Leadership today is hugely demanding. The pace is relentless and constant change is one of the few things we can be certain of. In the welter of information coming their way, leaders must stay focussed on what matters most and, at the same time, reach out to their teams to make meaningful, human connections – often with people they rarely, if ever, meet face-to-face.
It’s a challenge.
Can mindfulness training help? Does it make meaningful differences to a leader’s capacity for personal resilience, for their ability to collaborate, and their capacity for agile decision-making in the midst of complexity?
A research programme I conducted in 2016 with colleagues, assessing the impact of mindfulness training on a group of around 70 senior business leaders,[1] set out to discover the answer. In brief, we found that it does… if you work at it!
The leaders on our programme who learned systematic mindfulness practices and kept them up for two-months, doing around 10-minutes a day, developed three key capacities. We called these AIM: Allowing, Inquiry and Meta-awareness.
Allowing has two aspects: wisdom and compassion
The wisdom aspect is the ability to let what is the case, be the case. All too often we don’t do this. We all share a tendency to wish or expect that things should be somehow other than they are.
“If only X, then everything would be OK.”
For X you can substitute pretty much anything. “If only that person wasn’t on my team…If only I had a different boss….If only I’d made a different decision 3–weeks ago…If only they hadn’t…”
We run internal dialogues like this over and over. And they don’t help us very much.
We also tend to over-use ‘should’:
“They should do that…, we should be like this…, I should be somehow different…”
We have this largely unconscious tendency to judgementalism that is often slightly harsh and almost always unrealistic.
The wish, that reality, right now, were somehow not what it is, get us nowhere.
Of course, we can do things to bring about change, but we can only do that by locating ourselves firmly with what is. Only when we accept that things are as they are, and allow them to be as they actually are, can we begin to enact change.
The wisdom aspect of ‘allowing’ sees that very clearly.
The compassion aspect of ‘allowing’ involves letting other people be themselves, without judging or criticising them. It involves approaching others with a wish for them to thrive, in their own terms. Along with that, comes a willingness to actively do things to bring that about.
Inquiry stands for an attitude of engagement in the present moment. It involves an open-hearted curiosity about, interest in, each moment of experience. What’s going on – right now?
That calls on us to explore our own and others’ experience. What am I feeling right now? Why might I be feeling that – what does it point to? And what is their experience like? Colleagues, direct-reports, customers, family members – how do they see things? What is it like for them?
How are we feeling? What are we sensing? ‘Inquiry’ is an attitude of engagement with our senses and our emotions in each moment – not just in our flow of thinking.
Meta-awareness is the ability the step back slightly from the stream of experience and see it as a stream of experience.
Most of the time we’re all just going along immersed in experience. It’s rare to step back and, for instance, to see that we are thinking when we are thinking. Generally, we just think – unreflectingly.
But when we can see that we’re thinking when we’re thinking, we’re much less likely to mistake our thoughts about a situation for facts about the situation. Thoughts are just thoughts – they’re not facts – and each of us will have different thoughts about what is happening inside us and in the systems all around us.
With meta-awareness we develop the ability to try out different thoughts and see how they fit. We can see that others might think differently, and that is allowed. We can expose our thoughts to critique, not rest in a belief in our own intrinsic rightness.
Meta-awareness also involves the ability to step back from the systems we’re immersed in. We come up off the dancefloor from time to time and get up on the balcony to watch what is happening in the wider systems we’re a part of.
Learning to AIM
Allowing, Inquiry and Meta-awareness are three key leadership capacities. Our research tells us that these are trainable skills, and that mindfulness training can make a measurable difference.
That training isn’t just about learning some new ideas and concepts. It’s about actively developing a set of capacities.
The good news is that all it involves is learning a few mindfulness practices, discovering how these apply in leadership contexts, and then investing around 10-minutes a day to keep it all up.
The return is well worth it.
[1] Reitz, M., Waller, L., Chaskalson, M., Olivier, S., & Rupprecht, S. (2020). Developing leaders through mindfulness practice. Journal of Management Development.