Leadership Research Summary:
- Mindfulness training is a novel method of leader development but contrary to its rising popularity, there is a scarcity of research investigating how mindfulness training may affect leader capabilities. To gain a better understanding of the potential of a new research field, qualitative research is advantageous. We sought to understand how senior leaders experience the impact of mindfulness training in their work lives and leadership ability. The sample comprised 13 leaders (n = 11 male) working in six organizations that completed a 10-week workplace mindfulness training (WMT).
- The study conducted semi-structured interviews 6 to 12 months following course completion. We analyzed the data following thematic analysis steps and based on these findings, we devised a framework of the perceived impact of mindfulness training on self-leadership and leadership capabilities. The study shows that WMT exhibited impact on three self-leadership capacities: mindful task management, self-care and self-reflection and two leadership capacities: relating to others and adapting to change. Participants’ recounts additionally suggested effects may expand to the level of the team and the organization. The study also showed that WMT may be a promising tool for self-directed leadership development and outline avenues for future research.
Leadership Research Implications and Findings:
- The study contributes to the theory and research of leader development in three important ways. First, a main contribution of this research is that WMT can be an avenue to self-directed leader development (Nesbit, 2012). Nesbit postulated that rather than keeping up with new leadership trends, the focus should shift on giving leaders the skills to “take greater control of their development.” He identified three meta-skills: self-reflection, managing emotion reactions to feedback and self-regulation. Leaders recounted examples for all three of these categories and showed that they often went beyond self-understanding to test or implement self-change. WMT seems a promising intervention for leaders to increase self-awareness – be it awareness of the way they manage their tasks, lead a tense conversation or react to change (Day and Dragoni, 2015).
- Typically, self-awareness of leaders is increased by 360° feedback tools, yet, our results show that mindfulness training like WMT might additionally prepare leaders to better manage negative emotions to feedback (Nesbit, 2012). Mindfulness training in general is conducive to becoming aware of mechanical reactions and the accounts of WMT in particular showed that leaders gain insights into their self-views and became aware of automatic reactions. Their reports further indicated that they continued to do so 6 to 12 months post-training completion, suggesting, that they developed sustainable meta-skills that they continued to use to develop self-leadership and leadership.
- Second, the study’s results give insights into the black box of how mindfulness training may shape leader behavior and even leadership style. Our data shows that there is a potential for mindfulness training of leaders that goes beyond decreasing stress and improving resilience. As highlighted above, the themes researchers created appear to overlap with multiple constructs and operationalizations of leadership capabilities and leadership styles such as the servant, authentic, human-oriented and agile leadership style. Thus, the study contributes with this study to the development of hypotheses regarding the potential impact of mindfulness training on leadership capabilities and leadership style. Scholars may also be interested to test whether mindful leadership is conceptionally distinct style of leadership characterized by greater focus on mindfully relating to others and adaptability to change.
- Third, the study’s findings show that mindfulness training may increase self-leadership capacities which is in line with a previous study of the impact of a mindfulness-based self-leadership training (Sampl et al., 2017). Self-leadership is distinct but positively associated with active leadership styles (Furtner et al., 2013) and improvements in self-leadership aspects are thus likely to be associated to improvements in leadership style and vice versa. Similarly, the study found various cross-over points between self-leadership and leadership themes which seemed to mutually enhance each other.
- A primary goal of leader development research has been to improve leader effectiveness (Day and Dragoni, 2015). Unearthing the potential of this mindfulness training for leaders and examining its role in improving self-leadership and leadership has implications for practitioners. WMT may produce long-lasting mental and behavioral shifts in leaders and thus may be a promising intervention for self-directed leader development. Leaders were motivated by workplace-specific program elements suggesting that it’s useful to develop novel mindfulness-based trainings for leaders. However, more quantitative research is needed first to support the preliminary findings of this study.