The Mind of the Leader

How to Lead Yourself, Your People, and Your Organization for Extraordinary Results

Rasmus Hougaard, Jacqueline Carter

• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781633693425
• eBook ISBN:
  9781633693432
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Psychology

How do you facilitate meaning, fulfillment, and true happiness for the people you lead?

• Addresses the feeling of never having enough time
• Brings a focus on mindfulness, but without getting all touch-feely
• Practically focused, full of exercises and programs
• Research and practice based advice road tested with hundreds of senior leaders

Audience: Senior leaders in large organizations, team leaders, managers

Announced first printing: 30,000
Laydown goal: 5,500

PART ONE

Understand and Lead Yourself

Imagine this scenario: A researcher brings you into a room with a chair. There are no windows. No pictures. No TV. Just you and the chair. You’re asked to sit down and think. For a time ranging from six to fifteen minutes, you’ll be on your own. Could you sit and be by yourself, or might you prefer painful electric shocks as a distraction?

Astonishingly, this experiment, published in the journal Science, reported that 67 percent of men and 25 percent of women found being alone with themselves so unpleasant that they ended up self-inducing electric shocks.¹ One man even shocked himself 190 times. People are so uncomfortable with their own thoughts that they’d rather have any distraction—even a physically painful one—than spend a few minutes being on their own. On the flip side, that’s how few of us have the focus, discipline, and restraint that define self-leadership. When we truly lead ourselves, it manifests itself as strength, determination, control, and balance.

Simply put, self-leadership is the ability to manage your own thoughts, behaviors, and actions. Self-leadership is the foundation for effectiveness and productivity, and for living a life according to our values and aspirations. It’s about having the mental strength to delay gratification and instead work toward long-term solutions. Self-leadership is about managing ourselves, so we can better lead our people, creating more meaning, connectedness, and a more people-centered culture.

Self-leadership starts in the mind. As an ancient Chinese proverb says, “Observe your thoughts as they become actions. Observe your actions as they become habits. And observe your habits as they shape your life.” Our minds shape our thoughts, and our thoughts shape our lives and the lives of those we lead. If we’re unable to lead our minds, then to a large degree we’re unable to lead our lives—let alone lead others.

To lay the necessary foundation for self-leadership, part 1 opens with a chapter on self-awareness. Self-awareness is the ability to monitor the mind so we can lead it better. Self-awareness is the foundation for self-leadership. We must understand our mind before we can lead it. This includes understanding how our mind works, the importance of values, and what truly makes us happy.

Chapters 3, 4, and 5 then focus on three core elements of self-leadership: mindfulness, selflessness, and compassion. Self-leadership requires focus (mindfulness), humility (selflessness), and the discipline of self-care (compassion). These three qualities—that is, MSC leadership—combine to provide a basis for effectively leading yourself—and in turn, your people—for stronger connectedness, increased happiness, and ultimately, increased productivity.

2

Understand Yourself

Vincent Siciliano, CEO of California-based New Resource Bank, shared with us the story of how he started with the bank. He was brought in to turn the bank around and restore it to its founding mission. When he showed up, all the other members of the executive team resigned, giving him the opportunity to rebuild with people of his own choice. Within a few years, under Vince’s leadership, the bank was back on track in terms of profitability and mission alignment.

The leadership team decided to take the pulse of the organization and launched the bank’s first employee survey. The results revealed low levels of engagement and criticism of senior leaders. Vince assumed this was left over from the many changes the organization had gone through and chose not to take any action.

A year later, the bank sent out another employee survey. This time, the results were more specific: morale was a significant issue and the majority of people, including members of the senior leadership team, identified Vince as the root cause.

Vince was crushed. His mind oscillated between anger, indignation, defensiveness, and blame. He wondered, “How could they say these things about me? Don’t they understand how far we’ve come under my leadership?” He could have stayed in this negative mindset, wallowing in self-pity and searching for excuses. Instead, he decided it was time to take a hard look at himself. Despite being a high achiever and successful throughout his career, Vince came face to face with an uncomfortable truth: he wasn’t the great leader he thought he was. He was leading by the book and trampling over the concerns of others who were not ready to move so fast or didn’t understand reasons for changes.

In our conversation with Vince, he said: “There was a gap between my internal reality and my external behavior. My ego had run amok. I was leading from my head and not from my heart.” He realized that despite all the skills he had developed through his years of management education and professional development, he’d never been directed to take a long look in the mirror and ask questions about who he was, what he valued, and what it really meant to be a leader.

Bill George, a Harvard leadership professor, former CEO of Medtronic, and author of True North, says that self-awareness is the starting point of leadership.¹ Self-awareness is the skill of being aware of our thoughts, emotions, and values, moment to moment. Through self-awareness we can lead ourselves with authenticity and integrity.

Vince’s experience is not unique. Self-awareness is not standard curriculum in most management education programs. The majority of MBA degrees focus on strategy and profitability—the things Vince excelled at. But this focus blinded him to what was actually happening in his organization.

Approximately 40 percent of CEOs are MBAs.² Many large-scale studies have found that leadership based solely on MBA-trained logic is not enough for delivering long-term sustainable financial and cultural results, and that it often is detrimental to an organization’s productivity. In one study, researchers compared the organizational performance of 440 CEOs who had been celebrated on the covers of magazines like BusinessWeek, Fortune, and Forbes. The researchers split the CEOs into two groups—those with an MBA and those without an MBA—and then monitored their performance for seven years. Surprisingly, the performance of those with an MBA was significantly worse.³ Another study published in the Journal of Business Ethics looked at the results of more than five thousand CEOs and came to a similar conclusion.⁴

To be clear, we’re not saying MBAs are not useful in leading an organization. But if the linear MBA-trained logic becomes the sole focus—at the cost of other skills, like self-awareness—the leadership approach is out of balance.

That was the case for Vince. He had all the numbers right. His strategy was clear. But people didn’t like working with him and were increasingly unhappy. He was managing based on prevailing business theories, but he didn’t know or understand himself. Because he lacked self-awareness, people found Vince inauthentic. Subsequently, they weren’t keen to follow him or support his leadership. Luckily for Vince, he was open to change and through a journey of mindfulness and coaching toward developing self-awareness, he was able to become more of the leader he wanted to be.

Self-awareness is where leadership starts. We must have awareness of ourselves to lead ourselves. In this chapter, we start by exploring self-awareness, examining how our mind works, and introducing how you can gain better self-awareness through mindfulness. Then we explore the importance of values, followed by a look at what it means to truly be happy. Finally, the chapter ends with practical tips for increasing your self-awareness.

Self-Assessment versus Self-Awareness

Many leadership development programs start with some form of self-assessment. But what do you actually learn from these assessments? In truth, most assessments just scratch the surface of who you are. Sure, they might provide you with insights into dominant traits and behaviors. But is that the real you?

Take a moment to consider the last assessment you did. What did you learn? Perhaps you discovered that you are a visionary thinker and it’s hard for others to keep up with your innovative strategies. Perhaps you learned that people find you unapproachable and you need to work on engagement.

These types of insights can be valuable; they can help you understand yourself and how you work with others. But they don’t necessarily provide you with the tools needed to solve difficult or complex leadership challenges. To do that, you need real self-awareness.

Take Maura McCaffrey, CEO of Health New England, a US health insurer. Like many CEOs, she’s passionate about her work and driven to get results. In her early years as a leader, this passion could occasionally create challenges. As she described it, “I would enter a meeting with a clear strategic plan and, without taking the time to engage others, move forward. I felt so strongly about it, no one could stop me.” Call it passion-bias. Her drive for results would lead her to steamroll the group into following her plan, regardless of objections or suggestions.

A 360-degree assessment illuminated this issue. The assessment was clear, but how to move forward was not. The assessment itself didn’t provide the tools to fix the problem. Instead, self-awareness did. With the help of mindfulness, Maura gained a new level of self-awareness and started to understand the downsides of her passion-bias. She began to understand how this drive was not always beneficial for her relationships, team engagement, or alignment with her values or organizational objectives.

Self-awareness is what enables you to translate the insights from an assessment into action. Self-awareness is getting to know yourself, moment by moment. Self-awareness is knowing what you are thinking while you think it and what you are feeling when you feel it. It’s the ability to keep your values in mind at all times. Self-awareness is the ability to monitor yourself so you can manage yourself accordingly.

In Maura’s case, self-awareness was what enabled her to monitor her behavior and change it in the moment. Self-awareness allowed her to notice when her passion-bias was about to manifest itself and take a pause. She learned to become more inclusive in her ways and engage others at their pace. Yes, it could sometimes take longer to put strategies into action. But in the end, those strategies showed much better results, because the people on her team were more engaged and better able to follow through on a vision they helped create.

A general lack of self-awareness, like Vince and Maura experienced in their early leadership years, is one of the key factors in many of today’s leadership issues and leadership failures. But to have better self-awareness, we must first understand how our mind works.

Welcome to Your Mind

Who manages your mind? The answer may not be what you think—or hope—it is. Here are a few facts all leaders should know about their mind:

• You do not control your mind.
• You are not rational.
• Your mind creates your reality.
• You are not your thoughts.

The first point: You probably don’t control your mind as much as you think. To test whether that’s true for you, focus on any word in this sentence for a full minute. Don’t think about anything else. Don’t get distracted. Just focus on one word for a full sixty seconds. No cheating. Okay, go ahead.

How did it go? Were you able to maintain complete focus for a minute? Or did you question the purpose of the exercise? Did you debate which word to focus on? Did the word catalyze new thoughts, leading you to think of other things? The point is that if you strayed from complete focus on that one word, you failed in leading your own mind, even just for a minute.

If you failed, don’t worry. You’re normal. Most people fail this test. Why? Researchers have found that on average, our mind involuntarily wanders nearly half our waking hours.⁵ While you think you’re managing your mind, you’re not. Think for a moment about the implications of your mind being distracted from what you’re doing nearly half of the time. How might it impact your effectiveness? How could it affect your ability to be present with others? How might it impact your well-being?

The second point: You are not rational. Sure, we like to think we’re rational beings. But in truth, we make choices based on emotions and rationalize them afterward. For example, numerous studies confirm that our decisions are influenced by how options are framed. In one study, faced with making a medical decision, subjects chose the riskless option when outcomes were positively framed in terms of gains, and the risky option when outcomes were phrased negatively in terms of losses.⁶

The third point: Your mind creates your reality. Consider the last time you believed you led a meeting where everyon...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• PART ONE: Understand and Lead Yourself
• PART TWO: Understand and Lead Your People
• PART THREE: Understand and Lead Your Organization
• Afterword: Leadership for a Hard Future
• Appendix A: The Mind of the Leader App
• Appendix B: Practices for Training Compassion
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• Author Team