Janice Marturano, in her excellent book Finding the Space to Lead…A Practical Guide to Mindful Leadership describes the mindful leader as one who “embodies leadership presence by cultivating focus, clarity, creativity and compassion in the service of others. Marturano writes that “mindful leadership does not ask you to change everything and everyone around you. It teaches you to be more fully aware of what is here and invites you to experiment with intentional choices that make small changes”. Regular mindfulness practice helps “you keep learning, and you keep strengthening and cultivating your innate ability to focus, see clearly, be creative and embody compassion”.

The author believes that the four fundamentals of leadership excellence – focus, clarity, creativity and compassion – “originate within our minds and hearts and we can strengthen and cultivate them through mindfulness leadership training”. Here are some of Marturano’s thoughts about the four fundamentals of leadership excellence:

  • Focus – In simple terms, when we get distracted, we lose productivity.  Furthermore, when we lose focus in a conversation or meeting, we lose connectivity with others who will likely feel disrespected.
  • Clarity – We’re so busy in our lives that we only see what we expect, hope or want to see. The price of this is that “we do not use our innate capability to challenge our own assumptions and to see what is actually here”. Marturano strongly believes that “we need leaders who are aware of their own filters and conditioning. We need them to notice the critical voice in their head, their fears of the unknown their discomfort with risks, their fear of failure and their propensity to seek the safety of old models”.
  • Creativity – Marturano quotes Debra Kaye’s research in Red Thread Thinking that “we need to remove ourselves periodically from “task-based focus””. The author also quotes William Duggan of the Columbia Business School in his books Strategic Intuition and Creative Strategy that “recent brain science has taught us that creativity requires some slow time for the brain and that “presence of mind gives you better ideas””. She writes that “a constant stream of thinking actually gets in the way of wisdom that lies deep within each of us, what we have learned and experienced over time and stored because of its importance”.
  • Compassion – Marturano writes that “our compassionate mind recognizes that our empathy arises from the understanding that we all share a common humanity”.

Marturano recommends that mindful leaders take a “purposeful pause” in their lives which she defines as “a moment in the day when you notice the swirl and choose to intentionally pay attention”. She endorses a mindfulness communication methodology offered by Gregory Kramer in his book Insight Dialogue. It involves a four-step process that can occur in seconds once it becomes ingrained:

  • Pause – Check in with yourself and “notice the sensations of your breath or the feelings of your feet on the floor to ground you to the present”.
  • Open to what is here, actually here, rather than what you imagined or hoped would be here. This is actually the most difficult step.
  • Listen deeply and “redirect your attention when you notice the quality of your attention waning”.
  • Speak the truth with the intention to do no harm. In today’s organizations, this requires that a leader creates a “culture that truly makes it safe for each person to speak his or her truth”.

Mindful leadership involves seeing one’s thoughts and emotions clearly. The author writes, “We give our thoughts too much weight. We often take them as gospel truth when, in fact, they are simply random ideas that may or may not be true”.  Thus, “in the development of leadership excellence, the next step in training the mind invites us to use thoughts as the objects of attention”. Furthermore, emotions can be “sources of great wisdom – the kind of wisdom that helps us connect with our own suffering, or actually acknowledge for more than a second the people and events that led up to the feeling of joy you are experiencing in this moment”.

Finding the Space to Lead…A Practical Guide to Mindful Leadership does an excellent job describing the practice of mindfulness as a key 21st-century leadership necessity.