Mindfulness-Based Strategic Awareness Training

A Complete Program for Leaders and Individuals

Juan Humberto Young

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781118937976
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781118937990
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

Mindfulness-Based Strategic Awareness Training: A Complete Program for Leaders and Individuals is the first book to link mindfulness training and positive psychology to the leadership, strategy and management issues faced by individuals and organizations.

• Sets out a complete program in Mindfulness-based Strategic Awareness Training (MBSAT), a new form of strengths-based business mindfulness training which enhances participants' ability to perceive opportunities, adapt and grow
• Draws on research from neuroscience, positive psychology, behavioural finance  and management to show how leaders, managers and individuals can build and maintain more resonant relationships and adapt to constant change
• Includes real-life vignettes, specific instructions and a wealth of resources designed to guide experiential learning including background information, exercises, guidelines, hand-outs, graphics, and guided audio meditations
• Mindfulness training is increasingly used in organizational contexts – the author is a pioneer in designing and delivering training that applies mindfulness and positive psychology to the strategic challenges of management and business

Reviews by Experts

This book is important for all who seek to lead organizations, showing how mindfulness can be combined with the findings from positive psychology for the benefit of all. The book is not just good theory. It also provides a step-by-step practical program to cultivate a balance between motivation for outcomes on the one hand, and compassion toward self and others on the other. Here are skills that can be learned; skills that can truly inspire and sustain wise leadership. —Mark Williams, Emeritus Professor of Clinical Psychology, University of Oxford, was also the Founding Director of the Oxford Mindfulness Centre. Now Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Psychiatry of Oxford University. Author of "Mindfulness: An Eight week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World", Co-author with Zindel V. Segal and John Teasdale of "Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for Depression".

In today's disruptive times, it is happy and loyal customers that count. This rich and practical book provides an exceptionally smart learning tool to help consumers make mindful decisions that lead to happiness.  And for any leader and manager it is a key reading for making wise business and marketing decisions that create value.—Bernd Schmitt, Ph.D., Professor, Columbia Business School, New York. Author of "Experiential Marketing: How to Get Consumers to Sense, Fell, Think and Act, Relate to your Company and Brands" and "Happy Customers Everywhere: How Your Business Can Profit from the Insights of Positive Psychology."

Juan Humberto Young is the first to integrate positive psychology and mindfulness with a results-oriented focus on business strategy. In today's ever-changing organizations, leaders need clarity and flexibility to adapt and succeed. Built on leading-edge science, this book offers a step-by-step program that will light your path not only to greater strategic awareness but also to greater well-being.—Barbara L. Fredrickson, Ph.D., Kenan, Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Author of the two bestsellers "Positivity: Top-Notch Research Reveals the Upward Spiral That Will Change Your Life" and "Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection".

Juan Humberto Young integrates mindfulness practices, positive psychology, and extensive business experience to design a practical training program that improves personal and professional decision-making. This book offers tools to make decisions that increase subjective well-being because the sources of much unhappiness are poor decisions. For business leaders, lawyers, negotiators, and everyone who wants to improve their quality of life, this book presents a path to achieve the capacity of strategic awareness, consisting of mental lucidity, emotional clarity, and bodily awareness, which results in skillful decision-making. This book provides readers an ideal way to find happiness, personal balance, and professional success.—Peter H. Huang, J.D. Ph.D., Professor and DeMuth Chair of Business Law, University of Colorado Law School. Author of numerous articles integrating Positive Psychology, Mindfulness and Law.

Part 1
Foundations for Mindful, Positive Leadership and a Constructive Way of Life

1
The Quest for a Model of Mindful, Positive Leadership and a Constructive Way of Life

1.1 Groundwork for Models of Leading and Living

This book takes the view that human existence should not be compartmentalized. It is hardly possible to be a mindful, positive leader without being a mindful, positive person in private life. Being one without the other is an oxymoron. In fact, everything in life is shaped by the quality of an individual’s innermost attitudes and the quality of human existence. From that standpoint the content of this book applies equally to normal individuals’ lives as well as the lives of leaders.

Leadership can achieve great things like excellent products, services and dynamic organizations—all of which can make life more enjoyable and enriching. Equally, leadership can be used to damage human experience. Wars, group violence and many different forms of organized, or even disorganized, social destruction can lead to harmful outcomes. However, most of the time leadership is a process that simply sustains the status quo at organizational, group or even individual levels.

In this book I offer a model that, with training, can produce leadership that assists leaders and managers to create value in a positive and sustainable manner. I am particularly grateful for the perspective of the influential management philosopher, Peter Drucker, who defined leadership as “lifting a person’s vision to high sights, the raising of a person’s performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.” Consequently what I am advocating is that almost everyone involved in any kind of social interaction has the potential to apply this type of leadership.

For example, a mother helping her child to achieve higher grades in school and a colleague helping a team member with problems at work will both benefit from applying these leadership principles. It is a leadership style that produces workable systems within organizations as well as workable solutions for the leaders themselves as for any individual.

Over the years, both in places where I have worked, led and managed groups and at some of the best business schools in the world where I have studied, I have explored a wide range of leadership theories. (Please see Box 1.1 for a brief description of some of the most popular leadership theories.) Careful application of these theories has helped me to improve outcomes for my teams and myself. In terms of standardized measurements, such as return on investment, we performed extremely well. But I wanted to reach beyond standard measures. I was intrigued by the possibility that we could perform more creatively and avoid the emotional problems caused by chronic stress and fatigue. I knew this was possible because of an important personal experience in my youth.

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Box 1.1 Leadership Theories

The plethora of existing leadership theories can be subdivided in four core orientations:

1. Trait Theories:
   These are theories that suggest that leaders must have certain personality traits or characteristics that people either have or don’t have. These leadership theories have lost their appeal lately and are somewhat outdated in the light of neurological findings concerning the plasticity of the human brain.
2. Behavioral Theories:
   These types of theories focus on how leaders enact leading. An early popular behavioral leadership framework was Kurt Lewin’s classification of leaders by their decision‐making style. According to Lewin leaders fall into three categories: autocratic leaders (making decisions on their own), democratic leaders (inviting team members to participate in the decision‐making process) and laissez‐faire leaders (allowing people to make decisions within their own teams).
3. Contingency Theories:
   These theories suggest that there is no ideal leadership style as each situation requires a different type of leading. A well‐known framework is Fiedler’s contingency leadership model.
4. Power and Influence Theories:
   These theories take the view that the key is how leaders use power and influence to get things done. A well‐known framework here is French and Raven’s Five Forms of Power. According to Raven three sources of power are positional: “legitimate,” “reward,” and “coercive,” and two sources are personal: “expert power” (knowing your stuff) and “referent power,” stemming from a leader’s appeal and charm.

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In my mind I can still see one of my father’s clients, a young businessman, the owner of a large transportation company dedicated to carrying perishable agricultural produce from the rural parts of the country to the capital, coming down the stairs in the office building as I went to see my father one day after school. He had tears in his eyes and was clearly moved, so I asked him what was happening? He answered that he was overjoyed, because his wife was finally pregnant after hoping for a child for years. He told me that he came regularly to see my father, his financial advisor. They had started talking together about everything, not just business, and this had helped to relieve him from the stress and exhaustion produced by long working hours and constant worrying. As a result he had become calmer and more relaxed and he was convinced that this had played an essential, positive role in enabling him and his wife to conceive a baby. He was so grateful to my father. I was only a 15‐year‐old teenager at the time, but I still remember that I thought “If only my Dad talked to me more often the way he talked with his client, Jorge.”

That story has remained with me because, besides illustrating how pernicious stress can be, it taught me something crucial about the importance of caring and loving relationships at work. I learned that there had to be a positive way of leading people so that they could develop and flourish. I simply didn’t know the “how” and this is what I set out to discover.

Here are the milestones of my quest. It is my way of highlighting the necessity of a model for mindful, positive leadership, and a constructive way of living with its integral parts. It is also a way to honor my teachers and all the researchers that have contributed directly or indirectly to the conclusions I have reached.

1.2 In Pursuit of Answers to Intriguing Questions

After years managing my own business and having achieved a respectable level of financial success, I felt secure enough to go back to the question: can we have better leadership and management models that benefit all parties?

In this search I studied for my doctorate at Case Western Reserve University’s Weatherhead School of Management in Cleveland, Ohio. There I met Professor Suresh Srivastva who thought of organizations as centers of human relatedness where people come together “to learn, to care and to grow, to love and develop, to cooperate and co‐create” (as he often used to say during his teachings in class).

At Weatherhead School of Management I also met David Cooperrider, who had the inspiration during a consulting assignment for the Cleveland Clinic, together with Suresh (his PhD supervisor), to invert the question “What problems need to be solved here?” to “What is working well here and how can we replicate it throughout the whole organization?” By inverting the focus they both created the new approach, appreciative inquiry (AI), which is recognized today as one of the most important modern management innovations.

Inspiring ideas also came from other teachers during my doctoral studies. Richard Boyatzis was teaching about the need for leaders’ emotional intelligence and John Aram articulated the need to reform the management profession to reflect the needs of not just one stakeholder but society as a whole.

Also working in the field was Richard (Dick) Boland, my other thesis advisor and one of the early advocates of design thinking in management—a way of managing that was oriented toward creating desirable and creative, yet sustainable futures. Dick’s inspiration for design thinking came from working with Frank Gehry, the iconoclast architect who designed the avant‐garde Weatherhead building, and observing his design methodology and working approach, which involved engaging the actual users of the building in the design process.

The experiences at the Weatherhead School of Management made a deep and lasting impression on me. It became clear that leading and managing well was not about learning and implementing the latest theories and tools on leadership and management but involved something beyond technicalities. Reading about the work of Albert Speer, the Minister of Armaments and War Production in Germany’s Third Reich, it became evident that good management tools were not the answer.

Speer explained how he employed advanced management systems such as ad‐hoc democratic styles of management control and flat hierarchies. However, as we all know, these innovations were put to use for purposes universally recognized as immoral that led to crimes against humanity. This historic reality highlights how a leader’s qualities are a key variable for skillful and sustain...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Boxes, Tables and Figures
• About the Author
• Preface
• About the Companion Website
• Part 1: Foundations for Mindful, Positive Leadership and a Constructive Way of Life
• Part 2: Mindfulness-Based Strategic Awareness Training (MBSAT)
• Session 1
• Session 2
• Session 3
• Session 4
• Session 5
• Session 6
• Session 7
• Session 8
• Final Words and Acknowledgments
• References
• Further Reading
• Index
• End User License Agreement