What Impact Does a Leader’s Mindfulness Have on Her People?

What Impact Does a Leader’s Mindfulness Have on Her People?

When I’m asked to run mindfulness courses or sessions with leaders and other managers I draw at times on the ideas that Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee set out in their book Resonant Leadership (Harvard Business Review Press, 2005). In particular, I’m drawn to the distinction they make between resonant and dissonant leaders. Putting this really briefly, resonant leaders amplify the qualities of their people – drawing out the best in them. Dissonant leaders, on the other hand, inhibit their people and get in their way.

I often start my presentations on Mindful Leadership by asking the people I’m working with whether they’ve ever worked under a dissonant leader. So far, they all have. I then ask them to share in small groups what that was like. The energy in the room rises, as people let off steam. Gathering the group back together after a few minutes I ask a simple question: “When you worked under a dissonant leader, were you able to give of your best at work?” And the answer of course is “no”.

I guess we all have our own intuitive sense of why that might be. We know how it feels to be unsettled by a leader – how that narrows our capacity and restricts our field of vision. Another time I’d like to write something about the neurobiology of such experiences. For now, though, I want to talk about some work Jochen Reb and his colleagues have been doing, looking at how a leader or supervisor’s mindfulness impacts on their peoples’ performance and well-being[i].

Jochen has recently come to Cambridge, where I live, to work at the University’s Judge Business School and I’m enjoying getting to know him. He’s doing some great work on the theme of mindfulness at work, including intriguing studies around mindfulness in negotiation. But for now let’s stick with his research on the impact of a leader’s mindfulness on employee performance and well-being.

In two separate studies, Jochen and his colleagues recruited a number of leaders and supervisors to see how their levels of mindfulness appeared to affect their people. The first study looked at a sample of 96 leaders from a range of industries and spread across upper and middle management and first-line supervisors. Using the well-tried Mindful Attention Awareness Scale that was developed by Brown & Ryan in 2003, they measured their levels of mindfulness. As is usual in self-report measures, the leaders were asked to rate how they felt they were doing on a range of issues that were picked out by the items in a questionnaire. Examples of the items that the leaders are asked to rate in the Mindful Attention Awareness Scale are “It seems I am ‘running on automatic,’ without much awareness of what I’m doing” or “I find myself preoccupied with the future or the past”. The leaders rated themselves on a scale of 1 to 6 from “almost always” to “almost never” across a number of such items and the scores their answers gave provided a measure of their self-reported levels of mindfulness and awareness.

Jochen and his colleagues then went on to measure the well-being of those leaders’ people. To begin with, they looked at their self-reported levels of emotional exhaustion. Here, using another set of measures, the employees rated statements like “I feel emotionally drained from my work” or “I feel used up at the end of the workday” on a scale of 1 to 7. The researchers also looked at the employees’ work-life balance, asking them to rate items like “I feel successful in balancing my paid work and family life” or “I am satisfied with the balance I have achieved between my work and life” on a scale of 1 to 9.

Then they asked the supervisors to rate the same employee’s performance on a scale of 1 to 6 using statements like “This person exceeds/meets/does not meet standards for performance.” And finally they measured the employees’ levels of deviance – a kind of negative performance measure. Examples here are “this employee publicly embarrassed someone at work” and “this employee has taken property from work without permission”, rated on a scale of 1 to 5 where 1 is never and 5 is weekly.

What Jochen and his colleagues found was that when leaders or supervisors showed higher levels of mindfulness then their people showed greater well-being and higher performance – that is, they had less emotional exhaustion and a more contented sense of their own work-life balance; their supervisors rated their performance more highly and they were seen to be less deviant at work.

It is interesting to notice that it wasn’t just issues such as the tendency to emotional exhaustion that were affected by leaders’ mindfulness but even issues such as the employee’s work-life balance. That shows how potentially powerful the role of leaders’ mindfulness is in the workplace. It’s also interesting that the leaders’ mindfulness was particularly strongly associated with employee deviance.  This may suggest that employees appreciate a mindful leaders’ tendency to be fully with them when they are seeking their attention. Mindless leaders, by contrast, who are absentminded in their interactions with employees, may be seen as not being respectful and as incompetent.

In a second study, Jochen and his colleagues recruited 79 leaders or supervisors, again across a range of industries and at different levels. Again they rated them against the Mindful Attention Awareness Scale and they measured their people’s well-being and performance – this time using a different set of measures.

They looked at job satisfaction, rating statements like “all in all I am satisfied with my job” on a scale of 1 to 7. And they examined the extent to which their work met their psychological needs. Examples of the items included here are “I feel like I can make a lot of inputs to deciding how my job gets done,” “I really like the people I work with,” and “I do not feel very competent when I am at work.”

Again they measured the employees overall job performance, as in the previous study, but now they added a few other measures. The supervisors were asked also to rate them on a scale of 1 to 7 across items such as “arrives at work on time” and “completes work requested as soon as possible.” And they measured the employees’ organizational citizenship behaviour. On a scale of 1 to 7, supervisors were asked to rate items such as “shows genuine concern and courtesy toward co-workers, even under the most trying business or personal situations” and “for issues that may have serious consequences, expresses opinions honestly even when others may disagree.”

Again, where leaders or supervisors exhibited higher mindfulness, then their people exhibited higher well-being and greater performance across all of these measures.

It’s not entirely clear why mindful leadership has these beneficial effects and further research might extend these findings by examining in greater depth and breadth the mechanisms linking a leader’s mindfulness to employee well-being and performance.

It seems that leaders who are fully present when interacting with their subordinates get a better understanding of their employees’ needs. That increases their capacity of offer them the support they need. A leader’s mindfulness can also create a sense of interpersonal fairness in employees. Future research could examine how perceived supervisor support and interpersonal justice provide a link between mindfulness and important employee outcomes. It could be that improvements in the perception of justice at work and higher levels of supervisor support, amongst other factors, contribute to a generally favourable perception of the relation between the leader and the employee.

Mindful awareness also allows leaders to better regulate their emotions; and it increases their awareness of themselves, others and their environment. This leads to their being seen to be more authentic. Authentic leaders are those who have, and are perceived by others as having, awareness of themselves, of others, and of their context; as well as being optimistic, hopeful, trusting, and positive. Mindful leaders are more authentic – and seen to be so.

All of this points to really exciting opportunities for leadership development. More mindful leaders bring out the best in their people. And mindfulness can be trained. Just a short course of training will raise a leader’s level of mindfulness. As Jochen’s study shows, that can make a real difference.  I’d love to take a group of leaders, give them a mindfulness course, and measure their people’s levels of well-being and performance in subsequent months. I bet you it would rise.

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[i] Reb, J., Narayanan, J., & Chaturvedi, S., (2012) “Leading Mindfully: Two Studies on the Influence of Supervisor

Trait Mindfulness on Employee Well-Being and Performance.” Mindfulness, 3:3.