Alumni Spotlight: Effortlessly forging her own path as a leadership coach
Sneha Mandala is using her industrial engineering degree and the exposure to diversity at UIC to create her own career path while being unapologetically herself. She is thriving as the senior leader in learning and development at Fanatics and consultant on work culture, leadership, and employee performance for corporate and tech leaders outside of fanatics.
The UIC alumna also presented a TEDx Talk called How to make work feel more effortless, which introduces people to ideas for thriving in the work environment and has more than 109,000 views.
Mandala earned her master’s degree in industrial engineering at UIC in 2016 and immediately landed a position working with robotics at Amazon. After several years, she discovered that her best and most inspired work came from finding her flow, and she became obsessed with researching how a flow state leads to peak performance.
“Working at Amazon made me realize that I needed to switch my career for my mental health, as well as to find my purpose at work,” Mandala said. “And that meant leaving my life of technology and engineering behind and embracing more of the people side of the corporate world. That’s when I switched to coaching, leadership training, and learning development.”
While she switched career paths, she still finds herself using her industrial engineering education.
“I am supporting the tech team with their growth needs and helping coach them,” she said. “I would say that my background in engineering is something that has given me an opportunity to connect better with the tech folks. We have about 1,000 people, (at Fanatics) and my chief people officer specifically said, ‘You have a great background in engineering and technology, and I want you to dive deeper with the tech teams.’”
Mandala also is working with a mentor who told her that she has much more to contribute beyond her 9 to 5 job. Throughout the last decade, Mandala was filming herself talking about leadership and decided to work with that topic and her experience at UIC and Amazon to develop a TEDx Talk.
“I thought I should stand up for something and represent a single pointed message. It got me thinking: What do I stand for? What is something that I absolutely cannot compromise on? And for me, I want to wake up every day and spend my day effortlessly,” she said. “Effortlessly doesn’t mean that I don’t want to put in the work. It means that work doesn’t feel like work.”
Mandala lived most of her life in India, which is very diverse culturally but is a homogeneous society, too. Being a young brown female at UIC was her first true exposure to a diverse community.
“UIC was my first American cultural experience, and that opened an opportunity for freedom. There are so many things that I can explore and learn on my own, and I would call it a changing point in my life,” she said. “That is when I decided I’m not going to live with restrictions. I’m going to live with freedom and I’m going to live each day effortlessly.”
While she doesn’t mention UIC in her TEDx Talk, her positive experience in the engineering department is the core of her life message.
“In order to perform at your peak, you need to experience an optimal state of mind which is called flow,” she said. “If you’re doing what you love in a way that feels the most natural to you with drive and authenticity, you will create the perfect conditions to get into a flow, which will increase your productivity and performance and reduce burnout.”
Learn more about Mandala, working effortlessly, and finding the flow state at https://snehamandala.com.