Leadership and Mindful Behavior

Action, Wakefulness, and Business

J. Marques

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137405609
• eBook ISBN: 9781137403797
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Aimed at business students preparing to enter the workforce, Leadership and Mindful Behavior provides readers with guidelines for effective and perceptive leadership. Some of the aspects to be reviewed will be the importance of both soft and hard skills; the concepts of sleepwalking and wakefulness; mental models, respect, change, and compassion.

1

An Expanded View of Leadership

This chapter examines leadership beyond the context of leading others. It presents leadership as a relationship that starts on a personal level and that expands from there. This chapter aims to eliminate traditional boundaries of leadership in professional settings and invites the reader to consider the many instances of leadership that each of us enacts daily. This chapter also discusses the responsibilities that come with leadership regardless of circumstance. Additionally, it briefly highlights ethics, empathy, respect, understanding, resilience, and courage—more details on these in subsequent chapters.

Leadership: A Foundational View

Most conventional books used for leadership education define leadership as exerting influence on others, claiming that leadership involves three elements: leader, followers, and situation. Many such books agree that leadership is a process involving influence, occurring in groups, and focusing on common goals.¹ There is nothing wrong with this notion—except that it limits the concept of leadership to a professional setting in which one individual, the leader, directs, processes, and coordinates the members of an organization or community to achieve predefined goals.² Such a notion omits a very important part of the real process: Leadership does not start with followers in a professional setting, but rather must be an internal process before it can become an external one.

Leadership as the process of guiding the self is not new. Peter Drucker, generally known as the father of modern management, stressed that in this knowledge era in which we currently live and work, we must be our own chief executive officers. Drucker encourages us to get in touch with our inner selves and to keep doing so throughout our careers, in order to sense how to find our place in society, when we need to change direction, and how to keep ourselves productive and involved.³ Drucker points out that we can understand what constitutes a rewarding professional life (from our point of view) only if we deeply understand our selves. Only then will we be aware of our strengths and weaknesses—how we learn, how we work with others, what our values are, how we can best contribute.⁴

As you focus on becoming an effective self-leader, you may find this process less straightforward than you expected. You will need to adopt certain strategies to get where you want to be. A good way of classifying these strategies is to divide them between those that are behavior-focused and those that are cognitive-focused⁵:

• The behavior-focused strategies entail observing yourself, setting goals, developing performance cues, being prepared (discussed in more detail later in this chapter), and “rewarding” and “punishing” yourself appropriately.

• The cognitive-focused strategies consist of shifting your perceptions so that your work becomes its own reward, giving you purpose, self-control, and a feeling of competence.

By engaging in these constructive mental shifts, you also start seeing challenges as opportunities. When you engage in effective self-leadership, you help motivate yourself and direct yourself toward rewarding performance.⁶ Self-motivation should not be underestimated as a driving motive in performance. Often this type of motivation is referred to in professional settings as “intrinsic motivation.”⁷ In short, you must discover, through self-examination, what inspires you so much that you want to do it for its own sake. This ties back into Drucker’s advice: figuring yourself out so that you can have a rewarding career and life.

Accordingly, reviewing leadership from a personal standpoint means considering some important qualities that make a leader stand out as one whose example is worth following. We will now review three of these qualities: (1) personal relationship, (2) punctuality, and (3) preparedness.

Personal Relationship

You must be a leader of yourself before you can be a good leader of others. Of course, being a leader does not require that you hold a formal position of power. You can hold an average position in a workplace, perhaps not be in a workplace at all, and still be a good leader. Rather, good leadership has everything to do with how you carry yourself: It means discipline and self-respect. When you behave in ways that catch the attention of others, making them want to adopt some of your behaviors, you are well on your way to being a leader.

People can be leaders while attending school, even if they are not seen as such at the time, by training themselves to perform in ways that stand out.

Ahmed is an international undergraduate management student from Saudi Arabia. He is in his late twenties, and he has a wife and two small children. Ahmed’s wife is also a student in the same program. Ahmed used to work in his home country, and he plans to work again after finishing his studies. As an international student, however, he is ineligible to work anywhere full time. But, unlike many of his peers, Ahmed does not want to remain just a student. He soon realized that the students from his country were not organized, making them unable to work together to their mutual benefit. Ahmed talked to two of his professors about starting a Saudi student organization in his university. The professors, who supported his idea, referred him to the dean of students, who explained to Ahmed the steps he must take to formally start such an advocacy organization. Ahmed had to clear some hurdles and fill out the appropriate paperwork, in addition to gathering signatures from key people in his institution, but he let nothing prevent him from reaching his goal. Ahmed held several meetings of Saudi students, but very little real leadership was in evidence. Accordingly, in the leader team election, Ahmed was chosen as the president of the organization by an overwhelming majority. And rightly so! He lobbied for a meditation and prayer room for students, initiated a peer mentoring program for students from his home country (and became a peer mentor himself), connected with other Saudi student communities outside his own campus, organized Saudi awareness days on campus to familiarize other students, faculty, and staff with Saudi traditions, and networked with various important Saudi businesses in the United States as well as in Saudi Arabia. In so doing, he enabled Saudi students to fulfill their internship requirements without resorting to endless searches for corporate facilitators. No financial reward was involved in any of these initiatives: Ahmed did what he did out of passion. He set a mission for himself and believed in it even when others did not. Through all his activities, Ahmed became highly visible on the radar of prominent Saudi representatives in the United States, and he will very likely continue in a leadership role of some sort after finishing his studies.

Leadership is a personal relationship. It is ignited by our inner passion for a goal, and it manifests itself through our behavior. History presents many examples of people whose goals seemed senseless or ridiculous—from Thomas Alva Edison, who failed hundreds of times before inventing a commercially viable light bulb, constantly seeing his failed attempts as discoveries of what did not work, to Abraham Lincoln, whose life was marked by setbacks, losses, and defeats, yet who refused to see himself as a failure, even when everyone else ridiculed him. And consider Mohandas Gandhi, whose appearance was so very frail, at a time when leadership was closely linked to a set of physical traits (tall and white among them); very few would have believed that he would firmly and doggedly lead India to independence. Similarly, Nelson Mandela, imprisoned for 27 years for striving for equality between blacks and whites in South Africa, became the first black president of South Africa in 1994. Each of these leaders faced challenges and opportunities, but each believed in himself and the mission he had chosen as his life’s purpose. Without that belief, none would have been able to place the mark on history for which we know him today.

Punctuality

A leader is punctual: Well aware of the value of timeliness, he or she does not make others wait needlessly. Promptness demonstrates care and respect on the part of a leader, and it also reduces stress and enhances your own preparedness. If you arrive on time, you can ensure that everything is in order, or you can simply focus yourself before the main event. George Washington was famous for his punctuality—he was so punctual that he refused to wait longer than a quarter hour for any appointment, regardless of its importance. Believing that he showed respect to others by being on time, Washington believed that the least others could do was reciprocate his respect for them. Though weighed down by his responsibilities as leader, he did not let others wait for him to arrive. He was on time for horse purchases and meetings of the Congress alike. Even his meals were never served late: Tardy guests found him halfway done and with no apologies. Promptness was important, Washington felt, and he made sure everyone around him knew it.

Living in an increasingly globalizing world, it is apparent that there are divergent measures of timeliness. Some cultures, such as the United States, Canada, and Western Europe, are monochronic; others, such as Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Arab section of the Middle East, are polychronic. In a monochronic culture, people do one thing at a time and focus fully on that. In a polychronic culture, multiple things are done synchronously, causing unexpected delays and less focus on punctuality.⁸

Regardless, however, where you come from, it is important to familiarize yourself with local customs and respect them. Ahmed, the Saudi student mentioned earlier in this chapter, came from a polychronic culture, but he realized that he would not achieve his goals by assuming a similar set of approaches toward time in the United States. So he adjusted his performance to meet local standards and reaped the rewards.

Punctuality is highly appreciated, especially in Western parts of the world. It sends out a message of integrity and dependability: You have agreed on a certain time to meet or call, and you keep to it. The message you send out here is unspoken, yet strong: You have made a promise and have no intention of breaking it. Conversely, if you are not punctual, you radiate unreliability. Some people may forgive you, but others will not, and you cannot tell from the looks on people’s faces what they think.

Being timely is to do yourself a great favor, because it can boost your self-confidence. You know that you are a reliable person—you have proven it by being punctual. You don’t have to start out with a stressed mindset that still dwells on that “slow driver” in front of you on the freeway, or that light that seemed to stay red for an eternity. Punctuality is an important tool toward self-mastery, because it has everything to do with self-discipline. Even if you are nice and very popular, people will appreciate you more if you are punctual.

If punctuality is a sign of respect to others, then the opposite is also true. Being late is a sign of disrespect toward those who wait for you. It shows that you did not care enough about their schedules and selfishly prioritized your own agenda before theirs. Tardiness is a form of arrogance, especially if it is a recurring pattern. It can drive people against you, and if your counterpart in any negotiation is as punctual as Washington was, you might as well say goodbye to a valuable and possibly lucrative relationship.⁹

Preparedness

A leader is well prepared, because preparation breeds professional performance and draws out appreciation, even admiration, from those who witness your actions. A leader prioritizes his or her available time and has the ability to postpone the things that are merely fun to first do the things that are important. A leader considers potential risks and devises backup plans to keep the program going. This additional aspect of professional behavior stems from a deeply rooted sense of respect for others. If you care about those who are exposed to your performance or product, you exude a positive message of appreciation toward your audience—and very likely will receive the same.

Preparedness is critical in almost all circumstanc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1 An Expanded View of Leadership
• 2 The Problem of “Sleepwalking”
• 3 The Value of Respect
• 4 Engaging in Self-Reflection: A Deeper Look Within
• 5 Mental Models and Reality
• 6 The Changing Nature of Our Dreams
• 7 Continuous Evolution as a Human Trait
• 8 The Value of Broadening Our Mindset
• 9 Why Soft Skills Are Critical
• 10 Maintaining Wakeful Leadership
• Notes
• Index