Leading Mental Health Clinic Launches Founder Development Programme

It’s easy to overlook how difficult the mental side of founding and growing a startup can be. As well as the day-to-day work of running the business, you have to think about how to manage the relationships, how to ensure your rapidly growing business has a positive culture at its heart, and find time to make vital decisions about how rapidly to expand.

Previously, founders have learnt how to do these things as they went along, often making significant mistakes along the way.

Now though, London mental health and wellness clinic The Soke has created a first-of-its-kind Founders Development Programme specifically designed to give company founders the skills and knowledge they need for business success.

The Founders Development Programme is specifically designed to give company founders the skills and knowledge they need for business success

What is the Founders Development Programme?

The Soke’s Founders Development Programme is based on research from Harvard Business School. This research identified things such as appointing key talent, managing culture, and ethical dilemmas as the most important skills for founders of fast growth businesses.

However, as The Soke founder Maryam Meddin points out, these crucial skills are all too rarely taught:

“Whilst many founders may believe that they naturally possess the necessary characteristics for successful leadership, the reality is that few come to the fundraising table with the array of skills needed to successfully lead an organisation from inception to growth and beyond.”

The Founders Development Programme teaches these skills, with modules taught by a multidisciplinary team of psychiatrists, psychologists, therapists, senior leadership coaches and media experts.

What does the Founders Development Programme teach?

The core modules of the programme include:

• Psychological assessment
• Leadership vs Management
• Practicing emotional and social intelligence
• Communication
• Conflict management
• Creating and sustaining corporate culture
• Exerting influence
• Training and delegation
• The pro-active model for decision making
• Key relationship mapping
• Skills needed for the board and investors
• Financial knowledge for non-financial people
• Media training
• Systemic psychotherapy

For more information on the Founders Development Programme, and to sign up, contact The Soke via its website.

What is The Soke?

The Soke (whose founder Maryam Meddin contributed to last year’s Business Idea on the feeling economy) is a private mental health and wellness centre based in South Kensington, London.

One of the centre’s key goals is to combine mental health and wellbeing services with professional coaching – tackling common issues like depression, anxiety and corporate wellbeing through a holistic, multidisciplinary approach.