Читать книгу The Mindful Leader - Bunting Michael - Страница 9

Within a few years of starting my journey with mindfulness I was fortunate to meet two wonderful mentors who taught me the connections between mindfulness and leadership. As mindfulness became my deepest passion, they invited me to teach and make a living from the work. This was at a time when very few organisations offered transformational leadership development programs, let alone mindfulness training. Back in the late nineties mindfulness was a radical idea, even stigmatised. I took a great risk when I left my own thriving paper merchant business and joined them in the trailblazing venture of teaching mindfulness and leadership to business and government.

But it worked, and far exceeded my expectations. The programs were radically successful. Before any research on mindfulness was available, people connected with the elegant common sense of mindfulness in a leadership and transformational context, and the results were usually life changing.

The key is the integration of mindfulness and leadership. Just being mindful is not enough. Even with serious mindfulness training we can still be poor leaders. But when mindfulness is fully integrated into leadership, exponential progress can be made. This book marries research-based mindfulness practices and leadership behaviours to provide a practical model for improving your leadership and your life. For me, that has been the greatest reward of this work – supporting leaders to truly transform themselves and their teams.

I don't think the leaders I've worked with had much idea what they were taking on when they said yes to authentic, mindful leadership and personal development. They did not realise that the familiar ground they were standing on would be shaken. We like the word transformation, but the process is a whole lot grittier than the advertising. As one of my favourite awareness teachers once put it, ‘Most of us are not prepared to sign up for transformation, we just want to become a caterpillar with wings. But that is not a butterfly.' The caterpillar does not survive the process of becoming a butterfly.

Transformation is the territory of true leadership. The process of reinvention calls for a spirit of adventure. A transformational leader is willing to stay young, a beginner, an adventurer inside and out. They are also ordinary people. The work of true transformation is just that: work. It takes no special talent or skill. But it does take an uncommon determination to face our fears, reactivity, avoidance patterns and insecurities and to keep going. It takes strength.

Developing as a leader is about cultivating our inner strength to stay true under fire, to ask questions we don't know the answer to, to stay balanced when our world is turning upside down, to stay kind and respectful when the heat of anger and frustration is coursing through our veins, to courageously hold ourselves and others accountable when we want to slip into avoidance and self-justification. It is about enabling ourselves to connect with others with authentic compassion, to truly understand them, to see their struggles and aspirations, the deepest desires of their hearts, their greatest potential. And, perhaps above all, it is to stay real, to keep coming back to honesty and humility.

My friend Barry Keesan, Senior Vice President for General Code, a municipal codification service company in the US, explained to me how feedback is critical to this process. People are reluctant to give leaders feedback because they fear the consequences. This can create a skewed view of reality in the leader – it's easy to start believing you are perfect and everyone is engaged. That's a dangerous way to lead, especially if you are the last to know when your people are not truly aligned. So you have to really work at getting honest feedback.

Barry said, ‘You have to make yourself vulnerable, admit your fears, mistakes and uncertainties, and communicate to people that you welcome honest feedback. And that sends a message that you value them, that their opinion matters and that you are humble enough to look at your own actions. For me, it's actually a validation that I am doing something right when my team gives me honest feedback. It's paradoxical, but true. It means I have a good relationship with my team when they tell me when I did something that was out of line.'

When I expressed my surprise at Barry's attitude, given how rare it is, he explained that what has enabled him to stay open is years of mindfulness practice. Mindful, inspiring leaders like Barry are authentic and courageous enough to put down their mask. They have found a deeper place of self-acceptance in themselves, an acceptance of their humanity. They know all too well their faults and failures. They rarely excuse them or rationalise them. When they go off track (as they inevitably will) they are willing to really listen to the feedback they receive. They are people we can trust and relate to. We warm to them because they have cultivated an awareness we are drawn to.

But don't misinterpret their kindness and authenticity for complacency or softness. They can be tough when they need to be. Their compassion can be fierce. They will hold you accountable for commitments and will not avoid the tough conversations. They will stretch you beyond your capacity.

Jeff Weiner, the CEO of LinkedIn, a strong advocate of mindful leadership and judged by one rating service to be the best CEO in the US, is a great example of this. When asked in an interview how he handles poor performance he replied, ‘You do it in the most compassionate and most constructive way you know how.' Jeff then goes all in with those people to help them close their performance gap, and if it does not work out they are invited to leave, but with the support to find something better. As he put, ‘And if it doesn't work out, we're gonna figure out another role for you here hopefully, and if that doesn't make sense, I'll do everything I can to make sure you're successful elsewhere.'1

The greatest leaders cultivate a paradoxical and profoundly effective combination of strength and compassion. It is less science than art. But make no mistake, the science backing mindfulness and its impact on leadership is incontrovertible.