Leadership is a well-traversed topic in terms of books, articles, podcasts, and yes, blog posts. Much of that content pertains to leadership styles and how they approach teams and challenges differently. Situations when an authoritative leader like Elon Musk is more likely to be successful than an empathetic consensus builder like Joe Biden, for example. Given the bounty of educational material on those topics already, I want to explore here a quality of leadership that I think is the basis for guiding a team through an emotionally fraught, complex challenge without destroying the team or individual team members in the process.
Our culture places a lot of value on leading from instinct. It is often seen as the mark of an exceptional leader that they can figure out the right course of action with a minimal set of facts or advice. To be sure, I believe that all decisions end up as gut calls, because data cannot make decisions for us. The leaders with the best overall statistics, however, take in as much information as possible to inform their intuition before making those calls. We can often mistake confidence for competence, but confidence is an emotional state as well as a communication style. It’s one way we convince ourselves and others that we have what we need to make a good decision. The process of convincing ourselves is one place where we must take care to avoid the implicit assumption that our instincts are good based on previous success. In Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman argues that the majority of our decisions are made by the stupid, but fast, part of our consciousness. That aspect suffers from a surplus of confidence due to its oversimplification of the world.
On the other end of the leadership spectrum, if you tend toward anxiousness like I do, you may be biased toward action to relieve the sense of emergency that activates our fight/flight/freeze instinct. The likelihood that these moments are truly a threat that requires split second decisions is small, unless you’re in specific fields like the military, law enforcement, or emergency medicine. The emotion that people bring to a situation can activate that mental urgency, as can our own personal histories. This urgency is illusory in the sense that there is no instantaneous decision required, despite the beliefs of the parties involved to the contrary.
Mindfulness is the practice of accepting the current state of things without judgement. By acceptance, teachers like Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield usually mean active presence with or acknowledgement of our current situation. The active part here is crucial. We don’t passively endure the situation or turn away from things in order to avoid the difficult emotions that arise. We hold our thoughts and feelings lightly in our awareness, not turning away from them, and allow them to exist as they are. Tara Brach describes this effort and the time it takes as the Pause. Employing the Pause and the clearer eyed presence of mind on the other side are the underpinnings of what is called mindful leadership when we employ them as leaders. To be a mindful leader means to desire to lead from a clear frame of mind as possible, using the Pause to avoid reactivity as the guide for how we treat others and make decisions.
To be effective, the Pause comes before judgement, action, analysis, or brainstorming. In a perceived crisis we can be tempted to respond instinctively: developing a list of ideas or options or data to gather or analysis to perform. As detailed in Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, the problem is that our brains are wired to narrow our focus down to the simplest explanations and actions in times of stress or crisis. This narrowed focus limits our understanding of the issue at hand and can lead us to act with a flawed mental model, which can result in outcomes that are suboptimal. The Pause gives us a shot at allowing in all of the relevant information that we may make use of in solving a problem.
The Pause is not always accessible to us, especially in situations where emotions are high. However, we can train to increase our access through regular mindfulness meditation of 10 minutes or more per day. By taking time regularly to train our ability to focus on bodily sensations such as the breath, we learn to sense that gap between the receipt of sensory data and our response. The sudden change of breath or heart rate triggers our awareness and reminds us to Pause and take in our full situation. As we practice more and more, we start to enter this state more easily before we respond to others’ or make consequential decisions.
I have been practicing meditation for more than 15 years with varying degrees of regularity which has greatly deepened my awareness of my body and emotions. I credit that awareness for my growth as a leader over the last several years as I have managed the GeoCarb Mission, including the team within the University and externally. Importantly, it has also allowed me to see that growth. A few recent examples spring to mind.
As we returned to the office following the shutdown during COVID, several employees had a very difficult time with the transition. I tried and failed to convince the institutional leadership that these employees might quit if we forced a complete and total return to the office and that is exactly what happened. Throughout all of these negotiations, I was constantly having to find my empathy for the person I was speaking to, which can only happen after we Pause and allow our emotions to abate a bit. When an employee decided to resign and take a remote job, I met with them and felt the disappointment of that leaving as well as the fear of whether I’d be able to fill their role with someone that could do the job well. I felt the anger with my leadership for the rigidity of the policy. I was able to Pause and look them in the face and see their worry about how I would respond as well as their excitement about the new role they’d be taking. From that place, I was able to congratulate them and really mean it. Another benefit of the Pause is that it gives you a chance to find your ability to care for others as independent from you.
An even tougher example came when a high ranking leader accosted me in front of other leaders with an aggressive tone and language. This dressing down was a potentially explosive situation, because my past has imprinted on me a very protective, angry response when I am cornered in this way. Fortunately, I was able to Pause and feel that anger through the flush in my cheeks and surge of adrenaline. From the Pause I was able to see this person’s frustration and feelings of helplessness. I responded to this with a boundary statement – I asked the leader to not speak me to that way, and we would figure out a different approach. It was only moderately successful, and that experience has marked my impression of that leader strongly. The Pause enabled me to take my angry response out of the equation and avoid pouring gasoline on the growing fire. I feel proud in hindsight that I was able to recognize and feel my feelings and not allow them to determine my course of action.
As you think about how to lead, I encourage you to start the practice of mindfulness and meditation to give you the space to Pause. Of course, practicing the Pause is just the first step, but it is also the basis for leading mindfully. In a future post on this topic, I’ll explore how we step out of the Pause to communicate skillfully and inform our intuition for better decision making.
Sean M. R. Crowell 