MBC Community Area

Ready for ‘The Mindful Conduct of Litigation’? - Newsletter entry from The Legal Diary

As the law focuses on mental health, aggressive and belligerent litigators appear to be an archaic breed. New guidance from the Mindful Business Charter aims to bring the profession up to date

One former litigator involved in creating the guidance said: "I well remember some of the behaviour that goes on and how it often got in the way of the resolution of disputes." - a report on the MBC Litigation Guidance Launch

13th October 2022 Press Release - Annual Event

In this call we hear updates from Visa on how they have implemented the MBC through ERG's a steering committee and a good deal of hard work and passion.

Dr Emma Mahoney led an informative and thought provoking workshop. As well as information on what neurodiversity is, how important support is, and what the advantages are for individuals and businesses to recognising and harnessing the diversity of thought and approach that those with neurodivergent mindsets bring, we also shared thoughts in break out rooms. We discussed where organisations are with regard to: understanding, valuing, and supporting neurodiversity; what they have been doing; and what are the barriers and opportunities in this space.

Commonwealth and Olympic Champion, Sally Gunnell joined us to take us through her story, and discussed how rest and relaxation are vital in order to excel and be at the top of your game.

Our Annual General Meeting with updates from trustees on their Annual Report to members for 2022 and the Annual Accounts for the same year, together with a summary of the key findings from our annual survey of members and a look at our Theory of Change Model which highlights what we need to do as a community to effect the change we exist to create.

A presentation on the 2023 Annual Member Survey, showing analysis, insights, and impact.

We want to make it as easy as possible for you to share the work of the MBC with your colleagues, old and new. As such, we have created this video for you to use internally, to help new recruits, (or people who might want a refresh) understand what the MBC is, and why its important to your organisation.

On this call we had an introduction and update from Richard Martin, followed by an update from Russ Martin at Ashurst on the challenges and successes they have experienced, embedding the MBC into their organisation. We also took the opportunity to interact within our signatory community by going to break out rooms and discussing what we have planned for 2023.

Mark is a consultant psychiatrist at London’s Royal Free Hospital. He is also well known for his work with the team of young Thai footballers who were rescued from a flooded cave. Mark has recently visited the boys again and has more insight into the organisational factors that enabled the groups inside and outside the cave to survive. This session looks at what we can learn in terms of resilience, leadership, and the purpose of working for and within a community.

This short animation is an excellent example of how to share MBC practices and principles in the workplace - looking at how we can be more mindful for colleagues in blended/hybrid working situations.

MBC Signatories Call Nov 16th 2021 - Welcoming new members, a brief overview from Richard Martin including learnings and requests from 121's he has been conducting with members, and updates from Carolina at PLMJ who provided great insights into mental well-being in the legal sector in Portugal, and Katie Wadsworth and Natasha Kay from Cooley, sharing their successes and challenges when implementing the Mindful Business Charter pillars.

MBC bi monthly Signatory Call September 2022

The session will help us understand what we mean by neurodiversity, and address some of the stigma associated with it. It will explore how neurodiversity affects different people, debunk some myths and language and help us to reflect on what it means for our modern workplaces – how to embrace, accommodate and celebrate neurodivergence and make those workplaces more inclusive.

We often hear that MBC is all very well but it doesn’t work when there is a big transaction and all hands are needed on deck. This just isn’t true. Earlier in 2022 we heard from Hannah Brophy at Lloyds Banking Group and Stacey Bairner about a deal they worked on together, a monster of a deal, that they approached in a mindful way, delivered on time and to the required standard and in a way that was respectful of their teams’ wellbeing. We have turned that conversation into a podcast. Thanks to Hannah and Stacey for sharing their experience.

One of the things that often gets in the way of meaningful collaboration between clients and suppliers about healthy working practices is how best to approach the subject with a client – particularly a really important client you don’t want to risk upsetting. It is all very well for us MBC champions to say you just need to get on with it and the client will be fine, but we know the reality is that many of our colleagues in the business – and this applies to law firms as well as other suppliers – have any number of concerns that might hold them back. This session therefore, is an opportunity to hear the client voice. We have assembled a panel of senior folk in client organisations who will provide their perspective and experience on how to engage with clients. The session is intended to be for anyone in your organisations who you think would benefit from this insight.

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

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

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