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.

Why Big Teams Suck

In 1957, British naval historian and management satirist Northcote Parkinson painted a cynical picture of a typical committee: It starts with four or five members, quickly grows to nine or ten, and, once it balloons to 20 and beyond, meetings become an utter waste of time – and all the important work is done before and after meetings by four or five most influential members.

As Parkinson would have it, numerous studies now confirm that, when it comes to teams, many hands do not make light work. After devoting nearly 50 years to studying team performance, the late Harvard researcher J. Richard Hackman concluded that four to six members is the team best size for most tasks, that no work team should have more than 10 members, and that performance problems and interpersonal friction increase “exponentially as team size increases.”

These troubles arise because larger teams place often overwhelming “cognitive load” on individual members. Most of us are able to mesh your efforts with and maintain good personal relationships with, say, three or four teammates. But as a group expands further, each member devotes more time to coordination chores (and less time to actually doing the work), more hand-offs between the growing cast of members are required (creating opportunities for miscommunication and mistakes), and because each member must divide his or her attention among a longer list of colleagues, the team’s social glue weakens (and destructive conflict soars). Following my earlier LinkedIn piece, findings about group size are reminiscent of psychologist George Miller’s famous conclusion that seven was a “magical number” because people could only hold “seven, plus or minus two” numbers in short-term memory. Both Hackman and Miller found that, once people start trying to deal with double digits, the cognitive overload takes a toll.

These findings help explain why the average restaurant reservation in the United States is for a party of four. Think of the last time you were at a dinner with a group of 10 or 15 people. It is difficult, perhaps downright impossible, to have a coherent and emotionally satisfying conversation that engages each member of the party all at once. Typically, the group breaks into a series of smaller conversations or a few people do all the talking and the others say little or nothing.

Some organizations learn about the drawbacks of oversized groups the hard way. Retired Marine Captain and former U.S. Senator James H. Webb explained why the “fire team” – the basic combat fighting unit – shrunk from 12 to 4 during War II. Webb wrote in the Marine Corp Gazette that this “12 man mob” was “immensely difficult” for Marine squad leaders to control under the stress and confusion of battle. Coordination problems were rampant and close relationships – where soldiers fight for their buddies – were tougher to maintain in 12-man teams. The U.S, Navy Seals have learned that four is the optimal size for a combat team as well. And, the basic work unit at McKinsey, the consulting firm, is one “engagement manager” and three other members. As Intuit’s CEO Brad Smith puts it, when it comes to teams, “less is often best.” Just like on­line retailing giant Amazon, Intuit insists: “Our development teams can be no larger than the number of people who can be fed by two pizzas,” which helps them “stay nimble and make decisions quickly.”

This lesson applies to small organizations too. Pulse News, makers of a “news aggrega­tor” app, was started in mid-2010. Communication breakdowns and misunderstandings flared-up after it grew slightly, from three to eight people. Founders Akshay Kothari and Ankit Gupta told us that, after they divided those eight among three teams, people produced better software, did it faster, and argued less. When Pulse expanded to about 12 people (working in four teams, all in the same room), each team maintained a bulletin board that captured their current work to help everyone at Pulse follow what they were doing. Every afternoon at about 3:30, each team also gave a short talk to the company about what they working on and where they needed help. Pulse relied on small teams as it grew to 25 employees and 30 million users; it is now part of LinkedIn, which bought Pulse for 90 million dollars in April, 2013.

The lesson is that, if you are on a big team that keeps screwing up, where members don’t care much about each other, and are fighting like crazy, try some subtraction or division. A Harvard Business School study by Melissa Valentine and Amy Edmondson of a large hospital’s emergency department demonstrates how powerful such moves can be. The crowd of 30 or so doctors and nurses who staffed the department at any given time were divided into multiple six person “pods,” each led by a senior doctor or “attending physician.” After the change, information about patients flowed more quickly and accurately and personal relationships improved markedly. Smaller teams reduced confusion and discomfort about who to ask for help and updates.

One nurse said, before the pods, “You had to walk across the ED all timid” and get up bit of courage and say to the doctor “Uh, excuse me?” With the pods, “Now they are in the trenches with us.” It was also easier to discern which “podmates” were responsible for particular chores and deserved credit or blame when things went well or badly.
Another nurse added:

“Now there is much more of a sense of ownership of each other. I’ll say, “My pod isn’t running well. Where is my doctor?” And he’ll be accountable to me. And the doctors will say, “Where are my nurses, who do I have today?’” People rarely, if ever, claimed each other in this way before the pods were implemented even if they were working together on many shared cases. A resident would have used more detached language like, “Who is this patient’s nurse?” – ignoring that the nurse had any relationship to him – rather than, “Where are my nurses?”

The pods also created big efficiency gains. Valentine and Edmondson analyzed data on 160,000 patients served by the Department during the six months before the pods were created and the year after. After the pods, patient throughput time plummeted by about 40%, from about eight hours (8.34) to five hours (5.29) per patient –without increased staffing levels. This drop not only reflects more efficient use of staff; think of the patients’ experience: Five hours at the hospital sucks a lot less than eight.

The upshot? As my co-author Huggy Rao and I found in our research, scaling is a problem of both more and less. Many hands do not always make for light work, especially when it comes to team size. The first question I ask when a team reports they are locked in dysfunctional conflict, suffering from indifference, making bad decisions, or missing deadlines -- or all of the above -- is “how big is it?” If the answer is more than then five or six members, especially more than than ten, some savvy subtraction or division can create striking improvements. As Valentine and Edmondson's research shows: Leaders become more effective. Efficiency improves. Interpersonal friction wanes. And strangers become friends.

Robert Sutton is a Stanford Professor and co-author (with Huggy Rao) of Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More without Settling for Less. This piece is an edited excerpt from that book. 
Posted by:Bob Sutton

How Great Companies Think Differently

Artwork: Sarah Morris, Midtown—HBO/Grace, 1999, Gloss household paint on canvas, 213.4 × 213.4 cm

It’s time that beliefs and theories about business catch up with the way great companies operate and how they see their role in the world today. Traditionally, economists and financiers have argued that the sole purpose of business is to make money—the more the better. That conveniently narrow image, deeply embedded in the American capitalist system, molds the actions of most corporations, constraining them to focus on maximizing short-term profits and delivering returns to shareholders. Their decisions are expressed in financial terms.
 
I say convenient because this lopsided logic forces companies to blank out the fact that they command enormous resources that influence the world for better or worse and that their strategies shape the lives of the employees, partners, and consumers on whom they depend. Above all, the traditional view of business doesn’t capture the way great companies think their way to success. Those firms believe that business is an intrinsic part of society, and they acknowledge that, like family, government, and religion, it has been one of society’s pillars since the dawn of the industrial era. Great companies work to make money, of course, but in their choices of how to do so, they think about building enduring institutions. They invest in the future while being aware of the need to build people and society.
 
In this article, I turn the spotlight on this very different logic—a social or institutional logic—which lies behind the practices of many widely admired, high-performing, and enduring companies. In those firms, society and people are not afterthoughts or inputs to be used and discarded but are core to their purpose. My continuing field research on admired and financially successful companies in more than 20 countries on four continents is the basis for my thinking about the role of institutional logic in business.
 
Institutional logic holds that companies are more than instruments for generating money; they are also vehicles for accomplishing societal purposes and for providing meaningful livelihoods for those who work in them. According to this school of thought, the value that a company creates should be measured not just in terms of short-term profits or paychecks but also in terms of how it sustains the conditions that allow it to flourish over time. These corporate leaders deliver more than just financial returns; they also build enduring institutions.
 
Rather than viewing organizational processes as ways of extracting more economic value, great companies create frameworks that use societal value and human values as decision-making criteria. They believe that corporations have a purpose and meet stakeholders’ needs in many ways: by producing goods and services that improve the lives of users; by providing jobs and enhancing workers’ quality of life; by developing a strong network of suppliers and business partners; and by ensuring financial viability, which provides resources for improvements, innovations, and returns to investors.
 
In developing an institutional perspective, corporate leaders internalize what economists have usually regarded as externalities and define a firm around its purpose and values. They undertake actions that produce societal value—whether or not those actions are tied to the core functions of making and selling goods and services. Whereas the aim of financial logic is to maximize the returns on capital, be it shareholder or owner value, the thrust of institutional logic is to balance public interest with financial returns.
 
Institutional logic should be aligned with economic logic but need not be subordinate to it. For example, all companies require capital to carry out business activities and sustain themselves. However, at great companies profit is not the sole end; rather, it is a way of ensuring that returns will continue. The institutional view of the firm is thus no more idealized than is the profit-maximizing view. Well-­established practices, such as R&D and marketing, cannot be tied to profits in the short or long runs, yet analysts applaud them. If companies are to serve a purpose beyond their business portfolios, CEOs must expand their investments to include employee empowerment, emotional engagement, values-based leadership, and related societal contributions.
 
Business history provides numerous examples of industrialists who developed enduring corporations that also created social institutions. The Houghton family established Corning Glass and the town of Corning, New York, for instance. The Tata family established one of India’s leading conglomerates and the steel city of Jamshedpur, Jharkhand. That style of corporate responsibility for society fell out of fashion as economic logic and shareholder capitalism came to dominate assumptions about business and corporations became detached from particular places. In today’s global world, however, companies must think differently. 

Rosabeth Moss Kanter is the Ernest L. Arbuckle Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and the chair and director of Harvard University’s Advanced Leadership Initiative. Her most recent book is SuperCorp: How Vanguard Companies Create Innovation, Profits, Growth, and Social Good (Crown, 2009).