Developing Mindful Leaders for the C-Suite

 

 

Time Magazine recently put “The Mindfulness Revolution” on its cover, which could either be seen as hyping the latest business fad, or as signaling a major change in the thinking of executive leaders. I believe it’s the latter.

 

The use of mindful practices like meditation, introspection, and journaling are taking hold at such successful enterprises as Google, General Mills, Goldman Sachs, Apple, Medtronic, and Aetna, and contributing to the success of these remarkable organizations. Let’s look at a few examples:

• With support from CEO Larry Page, Google’s Chade-Meng Tan, known as Google’s Jolly Good Fellow, runs hundreds of classes on meditation and has written a best-selling book, Search Inside Yourself.
• General Mills, under the guidance of CEO Ken Powell, has made meditation a regular practice. Former executive Janice Marturano, who led the company’s internal classes, has left the company to launch the Institute for Mindful Leadership, which conducts executive courses in mindfulness meditation.
• Goldman Sachs, which moved up 48 places in Fortune Magazine’s Best Places to Work list, was recently featured in Fortune for its mindfulness classes and practices.
• At Apple, founder Steve Jobs — who was a regular meditator — used mindfulness to calm his negative energies, to focus on creating unique products, and to challenge his teams to achieve excellence.
• Thanks to the vision of founder Earl Bakken, Medtronic has a meditation room that dates back to 1974 which became a symbol of the company’s commitment to creativity.
• Under the leadership of CEO Mark Bertolini, Aetna has done rigorous studies of both meditation and yoga and their positive impact on employee healthcare costs.

These competitive companies understand the enormous pressure faced by their employees — from their top executives on down. They recognize the need to take more time to reflect on what’s most important in order to create ways to overcome difficult challenges. We all need to find ways to sort through myriad demands and distractions, but it’s especially important that leaders with great responsibilities gain focus and clarity in making their most important decisions, creativity in transforming their enterprises, compassion for their customers and employees, and the courage to go their own way.

Focus, clarity, creativity, compassion, and courage. These are the qualities of the mindful leaders I have worked with, taught, mentored, and interviewed. They are also the qualities that give today’s best leaders the resilience to cope with the many challenges coming their way and the resolve to sustain long-term success. The real point of leverage — which though it sounds simple, many executives never discover — is the ability to think clearly and to focus on the most important opportunities.

In his new book Focus, psychologist Dr. Daniel Goleman, the father of emotional intelligence (or EQ), provides data that supports the importance of mindfulness in focusing the mind’s cognitive abilities, linking them to qualities of the heart like compassion and courage. Dr. Goleman prescribes a framework for success that enables leaders to build clarity about where to direct their attention and that of their organizations by focusing on themselves, others, and the external world — in that order.  Cultivating this type of focus requires establishing regular practices that allow your brain to fully relax and let go of the anxiousness, confusion, and pressures that can fill the day. (Editor’s note: here is Daniel Goleman’s related HBR article, The Focused Leader.)

I began meditating in 1975 after attending a Transcendental Meditation workshop with my wife Penny, and have continued the practice for the past 38 years. (In spite of this, I still do mindless things like leaving my laptop on an airplane, but I continue to work on staying in the present moment.) All of our family members meditate regularly. Our son Jeff, a successful executive in his own right, believes he would not be successful in his high-stress job were it not for daily meditation and jogging.

Meditation is not the only way to be a mindful leader. In the classes I teach at Harvard Business School, participating executives share a wide range of practices they use to calm their minds and gain clarity in their thinking. They report that the biggest derailer of their leadership is not lack of IQ or intensity, but the challenges they face in staying focused and healthy. To be equipped for the rapid-fire intensity of executive life, they cultivate daily practices that allow them to regularly renew their minds, bodies, and spirits. Among these are prayer, journaling, jogging and/or physical workouts, long walks, and in-depth discussions with their spouses and mentors.

The important thing is to have a regular introspective practice that takes you away from your daily routines and enables you to reflect on your work and your life — to really focus on what is truly important to you. By doing so, you will not only be more successful, you will be happier and more fulfilled in the long run.

Bill George

Bill George is professor of management practice at Harvard Business School and former chair and CEO of Medtronic.

The Top 10 Workplace Trends Of 2013

Top 10 Workplace Trends of 2013

This year, through primary research through my company and secondary research by a variety of trusted sources, I’ve tracked ten major workplace trends affecting the world of work. They focus on the generational shift, the rise of freelancing, the skills gap and more. From a professional perspective, understanding these trends will give you the leg up as you make career choices. From the corporate perspective, these trends will help you make more informed business decisions. Here are my top ten:

1. Millennials will rise up. Despite all the reports of the poor economy and the high unemployment rate for Gen Y, they will start to get jobs again. They will become nearly 30% of the American workforce next year and that number will increase substantially in the next five to ten years. As millennials enter and boomers retire, new life will be breathed into corporations and policies will change rapidly.

2. Working from home becomes mainstream. We’ve heard some companies trusting their employees enough to let them work from home. In 2013, companies will realize the cost savings and the productivity increase and give their employees more flexibility. While in years past flexibility programs were viewed as a perk, they will become more standardized and expected. One of the best examples is Aetna. 47% of their 35,000 employees work from home and they have saved an estimated 15% to 25% on real estate costs at an annual savings of about $80 million.

3. Emphasis on employee engagement. Employers are still having major retention problems and it’s costing them a fortune. In 2013, they will focus more on employee engagement to increase their retention rates. An October survey by MSW Research and Dale Carnegie Training found only a mere 29% of employees are fully engaged. One example is when MGM  Resorts put on an entire show for their employees this month.

4. More boomers retire. The shift in workplace demographics is finally upon us. Boomers will start to leave the workplace and retire next year and it’s about time. This will free up positions for Gen X and Gen Y to take leadership roles. The question is which generation will seize their roles? My research next year may give you an answer to that question.

5. Intrapreneurship is embraced. Companies are starting to understand how entrepreneurial Gen Y is and in order to compete with startups, intrapreneurship programs will take off. Aside from EY, PwC, DreamWorks, Microsoft, Google and Facebook, LinkedIn has now created their own program called “[in]cubator.” Employees with an idea can organize a team and pitch their project to executive staff once a quarter.

6. Freelance nation booms. We keep hearing about the surplus of freelancers out there and it’s just the beginning. Next year, there will be millions more freelancers, replacing full-time workers. Companies will hire experts to solve problems instead of full-time employees and save on benefit packages. This is due to the economy and how corporations operate now. One third of American workers are freelancers, reports NBC News.

7. The skills gap shrinks. As of this year, there are over 12 million people who are unemployed and 3.6 million open positions, reports the Bureau of Labor Statistics. American Manufacturers have 600,000 unfilled positions and 34% of companies say they are having trouble filling open positions. I see this skills gap shrinking as new talent enters the workforce, companies work with schools to train the next generation workforce and people realize that they need new skills in order to get jobs.

8. Internal hiring takes off. It costs companies 1.7x as much to hire an external candidate. The top reason why millennials leave companies is lack of career opportunities. My research shows that companies are starting to give opportunities to their employees over anyone else. This also means that job seekers will suffer. Internal hiring is good for employee morale, saves them money and is quicker (weeks versus months).

9. Employees become social advocates. Companies will start to leverage their talent in order to recruit and market. They will finally realize that they can just use their employees to get the word out instead of wasting money on advertising. Companies will become publishers and in some capacity compete with the likes of magazines and newspapers. IBM, for instance, has 32,000 employee blogs that touch on every area of their business.

10. Women start to outpace men at work. One billion women will enter the workplace in the next decade. Research shows that they are more educated than men and many are saying that they will start taking leadership positions away from them. Sheryl Sandberg and Marissa Mayer are just the beginning. Look for more females to break into top roles next year and beyond.

Dan Schawbel is a workplace expert, keynote speaker and the New York Times bestselling author of Promote Yourself.