Entrepreneurs often struggle with managing time and freeing themselves from firefighting and micromanagement. They also experience the ‘fear’ of ‘letting go’ leading them to be trapped in the management of their everyday operations rather than strategic thinking and leadership. In today’s episode, our guest Balaji Pasumarthy talks about how entrepreneurs can create trusting work cultures that allows them to refocus their energies on growth and scale instead of daily operations.

About our guest: Balaji’s passion is to liberate business leaders from constraints, so they can be in their flow. His expertise is in creating self driven and self organising teams. He shares his expertise in the Liberated Enterprise Creators Group Advisory Program. Through BNI and Golden Square Offices, he smoothens the process of getting clients and having a productive workspace. He did his B-Tech from IIT-Madras, and MBA from IIM-Bangalore. An entrepreneur for most of his career, he believes work needs to be joy, and entrepreneurship is about expressing your core.

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In this episode, we talk to our guest Raj Mariwala about why and how entrepreneurs struggle with mental health, and the holistic support systems that they can develop to ensure their wellbeing and resilience.

About our Guest: Raj Mariwala is Director of Mariwala Health Initiative, (MHI), a funding agency that provides a range of resources and support to organisations working in mental health interventions and advocacy. Raj serves as board advisor for the Global Mental Health Action Network, and for the Lancet Commission on Stigma and Discrimination, as well as being a board member of the NGO, Parcham, that works with adolescent girls.

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The onslaught of constant connectivity coupled with a pandemic that seems to go on forever has led to the great paradox of our lives: being simultaneously connected to tens if not hundreds of people through social media and yet feeling disconnected, lonely and alienated at work. In this episode, our guest Saugata Chatterjee talks about how organisations can leverage the power of communities for greater participation,  knowledge exchange, exponential connections  and transformative relationships.

About our Guest: Saugata Chatterjee is a multi-function, multi-domain business leader, who believes in the congruence of social good and business profit. In his current and most deeply personal project so far, he has banded with a small but exceptionally talented and passionate set of co-entrepreneurs. Together, they are building foreva, which we believe may be the world's first platform of its kind, designed to help community-focused businesses bring their dispersed and disconnected stakeholders together around shared priorities and commonalities. Before he started on this current endeavour, Saugata journeyed across a Sales role in Madura Coats, a Business role in Walt Disney, went through an intense first start-up experience, and finally evolved across several leadership roles in ITC, specifically in their Infotech subsidiary.

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Can we change the office meeting from being tiring, unnecessary and unproductive to being effective and empowering? In today's episode, our guest Sahana Chattopadhyay talks about how organizations and employees can transform their office meetings into "generative" conversations which drive the desired outcomes and also foster well-being at the workplace.

About our Guest: Sahana Chattopadhyay is a writer, speaker, coach, and facilitator. She spent 18 + years in diverse and globally distributed organizations working at the intersection of Technology, Human Potential, Organizational Learning, Complexity, and Emergence. She partners with organizations to build  capacities for emergent and ongoing learning, sense-making, collaboration, deep listening and generative dialogues to help thrive in uncertain, ambiguous, and complex times.

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Is it possible for a group of people to self-manage and lead their organisations through distributed authority and decision making? In this episode, our guest, Mohammed Ali Vakil helps us understand the remarkable power of Holacracy and how this is changing the way organisations are led and managed.

About our Guest: Mohammed Ali Vakil is the co-founder of Calm Achiever. They're the official partners for Getting Things Done (GTD) and Holacracy in India. They've trained 2000+ individuals in GTD from some of the top companies in India including Google, Deloitte, Barclays, Embassy Group & FutureGenerali. As a Holacracy Coach, Ali's passionate about helping organizations structure themselves to increase team engagement, agility and purposeful work.

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New research indicates that employees are experiencing mental stress, burnout and anxiety at work at levels that are unprecedented. What's more, the COVID-19 pandemic has further exacerbated these issues with employees being more disengaged and stressed out than ever at work. In this episode, our guest Shashi Nair explains how employees can enhance their wellbeing and engagement at work, through small everyday practices, and how organisations can enable individuals and teams to be open, engaged, trusting and authentic at work.

About our Guest: Mr. Shashi Nair is interested in wellness for himself and others. He is a seeker, practitioner, and teacher in inward journeys of personal mastery, and outward journeys of systemic change in complex systems. An alumnus of IIT Madras and IIM Bangalore, Shashi has 27 years of experience across the corporate and social sector. He spent 14 years as a CEO, scaling an IT Training and Consultancy from its infancy. He has over 15 years of experience in the social sector, particularly school education systems, having worked in Azim Premji Foundation and Azim Premji University. Currently, Shashi is a Founding Director of Viridus Social Impact Solutions, a Trustee of Kiirti Trust and a co-initiator of the Well-Being Movement. Shashi can be reached at [email protected].

Resources (links):

SMARP: 8 Employee Engagement Statistics you need to know | Infographic 

Shawn Achor: The happy secret to better work | TED Talk 

The Atlas of Emotions: An interactive tool for identifying, labelling and responding to emotions  

Gallup: State of the Global Workplace | Report 

Fredric Laloux: Reinventing Organizations | Book

Wellbeing with Viridus 

Credits:

Hosted by Deepak Menon & Sujatha Rao Produced & Edited by Sowmya Karun Cover Art by Sanjali Ranjan Intro & Outro Music by Derek Clegg

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Is it possible for a group of people to self-manage and lead their organisations through distributed authority and decision making? In this episode, our guest, Mohammed Ali Vakil helps us understand the remarkable power of Holacracy and how this is changing the way organisations are led and managed. 

About our Guest: Mohammed Ali Vakil is the co-founder Calm Achiever. They're official partners for Getting Things Done (GTD) and Holacracy in India. They've trained 2000+ individuals in GTD from some of the top companies in India including Google, Deloitte, Barclays, Embassy Group & FutureGenerali. As a Holacracy Coach, Ali's passionate about helping organizations structure themselves to increase team engagement, agility and purposeful work.

Resources:

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If you're still reading this, THANK YOU and hurry up and go subscribe!

New research indicates that employees are experiencing mental stress, burnout and anxiety at work at levels that are unprecedented. What's more, the COVID-19 pandemic has further exacerbated these issues with employees being more disengaged and stressed out than ever at work. In this episode, our guest Shashi Nair explains how employees can enhance their wellbeing and engagement at work, through small everyday practices, and how organisations can enable individuals and teams to be open, engaged, trusting and authentic at work.

About our Guest: Mr. Shashi Nair is interested in wellness for himself and others. He is a seeker, practitioner, and teacher in inward journeys of personal mastery, and outward journeys of systemic change in complex systems. An alumnus of IIT Madras and IIM Bangalore, Shashi has 27 years of experience across the corporate and social sector. He spent 14 years as a CEO, scaling an IT Training and Consultancy from its infancy. He has over 15 years of experience in the social sector, particularly school education systems, having worked in Azim Premji Foundation and Azim Premji University. Currently, Shashi is a Founding Director of Viridus Social Impact Solutions, a Trustee of Kiirti Trust and a co-initiator of the Well-Being Movement. Shashi can be reached at [email protected].

Resources:

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Join Sujatha Rao and Deepak Menon as they figure out how we can create better workplaces- to not just help us do better work, but also lead better lives at work. Every week, Sujatha and Deepak talk to a guest about new ways of thinking about and structuring workplaces. Subscribe now for more updates and visit us at www.workwisepod.com.