Chapter 13
In This Chapter
Flourishing in your leadership role
Discovering how you can become a more mindful leader
Leading your organisation mindfully
Boosting your resilience using mindfulness
Most people spend a huge amount of their time at work. It stands to reason, therefore, that work should make you feel good about yourself, give you a sense of personal mastery and be fun. Unfortunately, many find work to be stressful, demotivating and frustrating. Great leaders identify what motivates people and match their skills to those needed by the organisation, thus creating a win–win situation. In order to create this situation, leaders need to be in a fit state to lead others.
Ideas about what makes a good leader have changed dramatically over time. In the 1920s and 1930s, trait theories argued that leaders were born. From the 1940s to the 1960s behavioural theories argued that you can be taught leadership – it is just a matter of adopting the right behaviours when attempting to lead. You can be autocratic (‘I am the boss, do it this way’) or democratic (‘Let’s decide how we should do this’).
In more recent times, contingency theories (such as situational leadership) argue that no one leadership style is correct and that as a leader you need to adopt the correct leadership style for the situation. Transformational theories view leaders as agents of change. As a transformational leader you can ‘transform’ the workplace via team work or team development, or by acting as an agent of change or a strategic visionary.
Human potential theories are the latest development and are concerned with the performance of the leader from a human perspective. These theories incorporate authentic leadership, resonant leadership, mindful leadership and neuro-leadership. Human potential theories are concerned with maximising your potential as a leader by being true to your values, and finding out how to work in harmony with yourself rather than trying to be something you’re not. Mindfulness is a core element of human potential theories of leadership.
If you look at leadership theories over the last 70 years or so, you can easily see how each leadership theory has built on the last theory. You can also see why human potential theories are gaining in popularity. We live in a VUCA world – volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. This new world may go part of the way to explaining why some leadership theories are no longer effective. Yet many leaders, and you may be one of them, continue to base their leadership behaviours on outdated models. Why? Because like everyone else you probably do a fair amount of your work on auto-pilot. Over the years you’ve probably developed habits, which have been rewarding, and you repeat these patterns of behaviour with little or no conscious thought.
Adopting new, human potential theories of leadership can be scary, as you discard the security blanket of your old methods of leadership and take a leap into the unknown of being yourself, and maximising your potential as a leader. In this brave new world, you need self-knowledge and the courage to be true to yourself. In return, you can shed the heavy burden of trying to be someone who you are not in favour of being the best you can be.
Being a leader is a challenging role, especially in times of recession and economic crisis. Being a senior leader can also be a lonely and isolating experience. At times when you feel under pressure and uncertain about the future, you’ll find keeping your team motivated and engaged tough. As a leader, you may also feel less inclined to seek support and guidance from your peers. Catastrophising as thoughts spiral round and round in your head is all too easy.
Imagine missing a report deadline at work. In reality this situation is hardly life or death, is it? But your mind is likely to make up its own story about what’s going on, blowing the matter out of all proportion. As you discovered in Chapter 5, your cavemen threat response can have a serious impact on your performance, health and happiness. By practising mindfulness and learning to observe thoughts as mental processes, you can change things.
Take the example of Dave and Ken, two middle managers from the same organisation that I (Juliet) have coached (names changed). Both applied for the same senior leadership role. An external candidate was appointed, so neither got the job. How they dealt with the situation was very different.
Dave’s thoughts started to spiral down as he catastrophised about the situation. He tried to get on with work, but his mind kept on wandering to what went wrong at the interview, and how this might threaten his career.
Ken, however applied mindfulness to his feelings of failure and rejection. He noticed himself starting to spiral down and his body becoming tense. He practised mindfulness for a short while, calmly observing his thoughts without reacting or thinking about them further, recognising the impact of his thoughts on his emotions and then noticing how his body feels. He released the tension he felt and then focused his attention on the present-moment sensation of breathing. Ken returned to his work. He acknowledged feeling sad and a little angry about missing the promotion, but did not let these thoughts and emotions have a negative impact on his work and well-being.
This example graphically illustrates how mindfulness can help you, as a leader, pick yourself up after a fall, avoiding falling into a downward spiral of despair. Mindfulness also teaches you that the problem is never the real problem! Your perception and response to life’s challenges is what can throw you out of the frying pan and into the fire!
While many things are beyond your control at work, you always have a choice about how you respond. Choosing how you respond is empowering – it hands control back to you.
Leadership can be challenging, and its easy to forget to look after yourself. Here are three simple exercises that can help you balance work demands with the need to care for your well-being.
Think about the little things that make you feel good in life. Examples may include stroking a pet, hugging a loved one, someone appreciating something you’ve done or seeing the first flowers of spring.
Ask yourself if you can give these small pleasures a little extra attention. As you experience them, try pausing for a moment to really soak in the good they provide. Allow your body time to release feel-good hormones so that you can derive maximum benefit from these pleasurable experiences.
Soaking in the good is free and takes little time. It can also reduce your threat response, activating your parasympathetic nervous system, flooding your system with feel-good hormones. You may be amazed at the impact it has on your life.
When you smile, you’re telling your body that everything is fine. This simple action turns off your threat system. Your body immediately stops pumping adrenaline around your body, your blood pressure drops and feel-good hormones such as serotonin is released.
Do you find it easier to demonstrate empathy and kindness to others rather than yourself? Maybe you dismiss the idea of self-kindness as selfishness?
Sometimes you need to be selfish for your own preservation! Try to avoid beating yourself up for mistakes you make, things you get wrong or things you should have done. Being kind to yourself can help reduce or eliminate the detrimental effects of fear, guilt and shame.
Taking time out to consciously accept yourself and make friends with the person you really are helps you increase your happiness and creativity. This time out is especially important if you’re a leader. Self-acceptance also helps to train your brain to work in approach mode rather than avoidance mode. A befriending exercise such as ‘Cultivating Kindness’ in Chapter 5 helps you to deactivate your threat system, making it easier to concentrate and gain a fresh perspective. Befriending yourself can be really hard when you first practise it, but does get easier over time and is definitely worth working on.
For leaders, the ability to identify and overcome outdated mental programming without triggering the threat system is vital. If you’re really serious about being a better leader, and thriving rather than surviving, you need to prioritise time to learn mindfulness and embed practice into every day you spend at work.
Human potential models of leadership all centre around the concept of being the best you can be, maximising your innate leadership qualities while being true to yourself and your values. All human potential theories incorporate mindfulness in some shape or form.
This section briefly explores models and ideas around becoming a more mindful leader.
Authentic leaders are leaders who demonstrate the genuine desire to understand their own leadership behaviour in order to serve the needs of the organisation and its staff most effectively. Their behaviour and decisions are based on strongly held values and beliefs. By upholding these values and beliefs, they increase their personal credibility and win the respect and trust of their team, colleagues and peers.
Authentic leaders actively encourage collaboration and the sharing of diverse viewpoints, leading in a way that others perceive and describe as ‘authentic’. Authentic leadership is all about leaders as individual people. It can be likened to a self-awareness approach to leadership and leadership development.
According to Bill George, former CEO of Medtronic and author of Authentic Leadership (Jossey Bass, 2004), authentic leaders are motivated by their mission, not your money. They tap into your values, not your ego. They connect with others through their heart, not their (sometimes artificial) persona. Authentic leaders should live their lives in such a way that they would be proud to read about their behaviour on the front page of their local newspaper.
George defines authentic leadership as having five dimensions. Authentic leaders:
He believes that acquiring these five dimensions isn’t a sequential process, but happens throughout a leader’s life, often over a long time period.
Mindfulness is a key element of authentic leadership. It underpins all five dimensions described above. It helps leaders increase their self-awareness and self-regulation. It helps them to be kinder to themselves and to protect their values.
This activity will give you an indication of how ‘authentic’ your leadership style is.
Score the questions below as follows: 0 = not at all like me, 1 = a little like me, 2 = mostly like me, 3 = an accurate description of me.
Enter your scores in the table below:
Interpret your trait score as follows:
To work out your overall score, add up the figures in the right-hand column. The authenticity of your leadership style is shown below:
If possible, repeat the exercise with one or more colleagues, peers or members of your team. Don’t forget to emphasise the need to be honest! Do your team members see you in the same way that you see yourself?
Resonant leaders are individuals who manage their own and others’ emotions in ways that drive success.
The idea behind resonant leadership is that, rather than constantly sacrificing themselves to workplace demands, leaders should find out how to manage these challenges using specific techniques to combat stress, avoid burnout and renew themselves physically, mentally and emotionally. Many of these techniques are derived from mindfulness practices.
Resonant leaders:
The latest thinking on effective leadership suggests that leaders need self-awareness (a clear idea of what makes you tick, your strengths, weaknesses, beliefs and motivations) and must be well-grounded and centred.
In addition, leaders need to be able to manage how their mind deals with multiple demands and constant connectivity so that they can maintain peak performance and well-being.
Mindfulness helps you to manage how their mind by regulating and focusing your attention, making you more aware of your thoughts and emotions. Dan Siegel, clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA School of Medicine and co-director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center, refers to mindfulness practice as ‘good brain hygiene’, which is as important to your health as brushing your teeth.
If you want to explore this subject further, two key authors in the field of mindful leadership are Michael Carroll (The Mindful Leader, 2007) and Michael Chaskalson (The Mindful Workplace, 2011).
As you process the continuous stream of information coming in from the world around you, your brain selects the things it deems most relevant and often dismisses the remainder. Academics and researchers argue that business performance is strongly influenced by this continuous stream of individual and organisational ‘meaning-making’.
Mindfulness encourages a state of active awareness, openness to new information and willingness to view situations from multiple perspectives. Adopting a mindful attitude allows you to suspend judgement until you have all the facts. Doing so refines your ‘meaning-making processes’, giving you a more balanced view of the world around you.
This state of active awareness cannot be achieved by simply grasping the idea of mindfulness as an intellectual concept. To fully benefit from mindfulness, you need to regularly apply it to your workday practices. When you gain sufficient knowledge and confidence, you can help others around you by introducing a few simple mindfulness practices into their working lives. We now look at practical ways to incorporate mindfulness into your work as a leader.
If you’ve been in a leadership or management role for any period of time, you’re probably well versed in various models of decision making. What you may not be familiar with is looking at your mindset and unconscious mental programming when making decisions. As discussed throughout this book, your thoughts have a huge impact on how your body feels (for example, tension) and emotions (for example, happiness and fear). Similarly, holding tension or anger in your body has an impact on your thoughts. This impact is often unconscious, but can have a profound impact on the decisions you make.
A number of researchers have concluded that, when making decisions, emotions and negative information have a huge impact. Surprisingly, numeric information, analytic and logical arguments often have less impact. See Chapter 2 for more on the benefits of mindful decision making.
By practising mindfulness you become more aware of the different factors at play when making a decision, including the impact of your own meaning-making process, which leads to less subjectivity in decision making.
Try this activity to improve your approach to making decisions. Follow these steps:
Chapter 7 has lots of information about mindful communication. The key thing to remember is that you’re likely to spend a great deal of time on auto-pilot. You may be physically in the same room as the person you’re communicating with, but at some point your mind is likely to wander elsewhere. As a leader, you need to make a real effort to be 100 per cent present when communicating. You need to train your brain to notice when your mind wanders to the past or future or to matters unrelated, and gently bring it back to the present moment. In this state of present-moment awareness, you’re better able to pick up verbal and non-verbal cues from your audience. You’re better able to identify emerging areas of support and build on them. Similarly, you can pick up on areas of dissent and take time to explore or address them. Most importantly, people feel that you’re really listening to them and that you value their time and input.
A key part of being a leader is encouraging people to voice their thoughts and contribute to discussions and meetings. When you’re in a mindful, present state of mind, you’re better able to encourage people to share their ideas and support them in working collaboratively.
Defaulting to old ways of thinking and behaving is all too easy when you’re trying to solve problems – after all, they’ve served you well in the past. Mindful problem solving takes a more holistic approach.
After practising mindfulness regularly for eight weeks or longer you should be able to use techniques like this one much more rapidly, as you develop the ability to quickly tune into the present moment and observe things more objectively.
As a leader, you’re the one who sets the tone in the workplace. Being true to yourself and your values is important; that is, you need to be authentic.
If you truly value people’s creativity and innovation, make sure that working practices reflect and celebrate these aptitudes. For example, your company could set up a system that identifies and rewards staff who are innovative. Google staff are allocated time each week to work on their pet projects or ideas that interest them. This freedom has led to the development of many of Google’s most profitable products.
If you value mindfulness, and want to cultivate a more mindful workplace, consider:
As Mahatma Gandhi famously said, ‘be the change you want to see’. If you want to encourage openness and honesty, be open and honest yourself. Many leaders paint a vivid vision of what an organisation is like to work for, but fail to follow this vision through by making sure that the fundamentals are in place to make the vision a reality.
Mindfully take a long hard look at your organisation, and what it looks like from an employee’s perspective. Does it really match up to the vision painted of it? Ask yourself what you can do to change things for the better, embodying your beliefs and values.
Did you know that a lack of control over your work can be a major source of stress? The Whitehall II Study found that leaders experience the lowest level of stress in organisations. This low level may be in part because they have a high level of control over their work. While leaders do have a higher degree of control over their work than many other employees, the high pressure, fast-changing environment that most leaders work in can be a major source of stress. Stress is now reported to be the number one cause of workplace sickness and absence. A huge volume of research carried out over the last 40 years demonstrates the effectiveness of mindfulness to reduce stress.
Mindfulness can build your resilience in the following ways:
While you cannot always control the challenges and stressors that arise at work, you do ultimately have 100 per cent control over how you respond to them. However, gaining this control can take practice!
Reading a book about mindfulness is all very well, but is no substitute for actually practising it and hardwiring it into your brain. The best way to cope well under stress and pressure is to develop regular mindfulness practice. After discovering and practising the basics for eight weeks, as little as ten minutes formal practice each day can help you take control of your responses to life’s challenges. Here are a few hints and tips to help you build your resilience.
The trick to maintaining peak performance is recognising when your performance starts to drop off and taking steps to restore it. The Yerkes–Dobson curve, described in detail in Chapter 5, illustrates this scenario.
To maintain peak performance, try this exercise:
Mindfulness teaches you how to manage your own mind. It shows you that you’ve a choice in how you respond to life. Just because you’ve always done things in a certain way doesn’t mean that you have to continue to do so. Mindfulness is also about creating a balance in your life between things that nourish you and things that deplete you.
You may find that, when you get particularly busy, you drop things that seem unimportant such as playing a musical instrument, playing a sport, spending time with friends or little pockets of time to yourself. The more you spiral away from being mode into doing mode, the busier you’re likely to become. Here are a few mindful strategies you can try to rejuvenate your life:
Stop surviving and start thriving by experimenting with different aspects of mindfulness. Your investment in time and effort will pay handsome dividends.