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.
Why does mindfulness matter for leadership and the bottom line?
A critical factor in creating and sustaining job satisfaction, productivity and a healthy bottom line is workplace engagement. Research firm Towers Watson reports that organisations with high rates of engagement consistently outperform their sector benchmarks for growth across a range of financials, including more than double the stock performance of the Dow Jones and Standard & Poor's Index for five years running. Great Place to Work's data shows that between 1997 and 2013 the best companies performed nearly two times better than the general market. Furthermore, the value of their 100 best companies grew by 291 per cent between 1998 and 2012. Compare that with the 72 per cent growth of the Russell 3000 Index and the 63 per cent growth of the S&P 500 Index. Great workplaces perform better and have substantially stronger bottom lines.
Leadership is the cornerstone of engagement. According to research performed by leadership experts Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner, my friends and co-authors of Extraordinary Leadership in Australia and New Zealand, nothing impacts engagement more than the behaviour of leaders. As much as 37 per cent of employee engagement can be attributed to the boss's leadership behaviour. Leading from and embodying values and integrity, inspiring a shared vision and common purpose, staying open to continually learning, challenging oneself and others, enabling and developing others, building trusting relationships and recognising others for great work – these exemplary leadership qualities produce tangible results.
Jim and Barry have analysed responses from more than 2.5 million people across the world and found that leaders who exhibit these behaviours have employees who are significantly more committed, proud, motivated, loyal and productive. In groups with exemplary leaders, engagement scores are 25 to 50 per cent higher than in other groups.2 In one study, researcher and author Richard Roi looked at 94 large companies (with an average annual income of US$17.4 billion) and compared those in which senior leaders applied exemplary leadership behaviours to a greater extent with those companies applying them to a lesser extent. The companies with great leadership enjoyed an average stock price growth of 204 per cent over ten years and a net income growth of 841 per cent. For companies in which leadership behaviour was weak, the average stock price growth was 76 per cent, and their net income decreased by 49 per cent.
Note that these are behaviours, not technical competencies. When leaders fail, it is rarely related to technical competence. The x-factor in leadership is behaviour. And the key to transforming leadership behaviour is the cultivation of genuine mindfulness married with leadership research and practice. This enables you to truly see and manage your behaviour in real time, which is when it really matters.
Daphne Guericke, Vice President of Content Analytics at Appen Inc., a language technology consulting firm in Seattle, Washington, shared with me how mindfulness impacts her leadership behaviour on a daily basis. First and foremost, she said, it helps her to understand herself. It reveals her triggers and where her values may be misaligned. It helps her observe how she reacts to thing. As she put it, ‘I need to be very aware and attentive to what's going on with me so I can be attentive, aware and present for others. We all have crazy lives and it's easy to just go, go, go, constantly fighting fires and dealing with issues. Mindfulness practice ensures I don't lose myself or my values in the chaos. When I'm more present with people it creates a much more genuine interaction rather than just intellectual problem solving. It really helps me to connect with people on a deeper, more human level. We're all hungry for that because it's so easy to feel like a cog in a wheel in the corporate world.'
A number of research studies have proven how mindfulness has a measurable impact on behaviour. Cognitive neuroscience studies show that it actually creates structural and functional changes in the brain. Observed behaviour changes include:
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Blodget, H. (2014, September 22). LinkedIn's CEO Jeff Weiner reveals the importance of body language, mistakes made out of fear, and one time he really doubted himself.
Kouzes, J., & Posner, B. (2014).
