MDE stands for Manager Development Experience. It’s a leadership program at adidas to help us become a high performance leader and provide skills, habits and tips into helping us continue the high performance trajectory of growth. Here is how the training experience change me and flicked a switch in my brain with a growth mindset.
1. Mindset
The program starts with setting us with the growth mindset. It’s based on neuroscience and psychology and how changing the way about how we think could already have an impact on our growth and performance. To me this is the most impactful of all.
It talks about how we can see the same thing in a stagnate mindset and also a growth mindset. Say when you listen to a presentation from your colleague who’s on the same level as you. They presented their latest campaign recap and showcase the strong results they achieved. Instead of comparing yourself and looking down on yourself or being envious and trying to nitpick their mistakes, you can take it as a learning opportunity. “What can I learn from them?”
I started to ask questions and find ways to learn and grow in any opportunity. Paying attention to other people and ask them about how they achieved the great campaign. Trying new things and learn from the failure to improve our neuroplasticity, where trying new things creates new neuropaths in our brain and stimulate growth. It’s such an easy thing to do but once this switch is flicked, you’d never see the things the same way.
2. Practice
Next we move on to practice, where we put the new learned skills and mindset into test. We started off with a 30-day challenge, where we picked a simple task related to sports and wellness to complete daily for 30 days. Originally I wanted to do a Kpop dance challenge, but due to my injury, I switch to voice journaling, which has been really helpful for my mindfulness. From the challenge, we learned about how habits are formed and how we can keep them going. (enter: Atomic habits from James Clear; still one of my favourite book until this day)
With the skills of habit-building, we then learn about the High performance habits — Seek Clarity, Generate Energy, Raise Necessity, Increase Productivity, Develop Influence & Demonstrate Courage. These are habits that has been proven to nurture high performance in yourself and your team. I then noticed that our team lead has demonstrated “Generate Energy” really well in our team. We have a really great team culture in place thanks to the workshop when this team was first formed 2 years ago. We implemented 2 key elements that we still pride everyday — Comfort box and Positive Vibes Manager (PVM).
Comfort box is just an easy win that lots of teams has, it’s a snack box. However, by encouraging teammates to voluntarily contributing snacks to the box, we build a nice culture of brining and sharing our likes or bring back specialties when we travel back home, and give each other a nice energy boost during a long dreary workday.
Positive Vibes Manager (PVM) is a special role we have in our team. It’s nominated every two months by the previous PVMs (first 2 were volunteers) and their role is to create positive vibes in our team. It could be small things as appreciating each other or bigger events once every 2 month (e.g. kayaking down a local river, playing golf or going to a beer festival or Christmas market) It’s really something special that generates a lot of energy in our team and makes us stand out from the organisation. I definitely see this as a great learning that I would bring forward to any future teams I’m in or I have the opportunity to lead.
3. Performance
Lastly, we have the live workouts and performance showcase. Out of 18 live workouts, which are business skills we could choose to improve on, we have to pick 3 to learn, hone and showcase the results. I picked “Increasing your business insight” , “Encourage creative problem solving” and “Building relationship with your stakeholders.”
The one I focused on the most is Increasing your business insight. Based on my last performance review with my line manager, the main development area we defined is to continue honing my knowledge and capability as a brand communication manager and grow from gaining more experience in my work. To do so, I need to continue to learn and grow more in the field of marketing. I started to pay more attention to any marketing opportunities around me. It could be great visuals in a movie. It could be a new marketing campaign from a competitor. It could also be the latest TikTok trend that’s going on. Luck for me that I’m personally interested in and passionate about our industry and all creative work. I can turn this passion and interest into business insights that help me build better campaigns.
Although I wasn’t able to dedicate as much time as I liked to this whole experience and also wasn’t able to have much reflection time with myself, my line manager and my colleagues, I felt it still made an impact on my growth as a marketing professional. To me, this is really just a start of the high performance journey and I look forward to revisit the learnings and keep reviewing them as I venture on in my career.
