How to bring mindfulness to your company’s leadership

Mindfulness is the height of fashion in leadership development circles. At a recent conference in the field, we saw a missionary-type fervor among some trainers who claimed that mindfulness could fix every ill in the organizational world.

It’s easy to succumb to enthusiastic hyperbole, but there is in fact very little data on the impact of mindfulness training on leadership development. Despite plenty of anecdotal support from leaders who have tried mindfulness, the current enthusiasm derives mainly from research conducted in clinical contexts that don’t much resemble modern organizations.

To find out the actual impact of mindfulness on leadership, we designed a Mindful Leader program that studied 57 senior business leaders in two cohorts. Participants learned why mindfulness might be relevant to their leadership practice, how to practice it and how to apply their learning to their individual leadership challenges.

Participants were all assigned daily home practice of mindfulness meditation and other exercises for every day that the course ran. We tracked whether and how they practiced, as well as the impact the program had on a variety of leadership capacities. We sought to understand exactly how their attendance was helping them with their real work issues — if at all.

So, does mindfulness training develop leaders?

Yes and no.

Mindfulness interventions, as long as they are combined with practice, can indeed develop leadership, by honing your skills in resilience, collaboration and leading in complex conditions. But it requires real practice, and there remains the question about how to design these interventions. We offer the following tips for anyone designing a mindfulness program:

— If you want to affect your workplace, start with yourself: Develop your own personal practice daily.

— Just as with any other intervention, significant parts of the organizational system need to support a mindfulness program. If you encourage mindful leadership behavior in training but, for example, promote those who display behaviors counter to mindfulness, then your mixed messages might result in stasis.

— A formal “taster session” gauges interest and can build commitment to a program. But if you are keen on maximizing impact, offer an extended mindfulness intervention that supports practice over a sustained period.

— Allocate a space for people to practice in the workplace — somewhere quiet and private. An open space or glass-walled meeting room won’t really be conducive.

— Encourage people to practice together if they wish to. You can even facilitate group-based, audio-instruction-guided meditation at a particular time of the day.

— Start your meetings with a “mindful minute,” 60 seconds for people to bring their attention to their breath by counting them in silence, or a similar process.

Mindfulness training is not a silver bullet. But when combined with formal daily practice that is supported over a sustained period, it can lead to really valuable change.