During the health crisis in France, more and more people turned to meditation. Among our friends at the meditation app Petit Bambou, the number of new subscribers per day rose from 5,000 to 15,000 during the lockdown. Mathieu Ricard, Christophe André, Fabrice Midal and other meditation teachers hosted regular live events to initiate the general public and offer practice time to thousands of French people. Mindfulness meditation is often seen as a way of managing everyday stress and generating higher states of well-being. Thousands of scientific studies on the subject show a strong correlation with reduced anxiety and depression, an improved immune system, and enhanced memory. This scientific approach, and the creation of specific protocols such as MBSR (Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction, developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn in 1979), have contributed to greater public awareness of these practices. In recent years, we’ve also seen a growing interest in mindfulness from the corporate world. For the past six years, we’ve been working on this topic ourselves, supporting managers in their initiation and development of mindful leadership. We’ve also observed a backlash in the debate that accompanies the current popularity of this practice, which is worth questioning. Despite this, for our team, which has run over 600 workshops and seminars based on these practices for people at all levels of the company – from telephone operators to salespeople, from executive committees to boards of directors – mindfulness is the most interesting and effective way of putting people back at the heart of the company.To understand this, we need to go beyond the idea that mindfulness is primarily an anti-stress tool, to explore its philosophical characteristics in greater depth.Here are a few examples of interesting ideas for nurturing mindful leadership.
Mindful leadership makes it easier to navigate complexity.
The corporate world is overflowing with paradoxes, and it demands of us, as leaders, an ability to accept variable speeds controlled by forces outside our decision-making power. It asks us to remain human while achieving ambitious goals, to walk a fine line between investor priorities and respect for social dialogue, to create coherence and meaning when we don’t have control over all the factors that affect our business. Mindfulness in its essence enables us to embrace the globality of a situation while certain questions remain unanswered. For the duration of the practice, we are invited to accept a situation as it is at the moment, letting go for a while of our problem-solving. Practice gives us the opportunity to explore other perspectives, to make the path and the collective experience more important, and to free ourselves from the result as the only indicator of success.
Mindful leadership refreshes eyes dulled by long, arduous experience.
Over time, leaders accumulate a wealth of experience that informs their decisions and enables them to apply a range of expertise. On a personal level, leaders also often go through difficult times, carrying out major projects that never see the light of day, or being made redundant following management changes, even though they have risen to challenges in the service of a strategic plan. At the same time as this experience is essential, it can also be cumbersome, preventing us from being creative and innovating new forms of leadership in our historical market. In the current period, which calls for rapid and far-reaching transformations of business models, mindfulness gives us the opportunity to experiment with new ideas outside mental shackles, to give the company a future. By looking with “new eyes” (Theory U, Otto Scharmer), this practice invites us to let obsolete ideas die, in order to create space for the birth of new ideas. Even in the midst of turmoil, practising leaders can access important intellectual and emotional resources.
Mindful leadership nurtures the leader’s ethic.
The business environment is also ethically complex. For example, the phenomenon of “washing” is currently very tempting for companies (greenwashing, happywashing, socialwashing, greatwashing, etc.). This strategy directs precious resources towards short-term, superficial solutions that are potentially dangerous for a brand’s credibility. The practice of mindfulness invites leaders to create specific ways of working that enable them to detect when a strategy is “dissonant” with the company’s raison d’être. Through regular self-encounters, mindfulness cultivates awareness and offers a source of courage to activate leadership that transcends the temptation of short-term vision.
Mindful leadership generates profound transformation.
At a time when companies and their employees are suffering from the fashions of the “liberated company” and the dogmas of collaborative working, mindfulness applied to corporate transformation enables us to find paths that are less radical, more respectful of the reality of the people involved in change, and more adapted to the unique culture and history of each company. Placing a “trendy” method on a company that is in a state of submissive inertia can also be experienced as violent and absurd, and produce a counter-productive result, even when the intention is to be more human and give meaning. Because mindfulness invites deep acceptance of reality as a starting point for all change, approaches to change that are rooted in mindfulness focus first and foremost on the cultural root that generates inertia, and take into account the system that “protects itself” through immunity to change (Robert Kegan).
Conclusion
Mindful leadership is a group of practices that invite leaders to take a different path, more in alignment with who they are at their deepest core, more in touch with their resources for innovation, more in activation of collective intelligence – without denying the realities of their power and responsibilities. For a leader who finds himself at the head of a strategic plan to transform the company, or who is helping his company navigate a major crisis, mindfulness is an interesting and powerful path. To discover mindful leadership through our executive coaching program, contact us.
In parallel with our coaching programs, we have decided to pass on the coaching and consulting approach that drives us at Connection Leadership through a training program. To become a Consultant Transformation Coach, we invite you to visit The Mountain, our transformation coaching school. Some useful links https://www.challenges.fr/club-entrepreneurs/confinement-l-appli-star-de-meditation-petit-bambou-decolle_705310 https://www.presencing.org/assets/images/theory-u/TU-ExecSum-French.pdf https://store.hbr.org/product/immunity-to-change-how-to-overcome-it-and-unlock-the-potential-in-yourself-and-your-organization/1736 https://societyforpsychotherapy.org/ethics-and-mindfulness/
