Become A More Mindful Leader
The key is awakening to your mindsets
Posted on 11-30-2018, Read Time: Min
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Every day, you make dozens of significant decisions that influence your effectiveness as a leader. These decisions could include:
- How to respond to a subordinate after s/he made a mistake that was costly to the organization?
- What do you do with a free hour after a meeting was just cancelled?
- Whether or not to listen to and implement a change suggested by a fellow employee?
- How to give feedback in a way that results in greater engagement and improved performance?
It turns out that 90% of the time leaders’ decisions and subsequent actions are driven by their non-conscious automated processes (e.g., habits, biases). In other words, for much of leaders’ daily life experiences, they operate mindlessly. While this is cognitively efficient, it is likely that leaders’ mindless operation and processing is preventing them from being more effective and successful.
A better approach is to operate more mindfully. Mindfulness is a state where leaders are able to monitor their information processing, and as they do so, they gain agency to adjust what information they process and how they process it, making them able to respond to their world in a much more flexible, conscious, and effective way.
Let me demonstrate the value of mindfulness to leadership by using a recent client as an example.
Meet Dave
Dave is a leader of a small non-profit organization that helps unprivileged youth and young adults gain employment. When I first met Dave, he considered himself to be a great leader. But after interviewing his staff, it was clear that Dave’s evaluation of his leadership was a bit exaggerated. What Dave initially failed to recognize as that he operated largely mindlessly and that he possessed four common non-conscious desires that drove him to make decisions and engage in behaviors that he felt were best, but were actually detrimental to the work environment.These non-conscious desires included:
- Looking good
- Being right
- Avoiding problems
- Doing what is best for himself
So, when situations arose that required Dave to make a decision, he was non-consciously predisposed to deal with the situations in a way that helped him look good, feel right, avoid problems, and do what is best for himself.
For example, on several occasions, his employees presented him with suggestions to improve upon decisions he had previously made (e.g., changing the pricing structure of a service, a new offering to provide to clients). In each of these situations, his non-conscious desires to be seen as looking good and being right led him to automatically, mindlessly and defensively shut down these suggestions. This is because implementing these suggestions would require him to acknowledge that his initial decisions were not optimal (i.e., his prior decisions were not right).
In these situations, Dave felt justified in his handling of these situations and that he had dealt with the situations in the best way possible. But unknown to Dave, his employees saw these situations as being very frustrating and his defensive reactions to his employees’ suggestions led them to have lower levels of engagement.
The Value of Mindfulness
In order for Dave to become a better leader, it became necessary for him to enhance his mindfulness. Doing so led to the two primary benefits of mindfulness:
1. Mindfulness allowed Dave to behave more consciously. By understanding and reducing the habitual and reactive responses that he typically engaged in, a more mindful Dave was able to be more choiceful, intentional, and regulated in how he thought about and navigated the various circumstances he found himself in.
2. It is impossible to operate consciously 100% of the time. But, what mindfulness also did for Dave is that it helped him to become more aware of his typical non-conscious automated processing, which allowed him with the ability to adjust and improve such processes.
Mindsets: The Key to Becoming a More Mindful Leader
Some common and general ways of improving one’s mindfulness include meditation, breathing, and yoga. While research has shown that these practices enhance mindfulness, they are limited in their effectiveness because they lack structure, tools, and a language to be able to evaluate our non-conscious automatic processes.
A ground-breaking way to enhance one’s mindfulness is to consider a personal attribute that is foundational to our non-conscious automatic processes: Our mindsets.
Mindsets are our mental lenses that selectively organize and encode the information we process, which in turn, orients us toward a distinct way of understanding experiences and guides us toward corresponding actions and responses. In other words, our mindsets are our mental fuel filters. Every day we are bombarded by thousands, if not millions, of stimuli. And it is mindsets that filter select information into our brains, which then goes on to shape our thinking, learning, and behavior.
Whether or not leaders are aware of their mindsets, they possess specific mindsets that non-consciously dictate how they operate, and thus, how effective they are as a leader. But, if leaders can awaken to their mindsets, they can become more conscious of how they operate and they can gain the ability to improve their non-conscious processing.
Learning about his foundational mindsets is what allowed Dave to become a more mindful and effective leader.
A ground-breaking way to enhance one’s mindfulness is to consider a personal attribute that is foundational to our non-conscious automatic processes: Our mindsets.
Mindsets are our mental lenses that selectively organize and encode the information we process, which in turn, orients us toward a distinct way of understanding experiences and guides us toward corresponding actions and responses. In other words, our mindsets are our mental fuel filters. Every day we are bombarded by thousands, if not millions, of stimuli. And it is mindsets that filter select information into our brains, which then goes on to shape our thinking, learning, and behavior.
Whether or not leaders are aware of their mindsets, they possess specific mindsets that non-consciously dictate how they operate, and thus, how effective they are as a leader. But, if leaders can awaken to their mindsets, they can become more conscious of how they operate and they can gain the ability to improve their non-conscious processing.
Learning about his foundational mindsets is what allowed Dave to become a more mindful and effective leader.
Four Sets of Mindsets
There are four sets of mindsets that, for decades, have been demonstrated to dictate how leaders think about and navigate the situations they find themselves in. Each set ranges on a continuum from negative to positive, and thus all leaders possess a mindset somewhere along each continuum. These mindset sets include the following:
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These mindsets non-consciously dictate leaders’ desires and automatic processing in the following ways:
These mindsets non-consciously dictate leaders’ desires and automatic processing in the following ways:
- Fixed & Growth Mindsets
- Leaders with a fixed mindset seek to look good causing them to avoid challenges and failures
- Leaders with a growth mindset seek to learn and grow, leading them to embrace challenges and failures as opportunities to develop and improve
- Closed & Open Mindsets
- Leaders with a closed mindset seek to be seen as being right, causing them to shut down the ideas and suggestions of others
- Leaders with an open mindset seek to find the truth and to think optimally, leading them to seek out new perspectives and ideas
- Prevention & Promotion Mindsets
- Leaders with a prevention mindset seek to avoid risk, causing them to focus primarily on not losing and avoiding problems
- Leaders with a promotion mindset see risk as being necessary for success, leading them to focus on attaining specific goals and reaching specific destinations
- Inward & Outward Mindsets
- Leaders with an inward mindset seek to do what is best for themselves because they see themselves as being more valuable and important than others around them
- Leaders with an outward mindset seek to do what is best for those they lead because they see them as being valuable partners
Becoming More Mindful by Awakening to One’s Mindsets
To help leaders become more mindful by awakening to their mindsets, I have developed a free personal mindset assessment.
By taking the mindset assessment, Dave was able to discover the mindsets that were non-consciously driving his leadership. It provided him with a framework and a language that had two specific benefits for his leadership. First, it guided him to operate more consciously in the moment-to-moment situations that he found himself in. Second, it allowed him to consciously change and improve his natural non-conscious processes.
While Dave is still working on staying consistent with his new positive mindsets, he now recognizes that his prior “best” was limited by his mindsets. And, by awakening to his mindsets, he feels as though he is a much more mindful leader, with his “best” yet to come as he works toward continually improving his mindsets.
By taking the mindset assessment, Dave was able to discover the mindsets that were non-consciously driving his leadership. It provided him with a framework and a language that had two specific benefits for his leadership. First, it guided him to operate more consciously in the moment-to-moment situations that he found himself in. Second, it allowed him to consciously change and improve his natural non-conscious processes.
While Dave is still working on staying consistent with his new positive mindsets, he now recognizes that his prior “best” was limited by his mindsets. And, by awakening to his mindsets, he feels as though he is a much more mindful leader, with his “best” yet to come as he works toward continually improving his mindsets.
Author Bio
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Ryan Gottfredson, Ph.D. is currently a leadership and management professor at the Mihaylo College of Business and Economics at California State University-Fullerton (CSUF). As a respected authority and researcher on topics related to leadership, management, and organizational behavior, Ryan has published over 15 articles across a variety of journals including: Journal of Management, Journal of Organizational Behavior, Business Horizons, Journal of Leadership and Organizational Studies, and Journal of Leadership Studies. His research has been cited over 1,450 times since 2013. Also, Ryan has been featured in popular press outlets including Association for Talent Development and Training Industry. Visit www.ryangottfredson.com Connect Ryan Gottfredson |
Book: Becoming an Effective Leader: What You Need to HAVE, BE, KNOW, & DO
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