In today’s world, we need mindful leadership more than ever, but there are still few scientific studies which directly support evidence of the impact of mindfulness training on leadership. Megan Reitz, an Associate Professor of Leadership and Dialogue at Ashridge Executive Education at Hult International Business School, and Michael Chaskalson, one of the pioneers of the application of mindfulness in leadership and in the workplace, examine the path of implementing mindfulness training in company leadership.
From Harvard Business Review :
Mindfulness is the height of fashion in leadership development circles. At a recent conference in the field, we saw a missionary-type fervor among some trainers who claimed that mindfulness could fix every ill in the organizational world. It’s easy to succumb to enthusiastic hyperbole; one HR director we spoke to was characteristically delighted to be introducing a two-hour workshop to her board of directors to help them become more resilient, more focused, and more open to challenge.
But hopes like these are justified more by wishing than by any reliable evidence. There is in fact very little data in relation to the impact of mindfulness training on leadership development. Despite plenty of anecdotal support from leaders who have tried mindfulness, the current enthusiasm for it derives mainly from research conducted in clinical contexts that don’t much resemble modern organizations.
From the perspective of leadership development, there are three urgent questions that need to be answered if the enthusiasm (and the usefulness of mindfulness in a leadership context) isn’t to dissipate.
We need to know:
- Does mindfulness training actually “develop” leadership?
- If it does, how does it do so? What are the mechanisms that make it effective?
- And how do we design interventions that actually work?
As we explained in our previous article, to begin to answer these questions we designed a Mindful Leader program involving fortnightly workshops, three of which were face to face and one of which was a shorter virtual meeting. In all, the research studied 57 senior business leaders in two cohorts. Participants learned why mindfulness might be relevant to their leadership practice, how to practice it, and how to apply their learning to their individual leadership challenges.
Read the full article here
