getting partners involved and using MBC as an HR tool - Emma Smith and Alasdair Sutherland - Burness Paull

Our Mindful Business Charter event on 13 May 2021 marked Mental Health Awareness Week in the UK. We welcomed 15 new signatories and heard from two speakers: Dr Emma Jones - senior lecturer in law at the University of Sheffield and part of the International Bar Association’s global task force on mental health and wellbeing. Dr Mark Berelowitz - Consultant Child Psychiatrist at the Royal Free Hospital in London. Along with his Thai colleague Dr Tee, Mark studied the Thai boys football team who were trapped in a cave in the summer of 2018, and identified key themes to their resilience and survival. More recently Mark has been involved in supporting frontline clinical NHS staff during the COVID pandemic, and is helping the hospital plan for the post pandemic recovery.

During the session Richard Martin encouraged participants to be more aware of when they are feeling stressed and of what that is doing to them, gave insight and guidance as to how we can each individually better manage stress and stressful situations and reminded us of what MBC tells us about how we can help each other.

Insight from Kate Dodd and Matt Morgan of Pinsent Masons