You Are Bigger Than Your Role

Mindfulness allows you to see the role and the person playing the role distinctly and without internal criticism. By cultivating mindfulness, you will develop discernment and learn to perform your role with detached engagement as you recognize that you are bigger than your role. Jon Kabat-Zinn, author of Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life, defines mindfulness as “paying attention in a particular way; on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally.”²⁵

Mindfulness facilitates self-awareness by allowing you to simultaneously focus your attention in a deliberate manner on your body, thoughts, feelings, and external context. Being mindful, you see things as they are and observe yourself. This ability to perceive clearly without judgment helps you gain a deeper understanding of who you are as a whole person in relation to the world around you.

The first major benefit of mindfulness is that it gives you the discernment to choose appropriate roles. By being mindful of your strengths and weaknesses, you gain discernment in choosing right roles that leverage your real strengths. All leaders have the ability to act appropriately and choose right roles based on the context, and if they are in a wise state of mind, their emotional attachment to a particular role and ego issues are minimized. They are able to play multiple roles with ease without getting caught up with any one of them. Moreover, they know how to cast other leaders in complementary roles in order to serve a larger purpose. Gaining and maintaining the clarity that you are only a trustee and not the owner of the organization you are leading—even if you are the founder of that organization—is one of the key differentiators between smart leadership and wise leadership.

We have found that many leaders often step into a role feeling confident that they have the right skills to perform that role when in fact they don’t. As a result, they have to stretch their skills to make up for this deficiency, which can lead to failure. Other leaders shy away from a challenging role even though they are perfectly qualified for it because they don’t want to take the risk of potentially failing once they assume that role. They are more likely to pick a role they are comfortable with, but then they quickly become dissatisfied or bored because it is not challenging enough. Mindfulness helps you find a role that fits your skills and yet challenges you and gives you an opportunity to learn and grow.

Another major benefit of mindfulness is that it will help you perform your chosen role with poise and detachment. We once consulted with Ray Hayachi (not his real name), the cofounder and CEO of a start-up that eventually became a $100 million company. In time, the company investors suggested that Hayachi step aside and bring in a seasoned CEO who had more experience in the types of clients the company had and with multiple product lines. We advised Hayachi to let go of the CEO role and become the chairman of the board, a role in which he could continue to contribute to the growth of the company. Hayachi didn’t agree: he felt he could prove his mettle in running a large organization and scaling it up further to make it a billion-dollar company. In the ensuing battle of will, the board won: it brought in a seasoned CEO and made Hayachi chief operating officer. Hayachi resented the board’s decision and refused to assume that role. His lack of poise and unwillingness to listen to and learn from the new CEO sabotaged his career: he was forced by the board to leave the very company he had cofounded.

We see many leaders like Hayachi who get caught up in a particular role and are unable to gain a broader perspective and assume that role in an emotionally detached manner because they identify too closely with it. If you are mindful, it is easier to cultivate detached engagement because you can see yourself as being bigger than that role. Over time, this detached engagement helps you deal with failures effectively and build resilience, which helps you maintain your equanimity. You won’t cling to that role or become attached to the pleasures derived from it.

This detached engagement will provide you with several benefits. First, you will develop the ability to observe your performance—like watching an actor on stage—and objectively identify areas you need to improve. Second, you won’t feel the burden of the leadership role since you are aware of being merely an instrument of a larger purpose. Third, you will carry out your role with consistency and resilience without craving validation. Finally, since you are not attached to the outcome, you will be willing to share in the rewards and become a better team player.

In addition to helping you cultivate detached engagement, mindfulness keeps you grounded in the present. It is a popular notion that we spend too much time thinking and reminiscing about the past or worrying about the future and too little paying attention to the present. Mindfulness keeps you grounded in the present by focusing your attention on what’s happening here and now, and this allows you to perform better, according to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a professor of psychology at Claremont College.²⁶ He has demonstrated that artists and athletes tend to perform at their highest level when they operate in the immersive state of flow: when all their thoughts cease to exist and their selves completely merge with the object of their attention. When they are performing with such high concentration, awareness and action fuse together and their sense of time gets altered to focus on the present.

Mindfulness is like an untrained muscle: you can consciously develop it with the right exercise. Todd Pierce, former chief information officer of Genentech (and currently an executive vice president at salesforce.com), believes that leaders who consciously practice mindfulness can increase their self-awareness—and in doing so, they will be able to discover and tap into the best of themselves when leading others. Having personally experienced the benefits of mindfulness, Pierce was eager to introduce the company’s IT staff to mindfulness development techniques and develop their own self-awareness to improve their performance. He realized that the best way to keep employees motivated and engaged is by contributing to their personal growth. To accomplish this at Genentech, he brought in Pam Weiss, a Buddhist meditation teacher, executive coach, and the founder of Appropriate Response, a company that trains leaders in mindfulness development.²⁷

Pierce worked with Weiss to pilot the personal excellence program (PEP), a three-step personal development program based on mindfulness, for Genentech’s IT staff. Each participant selects a skill or quality that they believe will contribute to long-term satisfaction in their life. Then the participant nonjudgmentally observes the factors that inhibit or support her personal development. In a third step, the employee practices the newly learned skill or quality until it becomes ingrained. Weiss points out that self-awareness, cultivated through nonjudgmental self-observation, isn’t enough by itself to change behavior; you need to act on that self-awareness and practice the new behavior with diligence.²⁸ The whole purpose of the program that Weiss facilitated was to help Genentech’s IT staff use self-awareness as a tool to remove their self-limitations and recognize and realize their true potential. Pierce believed that by participating in PEP, his staff would develop mindfulness and become more engaged in their professional role and cope better with work-related stress. As Weiss pointed out, “Bringing your whole self to work—mind, heart, and body—helps you find the best response to a situation.”²⁹

Several years into the implementation of PEP, employee satisfaction in Genentech’s IT department had dramatically improved. According to Pierce and Weiss, almost all PEP attendees (six hundred employees went through PEP in six years) reported increased engagement and productivity at work, and they said they had increased their ability to self-observe and self-correct. They also reported better listening and peer-coaching skills, and 80 percent said that they were better able to deal with change and ambiguity. Many employees were more confident in handling bigger and more challenging projects.

Overall, employee engagement in the IT department increased from the time when Pierce took over the department in 2002 to the second highest companywide in 2009, the year ComputerWorld magazine ranked Genentech as the second best employer for IT professionals. Pierce explains: “The capacity to deal with difficulties and the level of engagement—these things are very, very powerful. These are skills and qualities you need to cultivate and practice over time.”³⁰

You don’t necessarily have to go to a meditation retreat to cultivate self-awareness. There are many ways to become mindful. Genentech employees have shown that they can cultivate self-awareness—and act mindfully—even in the midst of their busy work life, and Weiss’s work with them was truly transformational. This success convinced Pierce, who joined saleforce.com in late 2011 as executive vice president of operations and mobility, to team up again with Weiss to launch a mindfulness-based PEP at salesforce.com as well.

You Are Part of a Whole

Many smart leaders might think of themselves as solo performers without realizing that they are part of a larger ensemble. They are like the lead violinist in a symphony orchestra: they could occasionally lead the orchestra but can’t dominate the entire performance. They fail to understand or appreciate the complementary roles others have to play to put on a great performance. Wise leaders see interconnections among various roles all the team members play as one unified performance.

Back in 1993, Alan Mulally, Ford’s current CEO, was a general manager at Boeing in charge of developing the 777 passenger aircraft. In his weekly project review meetings, he used to remind his functional heads—those in charge of R&D, manufacturing, and sales and marketing—that in their activities, they should strive to optimize the entire system, or plane, rather than overoptimize a subsystem such as the landing gear or engines. And yet he reminded his executives that every subsystem matters for the effectiveness of the whole system. He told them that a plane with great engines and seats and cockpit design couldn’t take off unless all systems on the plane—from doors to engines, from toilets to wings—work together as one system optimized for excellence. It is common sense, isn’t it? But when you get caught up with your role, common sense is the first thing that goes out the window. Most of us operate on a daily basis totally focused on the task at hand—as if we have a tunnel vision and miss out the big picture completely.

When leaders gain a broader perspective by seeing interconnections among various roles people play, they see the value of the synergy between the roles. They then are open to change the way they play their role, switch roles, or cast their staff in new roles to serve the higher purpose more effectively.

We consulted with a large technology consulting firm whose leaders were convinced that as long as they were giving their clients exactly what they specifically asked for, they were doing the right thing. They perceived their role as being order takers and so had invested in processes and skills that enabled them to execute their client orders faster, better, and cheaper. However, in interviews with this firm’s clients, we discovered that although clients were happy with the firm’s delivery capabilities, they expected more. They wanted the firm to anticipate their needs and proactively fulfill them rather than deliver what they explicitly wanted. In other words, the clients were more interested in the firm’s innovation capabilities than its ability to deliver its services on time and on budget. We used this customer insight to broaden the perspective of the firm’s leaders and help them shift their role from a service provider focused on meeting a client’s explicit requirements to that of an innovator with more creative solutions to client needs. After investing in building new skills and capabilities to support this kind of role, the consulting firm has come to be recognized as a company that proactively serves its clients.