How to Bring Mindfulness to Your Company’s Leadership
The leaders in our study became less reactive and more responsive, which in turn affected many other skills, such as regulating their emotions, empathizing with others, focusing more readily on issues at hand, adapting to the situations they found themselves in, and taking broader perspectives into account.
This, we believe, is why mindfulness training can impact the important leadership capacities of resilience, collaboration, and leading in complex conditions.
Mindfulness interventions, as long as they are combined with practice, can indeed develop leadership, and we now know why. But there remains the question about what we learned about how to design those interventions. People seeking to introduce mindfulness into leadership development should be realistic, but there are real benefits to be had. We offer the following tips for anyone designing a mindfulness program:
6 Tips for Designing a Mindfulness Program
If you want to affect your workplace, start with yourself: Develop your own personal practice daily. This helps you to get real about what it takes, particularly in relation to the trials and tribulations of practice.
Just as with any other intervention, for a mindfulness program to enable genuine change, significant parts of the organizational system need to support it. 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” is often a good starting point: It gauges interest and can build commitment to a program. But it is just that—a start. If you are keen on attaining the impacts reported in our research project, offer an extended mindfulness intervention, which supports practice over a sustained period.
Allocate a space for people to practice in the workplace—somewhere quiet and private. The well-meaning allocation of a “goldfish bowl” area, the kind of open space or glassed-in meeting room so many offices offer these days, isn’t really 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 where people bring their attention to their breath by counting them in silence) or a similar process that helps attendees choose the quality of their attention and focus on the others present and the issue at hand.
Mindfulness training is not a silver bullet. But when combined with at least 10 minutes of formal daily practice that is supported over a sustained period, it can lead to really valuable change.
Then you can say that mindfulness works.
Reference:
https://www.mindful.org/bring-mindfulness-companys-leadership/