Dr Megan Reitz discusses the findings of her latest research, which offers clues to HR on how to make mindfulness a reality at work
I would be surprised if you haven’t heard of mindfulness. With an avalanche of books, apps, articles and training programmes flooding the HR scene over the last year, it would have been difficult to miss.
But I would also be surprised if you weren’t beginning to assume that mindfulness might be the answer to many of your organisational challenges, such has been the hopeful enthusiasm accompanying this subject.
Mindfulness is a choiceful and open-hearted awareness of yourself, others and the world around you. It is the capacity to purposefully step outside of the stream of our experiences and bring our attention to this present moment. There are several informal practices that have been recommended for developing mindfulness such as walks in nature, exercises focused on gratitude and undertaking particular daily tasks – such as showering or having your first cup of tea of the day – in a present-moment, focused and attentive manner.
While research undertaken with clinical populations suggests that people who practise meditation over time, often using audio downloads for guidance, become more mindful, research in organisational and leadership contexts has been minimal.
As the clamour to introduce mindfulness practices into organisations increased, at Ashridge we felt it was high time that we answered some critical questions: does mindfulness improve leadership effectiveness? If it does, how does it do so? And what level of meditation practice is required?
We studied 57 senior leaders who attended an eight-week ‘mindfulness programme’. This included four workshops with tuition, practice, feedback around various mindfulness meditations and application of mindfulness to leadership contexts. They were also assigned home practice between the workshops. I led the programme jointly with Michael Chaskalson, a mindfulness teacher with more than 40 years of experience (as well as being a leadership development researcher and facilitator, I also have an established personal meditation practice).
For the first time ever, the research included a wait-list control group, which means the group was measured at two points in time, but half the group was measured before and after the training, and the other half measured without the training. This process identifies far more robustly what the effect of the training is on outcomes.
If you are considering implementing mindfulness training it is important that you hear the good news and the bad news.
First, the good news: mindfulness meditation and training can significantly improve critical leadership capacities relating to resilience, collaboration and decision-making in complexity. There are three practical ‘meta-capacities’ that are repetitively trained during meditation. First, the capacity for ‘metacognition’: to choose, at crucial times, to observe, in the moment, what we are thinking, feeling and sensing. Second, ‘curiosity’ that ignites our desire to tune into our experiences. Third and finally, the attitude of ‘allowing’, which helps us to accept current reality with compassion towards ourselves and others.
These meta-capacities, our participants explained, enabled a small space to open up in the midst of their automatic reactions, which, in turn, developed a number of cognitive and emotional skills including focus, empathy, emotional regulation, perspective-taking and adaptability to context. Given how important these skills are in our organisations today, we therefore have reason to assume mindfulness training would be an essential aspect of our organisations’ development strategy.
This is where we have to tell you the bad news – or at least the cautionary news.
We found that the extent to which these skills were developed depended upon practice time. The more the leaders practised in their own time, the more significant the outcomes. Those who practised for more than 10 minutes every day, on average, progressed significantly better. This means that if your intervention is simply a one-off workshop on wellbeing you must be realistic about what changes you can expect it to instigate.
Furthermore, even if you run a longer-term training programme, through listening to our leaders’ discussions we realised that finding even 10 minutes in their day was extremely challenging. Busyness, lack of routine and lack of support from colleagues can make finding the time and discipline to practise difficult.
Practically, therefore, our research suggests that your training should encourage practice through, for example, facilitating multi-session training, helping participants to develop a routine, ensuring they receive maximum support from their colleagues and giving them input from trainers experienced in the highs and lows of sustaining practice over time.
If you do this successfully, mindfulness training can lead to the development of skills that are critical to organisational effectiveness in the 21st century.
Dr Megan Reitz is associate professor of leadership and dialogue at Ashridge Business School, and is the author of Dialogue in Organizations (2015)