Why is mindfulness important for leaders?
And why today more than ever…
We live in a time of great crisis which is manifesting itself in environment, business and finance, social disintegration and increasing poverty and hardship in the world, dwindling resources, conflict, the list goes on and on. Whether we see this challenge as a crisis or as an opportunity to embrace the change and develop new models of how we live, work and trade in the world will depend largely on the kind of leadership we foster today. Digging our head into sand will not do. What is needed now more than ever is aware, creative and brave leadership endowed with vision and insight.
The leadership practice of being fully present and in the moment is one of the most difficult practices we can master.
Mindfulness is about going beyond the hierarchical conservative models and moving into the adaptive, intuitive and co-creative leadership. Mindfulness creates leaders that are self-aware, agile in the moment and deeply resonant.
In his article on Mindful leadership, George Ambler recognizes 3 key components which define mindful leadership, they are:
Ability to stay fully present in the moment
The ability to stay fully present in the moment and to respond appropriately to the situation unfolding before you requires self mastery. One wrong step and the situation could spiral out of control. To remain mindful one needs to be self aware and have the awareness of the environment and the people around you.
Self awareness
Knowing ourselves enables us to make choices how we respond to people and situations. Deep knowledge about ourselves enables us to be consistent, to present our self authentically, as we are. We trust and follow people who are real, who are consistent and whose behaviour, values and beliefs are aligned. Honing the skills of mindful attention to oneself enables us to make better choices because we recognize and deal with our internal state – thoughts, physical sensations and emotions. Our perceptions are clear, not clouded by our own filters, biases and unexplored or unacknowledged feelings. Through purposeful, conscious direction of our attention we are able to see things that could normally pass us by giving us access to deeper insight, wisdom and choices.
Environment and people awareness
For a leader, each conversation and exchange is an opportunity to gather valuable information about people, groups and cultures whilst building relationships and resonance.
The ability to be fully present, mindful of our internal state and the environment allows us to respond as true leaders. This practice is especially required when managing organisational change and crisis situations. The more we practice being present the better we are able to influence, guide and lead.
Another great example of the applied mindfulness is Dr Otto Scharmer’s work.
Dr Otto Scharmer is a Senior Lecturer at MIT and the founding chair of ELIAS (Emerging Leaders for Innovation Across Sectors), a program linking twenty leading global institutions from business, government and civil society in order to prototype profound system innovations for a more sustainable world.
Scharmer holds a Ph.D in economics and management.
In his new book Theory U: Leading from the future as it emerges, Otto Scharmer introduces readers to the concept of “presencing”. A blend of the words “presence” and “sensing”, presencing signifies a heightened state of attention that allows individuals and groups to shift the inner place from which they function. When that shift happens, people begin to operate from a future space of possibility that they feel wants to emerge.
Being able to facilitate that shift is, according to Scharmer, the essence of leadership today.
These are some of the key points that Dr Schramer illuminates:
Tapping our collective capacity
We live in a time of massive institutional failure collectively creating results that no one wants. Climate change. AIDS. Hunger. Poverty. Violence. Deconstruction of communities, nature, life – the foundations of our social, economic, ecological and spiritual wellbeing. This time calls for a new consciousness and a new collective leadership capacity to meet challenges in a more conscious, intentional and strategic way.
Illuminating the blind spot
The cause of our collective failure is that we are blind to a deeper dimension of leadership and transformational change. We are blind to a source dimension from which the effective leadership and social action come into being.
We know a great deal about what leaders do and how they do it but we know very little about the inner place, the source from which they operate.
Succesful leadership depends on the quality of attention and intention that the leader brings to any situation.
We know very little about this invisible dimension of leadership , even though it is our source dimension, and this constitutes a “blind spot”.
Slowing down to understand
At its core, leadership is about shaping and shifting how individuals and groups attend to and subsequently respond to a situation. That requires the skills of deep listening and mindfull observation.
Deep Attention and Awareness
Deep states of attention and awareness are well-known by top athletes. Bill Russell, the key player of the most successful basketball team ever, the Boston Celtics, describes it as playing in the zone. According to Russel’s description, as you move from regular to peak performance, you experience a slowing down of time, a widening of space, a panoramic type of perception and a collapse of boundaries between people..
While top athletes around the world have begun to work with refined techniques of moving to peak performance, business leaders operate largely without these techniques or indeed without any awareness that such techniques exist.
To be effective leaders, we must understand the field, or inner space from which we are operating.Mindfulness and meditation techniques offer an awareness and practice that can close this gap.
Summing up: The way we pay attention to a situation, individually and collectively, determines the path the system takes and how it emerges. On all four levels – personal, group, institutional and global – shifting from reactive responses and quick fixes on a symptoms level to generative responses that address systematic root issues is the single most important leadership challenge of our time.
For more information you can check:
There are two fundamentally different sources of cognition.
One is application of existing frameworks and the other accessing one’s inner knowing.
All true innovation in science, business and society is based in the latter. Albert Einstain famously noted that problems cannot be resolved by the same level of consciousness that created them. Instead, we begin to see the need to learn to respond from a deeply generative source.
Applied mindfulness in leadership hinges on three core fundamental movements:
- observation
- retreat and reflection (read meditation)
- spontaneous right action
It is my sincere hope that in the years to come we will learn to move away from repetitive, downloading, hierarchical models of leadership and into the fluid creative zone of leading from the inner space of the generative source. Using Otto Scharmers words: learning to co-initate, co-sense, co-presence, co-create and co-evolve into the more integrated, sustainable, socially just and spiritually fulfilling future.
