Chapter 15

Leading People, Change and Strategy

In This Chapter

Leading in the midst of constant change

Helping your organisation to flourish

Developing a mindful organisation

Leading people and change are arguably the two most demanding aspects of a leader’s work. This chapter explores how mindfulness can transform the leadership of people and change, and how the organisation can become more mindful while still keeping a keen eye on the bottom line.

Leading Mindfully when Change is the Norm

In the recent past, change projects at work were managed on the assumption that they had a distinct beginning, middle and end. Arguably the most widely known model argues that after the initial shock and denial stage comes a feeling of loss, and in the final stage people start to experiment with the idea of doing something in a new way, eventually embrace it, and the new way of working becomes ‘business as usual’. This model is great to bear in mind when major change happens occasionally, and there’s time to embed changes and return to a state of business as usual.

Another commonly used model proposes that in the initial stages of change an organisation prepares for change by breaking down old structures and ways of working, which causes uncertainty. In the middle stage, employees work to resolve the uncertainty and look for new ways to do things, and start to support and embrace the desired change. In the final stage (when people have embraced the change) comes further work to embed the new way of doing things into everyday business.

The problem with both models is that the pace of change for many organisations is now so rapid that there’s rarely time to complete stage three (embedding and business as usual) before the next change is necessary. So just as the sense of loss and uncertainty starts to recede and people start to explore new ways of doing things, they’re plunged straight back into shock, denial and breaking down what they’ve only just built up.

It’s no wonder that most change programmes fail, and that change fatigue is costing the UK and US economies billions each year.

Meeting modern-day challenges with mindful solutions

With little ‘business as usual’, one change follows another and another, and little if any time exists to consolidate and embed each change.

Constant, ‘bumpy change’ requires a new approach to leading change initiatives, centred on human processes of habit formation.

While many change management projects focus on the steps necessary for organisational change, the Prosci^® ADKAR^® model focuses on five actions and outcomes necessary for successful individual change, and therefore successful organisational change. In order for change to be effective, individuals need:

• Awareness of the need for change
• Desire to participate and support the change
• Knowledge on how to change
• Ability to implement required skills and behaviours
• Reinforcement to sustain the change

Knowledge and practice of mindfulness, together with some basic knowledge of how the brain works, on the part of both the leader and employees makes this model even more effective. In the words of Jon Kabat-Zinn, father of mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), ‘You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.’

Developing new change strategies

A UK head of operations that I (Juliet) worked with, lets call him Dan, was faced with the necessity of cutting costs by 10 per cent. He’d had to make similar cuts in the three previous years. Staff numbers had already been reduced, and working methods had changed and changed again. As a result, many staff were feeling disengaged from the company.

We’d identified together that humans crave certainty, and certainty was in short supply. We speculated that many of the team were exhausted with the constant change, and probably felt threatened by the possibility of future changes that may reduce their status or security. We speculated further that many of his team were working in avoidance mode.

Embedding change individually and organisationally

Dan was concerned that the employees’ experience of the last few years may make his next change initiatives even more difficult to implement. Dan knew that mindfulness training could help his staff become more resilient, increase their sense of positivity and make them more likely to adopt an ‘approach’ mode of mind in relation to the changes ahead.

Dan offered staff the option to attend mindfulness training in work time. The courses were publicised to staff as a personal development opportunity that could increase well-being and resilience in times of change. At the same time, Dan started to run focus groups on the challenges ahead to gain ideas about the best way forward. He was honest and open about the challenges that the organisation, and specifically the operations department, was facing. He encouraged staff to take the lead in problem solving and solution finding throughout. All focus groups and problem-solving forums started with a three-step focus break (see Chapter 5 for more on this), which served two purposes: it centred staff and focused attention on the task in hand, and it also helped him ‘model’ mindfulness to his team.

Dan knew that habits, once formed, are stored in the primitive areas of the brain and are therefore repeated unconsciously, making them difficult to change. He knew that, in order to change habits, people need to be aware of them. At the start of the working groups he used light-hearted, fun activities to help staff become more aware of their habits and mental mindsets. This approach helped his team become more aware of their mental programming and defaults, and the fact that they could change them. Those who were attending mindfulness courses often chipped in with things they had been discovering about themselves, and their experience of doing things differently.

Once the way forward had been agreed and accepted by most members of staff, Dan made efforts to reinforce new ways of thinking and working, celebrating success and small wins along the way. Doing so helped to reinforce the new ways of working, which over time became ‘the way we do things round here’. Within a few months the old ways of working and thinking were used less, and as a result they became less dominant, and most of his team seemed to replace them with the new habits.

Try these tips to make dealing with change less challenging:

• Use mindfulness to help you to identify your unconscious habits and thinking patterns. Decide whether they’re serving you well and, if not, consciously work to find new ways of acting and thinking. Repeat these over a two- to three-month period to form new dominant ways of thinking and acting that are more productive.
• Use the ADKAR^® model next time you start to plan for an organisational change. Visit www.change-management.com for more information.
• Habits take time to form, so organisational changes may be slow to be adopted. Help employees form new habits by providing opportunities to discuss, experiment with and practise new ways of thinking, behaving and working over a 8–12 week period. The more new habits are practised, the stronger the neural pathways in people’s brains become and the easier repeating the ‘habit’ is.
• Staff facing redundancy need just as much support as staff making the transition to the new way of working. Mindfulness training can help those being made redundant deal with the challenges that they’re facing, giving them back a sense of control.

Creating Strategies that Allow the Organisation to Flourish

In order to keep pace with change, you need to adapt your strategies. If you want to get ahead of change, a more strategic approach is needed. You have to anticipate trends and proactively define new and innovative ways forward. In order to do so, you must be agile and authentic.

Agility is now an essential leadership skill. The increasing speed of change demands that organisations need to become more nimble and flexible. Your ability to spot change on the horizon, anticipate what may happen next and develop strategies in advance is vital.

Authenticity is another essential skill in times of volatile, unpredictable change. Your ability to create clarity by describing your vision and painting a picture of the future is more important than ever. You need to be able to lead with confidence and have the courage to take a stand. You need to build trust and confidence within your teams and be genuine in your communications. Change tends to cause anxiety and confusion. Your role as a leader is to bring a level of certainty about the direction of travel and evoke a sense of purpose for your staff.

Identifying organisational culture

If you really want to make radical changes to the way your organisation operates, you need to gain a good understanding of its culture.

Whats your culture?

There are many tools and models are available to help you identify the characteristics of your organisations culture.

You might wish to use Cultural ‘dimensions’, a framework for cross-cultural communication pioneered by Hofstede and discussed practically in ‘Riding the waves of Culture’ by Fons Trompenaars. Alternatively you might wish to consider The ‘Cultural Web’ a tool to help align your organisation’s culture with strategy developed by Gerry Johnson and Kevan Scholes in 1992.

An alternative way to work on cultural change is to identify sub-cultures that may exist within an organisation and investigate why they may find it difficult to inter-relate. Rapid and constant change has a huge impact on organisational culture and can result in a ‘non-culture’ – a kind of vacuum left where a cohesive culture used to exist. This vacuum needs to be filled with a new collective coherence.

Mindfulness, as you know, helps you to step into the present moment and see what’s really going on. This ability is useful when seeking to identify sub-cultures. You need to map the sub-cultures that exist and how these relate to each other. For example, manufacturing may have a completely different sub-culture to finance. Once identified, take time to celebrate the sub-cultures and encourage them to flourish. The idea behind this move is that you bring them out into the open and thus have a better chance of understanding of what you’re dealing with. Trying to make a sub-culture comply with a corporate ideal often pushes it further underground, which makes it impossible to change. Giving people a unique sub-culture that they can be proud of often encourages that sub-culture to move closer to corporate intent.

Where a weak and dysfunctional sub-culture exists, try to give it a helping hand. Weak sub-cultures can seriously undermine organisational cohesion. Identify why confidence has been lost and help the business area add value to the organisation once more.

The final stage of the process involves weaving together the diverse sub-cultures. By getting members of staff from different cultures working together on areas of common purpose, more areas of shared beliefs emerge. The shared cultural beliefs encourage sub-cultures to bond and form a web of shared beliefs. These webs can become strong, and equally as effective as the tightly woven, singular company culture of the past.

Remember that cultural change initiatives take time to embed – no quick fixes exist. As a leader, getting to grips with organisational culture can be the deciding factor between a strategy’s or change initiative’s success and failure. Ignore organisational culture at your peril! Be mindful that not all organisational cultures may be to your liking. Unless they’re seriously detrimental to the organisation, you need to let go of your personal feelings on the matter and spend your energy on getting the different sub-cultures to work together and establish more and more areas of common ground.

Mindfully discovering common ground

Most researchers believe human beings are more hardwired to cooperate than to compete. Gather together workers from different sub-cultures to work together on areas of common ground. Start the meeting with a three-minute focus break (see Chapter 5), explaining that participants will be working together for the next few hours, you want them to gain the most from this time and that this technique helps them clear their minds and allow them to do so. Get each participant to write down five things they feel need to be worked on – each written on a different piece of paper. Gather the pieces of paper and group them into themes and areas of commonality. These areas of common ground are the things to work on first.

Creating a collective vision for the future

Large organisations generally spend a considerable amount of time and effort on developing organisational visions. Branding and communication experts are drafted in to help the top team define their vision for the future in a manner that will motivate staff and inspire belief, confidence and desire in customers. Smaller organisations sometimes suffer from having no vision, or a vision that is too wordy, difficult to remember and feels unachievable. Visions are intended to paint a vivid picture of the organisation and where it’s heading. Less is often more! You need to make your organisational visions memorable and inspiring but also achievable.

Try using the following techniques to help you develop a vision for the future.

Mindfully envisioning the future

Step 1: Centring and visioning

1. Settle yourself in a room where you won’t be disturbed. Switch off your mobile phone, your laptop (or at least the volume) and silence any device that may take your attention away from the task in hand.
2. Sit in a comfortable, upright position. Close your eyes or hold them in soft focus.
3. Spend three minutes or so focusing your attention on the sensation of breathing. Really feel the present-moment sensations of the breath entering your body and the breath leaving your body.
4. Spend a further three minutes reconnecting with your body in this moment in time. Check how your feet are feeling in this moment in time, followed by your legs, bottom, shoulders and head.
5. Open your eyes and capture on a piece of paper or your laptop the five key characteristics representing how you’d like your organisation to be in three to five years’ time. You can express these characteristics as words, pictures or paragraphs of descriptive text.

Step 2: Identifying things you need to start, stop and continue doing

1. Refocus your attention on the present-moment experience. Try to let go of the thoughts that are probably rattling round in your head. Remember, you’ve jotted them down, so nothing important will be forgotten.
2. Spend two minutes focusing your attention on the thoughts in your mind – observing them as mental processes and then letting them go.
3. Spend a further two minutes focusing your attention on your breathing, as described above.
4. Open your eyes. Read the ‘five characteristics’ you jotted down and ask yourself, ‘In order to achieve this, what do we need to
   • Start doing;
   • Stop doing;
   • Continue doing?’
5. Jot down what comes to mind.

Step 3: Checking your gut instinct and intuition

1. Refocus your attention as in step 2 above.
2. Open your eyes again and check what you’ve jotted down. Imagine what’s on the paper becoming a reality, and hold that thought for a moment.
3. Close your eyes or hold them in soft focus. Take five slow breaths. Now focus your attention on your body.
   • How does your body feel in this moment in time? If you feel any tensions or sensations, where in your body are they being held?
   • Do you feel any emotions? What are they?
   • Are any thoughts popping into your head? What are they?
4. Examine your experiences during this exercise. If you felt excitement and happiness and your body felt fine, you’ve probably got it right. If you felt fear or uncertainty, you may need to revisit your strategy.

This activity works well with a group. You can lead the mindfulness exercises and segue into and out of planning activities.

Developing strategies mindfully

Having defined a high-level vision, it’s time to develop a strategy to make it happen. You need to gather key information into one place and summarise it into an easy to read format.

You can use the model shown in Figure 15-1 as a discussion tool.

Consider conducting a SWOT analysis for each of the segments in the model above, whereby you identify each segment’s:

• Strengths
• Weaknesses
• Opportunities
• Threats

You can take a mindful approach to this task as follows:

Stage 1: Getting ready

1. Decide on the best people to get the task done and invite them to a meeting. Identify the mix of skills necessary to create an effective team.
2. Send a copy of Figure 15-1 (or your own version thereof) to each participant prior to the meeting. Ask them to come to the meeting with data for their own area relating to each segment.
3. Create the right environment to enable participants to think out of the box and innovate. Ensure that hot and cold drinks, slow-energy-release snacks, such as oat-based cereal bars, and fruit are available, even if you have to buy them yourself.

Stage 2: Mindfully preparing for productivity

1. Ask everyone at the beginning of the meeting to switch off (and not just silence!) all mobile devices so that everyone’s complete attention stays on the task.
2. Ask everyone to capture any concerns they may have on slips of paper and place these in a filing tray placed near the door.
3. Invite everyone to take part in a ‘centring’ exercise. You may wish to explain to participants some of the science behind mindfulness exercises and why doing them is a good use of their time. Model mindfulness by leading the centring exercise as follows:
   • Invite participants to close their eyes or hold them in soft focus.
   • Invite them to focus their attention on the thoughts that enter their heads, to acknowledge them as ‘mental processes’ and to let them go without starting to think about them or interacting with them in any way. Tell them that if their minds wander it’s fine and when they notice this wandering happening to just gently escort their attention back to the present moment. Allow three minutes for this activity.
   • Invite them to focus on the sensation of breathing, experiencing it as though for the first time. Allow two minutes for this activity.
   • Invite them to focus their attention on any sounds they may be hearing – inside the room, outside the room or even outside the building. Explain that the object of the exercise is to simply observe, not judge or react to the sounds. Allow one minute for this activity.
   • Invite them to open their eyes, ready to work on creating a new strategy.
4. Recap the overall vision that you’re all striving to make reality. This vision should already have been agreed upon in previous meetings.

Ask those participants who do not wish to try the mindfulness exercise to just sit quietly and observe it.

Stage 3: Mindfully establishing the status quo

1. Appoint five chairpersons – one to focus on each of the five segments. Split the remaining participants evenly between the five groups.
2. Explain that everyone will have the opportunity to contribute to all five segments.
3. Sound a bell to start the information sharing and capturing process. After 15 minutes, sound the bell again and ask each group of participants to move to a new chairperson. Repeat until everyone has had the opportunity to visit all five groups.
4. Lead another short mindfulness exercise. Use the three-minute focus break from Chapter 5.

Stage 4: Mindfully creating a new strategy

1. Share the information gathered. Make sure that you, and the group as a whole, do not start to judge or categorise – just listen and absorb.
2. Define as a group the strategies needed to achieve the business vision and targets. Work your way round the segments one at a time.
3. Thank the group for all their hard work. Take responsibility for taking away the draft strategy and producing a professional document for sharing and further discussion.

Embedding new values and behaviours

Now that you’ve a clear idea of your organisation’s culture and vision and a clear strategy for the future, you need to make the plan a reality. The vision and strategy may call for staff to embrace new values, and almost certainly to adopt new behaviours.

Be mindful that old ways of working and behaving are likely to be deeply embedded, especially if they worked well in the past and people have enjoyed and been rewarded (by pay, recognition or a sense of achievement) for working in this way. Don’t expect staff to embrace your proposed changes with the same enthusiasm as you. For one thing, you have a head start. You’ve already started to rewire the way your brain thinks about working. As you’ve worked on creating the strategy, your brain has been busily storing new information and making new connections. You’re aware of all the factors that led you to create the new strategy but your team are not.

When you’re driving change you’re likely to embrace it more quickly, even if you’re not wildly enthusiastic about what it involves. Asking people to do things differently can generate all sorts of mental conflicts for them – many of which they may be completely unaware of. If accepted, new ways of doing things are eventually stored by the brain as habits, and these habits in time become more dominant than the work habit circuitry that they’re currently using. The process of habit formation can be really slow. The more opportunities that you can create to explore and practise new ways of working, the stronger the brain’s neural pathways (circuitry) become.

For some people, the perceived threat of the new way of working may prove too great and they default to old ways of thinking and behaving. Be mindful that they may not defaulting on purpose as an act of anarchy; they may be largely unaware of how their thoughts, emotions and habits are driving their behaviour.

Mindfulness can be invaluable when you’re trying to embed new values and behaviours. It helps you to develop awareness of your hidden mental world. It helps you develop the skill to observe your thoughts, emotions and bodily responses. By developing this awareness, you’re able to choose a wise response. As a leader, being able to respond to people and situations mindfully helps you manage yourself better when driving through difficult changes. Mindfulness can help you manage your well-being and deal with any personal difficulties or inner conflicts that arise. In addition, you’ll be better able to observe when your team members are struggling and can then help them work better with their mind.

In times of change and uncertainty, be kind to yourself and your colleagues. As Chapter 5 describes, self-kindness can help you switch off your fight-or-flight response, making it easier to see things clearly and concentrate.

Remember that how you feel about things is likely to have an impact on your behaviour to others. Your behaviour is likely to have an impact on how others feel, which has an impact on how they behave. By acting as a mindful role model, you make things easier for those around you, and you’re likely to feel better too.

If you offer mindfulness training to your staff, it probably won’t make an unwelcome change any more palatable. What it can do is help them to become more aware of what’s going on in their mental landscape. This awareness gives them the opportunity to bring to the surface thoughts and behaviours that are making them unhappy, stressed or fearful. Knowledge of what’s going on in their minds allows them to take control of the situation. They can decide what to do next and focus their energy accordingly.

Creating a More Mindful Organisation

Introducing mindfulness into your organisation can lead to many benefits. Not only is mindfulness likely to improve employees’ well-being, it may also make them more productive and creative. But does such a thing as a ‘mindful organisation’ actually exist?

In the 1990s, the concept of the ‘learning organisation’ was popular. The idea was that an organisation would facilitate information sharing and learning for all members of staff and in this way continuously transform itself. Knowledge management systems were put in place to capture information and share it, and knowledge managers appointed to oversee the whole thing. The problem was that no one really knew what a ‘learning organisation’ looked like, so it was virtually impossible for organisations to know when they had metamorphosed into this mythical beast. While the idea was good, it became a never-ending journey – rather like that experienced by the crew in Star Trek – boldly going where no organisation had gone before … with no clear final destination.

The idea of becoming ‘a mindful organisation’ may fall into the same trap. You will probably find it easier and more meaningful to focus on incubating pockets of mindfulness within your organisation. Create spaces for staff to go and spend a few minutes in silence to refocus their efforts, and give staff permission to go to this place for short periods when they need to. Let mindfulness evolve within your organisation, and leave the future to sort itself out. Who knows? In a few years’ time many aspects of your organisation may be transformed by mindfulness, but it’s best to start with the present moment.

Remembering that looking beyond the bottom line is good for the bottom line

Research evidence suggests that mindfulness is likely to be good for your bottom line. Here are a few facts to consider:

• Stress is now the top cause of workplace sickness and absence in many countries. Lost productivity costs money. Studies conducted over the last 40 years conclude that mindfulness is highly effective in reducing stress.
• Many workers are now so busy that they’re in a constant state of fight or flight. Practising mindfulness can switch off the brain’s fight-or-flight response, improving both well-being and the ability to be productive.
• A lack of focus and concentration can undermine work performance. Research shows that mindfulness can improve focus and concentration.
• The ability to gain perspective and ‘see the bigger picture’ is important – especially in times of change. In recent years, seven independent studies have shown that mindfulness can help you see the bigger picture and set aside personal agendas.
• Research into mindfulness and decision making demonstrates that mindfulness can help you make more rational decisions, not be ‘blinded’ by past experiences and come up with more creative solutions.
• Mindfulness has proven effective in helping people manage their emotions better, develop a more positive outlook and prevent burnout.

The Return On Investment (ROI) of mindfulness

Let’s look at some simple mathematics.

An employee on a salary of £25,000 for a five-day week for 47 weeks per year (allowing for five weeks’ holiday) costs his company £106 a day. If you add on the cost of National Insurance and additional benefits, the cost is probably more like £133.

Research by the Health and Safety Executive conducted in 2011 demonstrated that, on average, people who were signed off work as a result of stress took 24 days off. Using the example above, the cost of this stress is £3,192.

If the organisation offered mindfulness courses to staff (two hours a week for eight weeks, delivered in-house by an external specialist) at an average cost of £300 per person (assuming a class of 12), and doing so helped reduce or eliminate time off for stress, the savings would be as follows

So, running one mindfulness course for 12 people can potentially save the company £31,512. And that’s without taking into account the possible increase in productivity that the mindfulness course can also offer. If, at a conservative estimate, 40 per cent of participants on a mindfulness course for 12 people improve their productivity by 10 per cent, that’s equivalent to gaining an additional member of staff for two days a week, which would cost £12,500 per annum.

The above calculations provide a strong argument for promoting and supporting mindfulness in the workplace. Naturally the cost of mindfulness at work consultants varies, as do salaries and average staff absence levels. In addition, levels of productivity can be tricky to measure in many work environments. The question to ask yourself is, ‘What is the return on investment for an average training course?’ Obviously, this is difficult to calculate.

If we apply the same rules to, for example, a one-day personal effectiveness course delivered by an external consultant, the costs may be as follows:

This investment can lead to a 10 per cent increase in productivity, but where is the evidence to support this? Little research evidence suggests that spending on personal effectiveness courses or many of the generic ‘interpersonal’ skills training actually has any impact on a company’s bottom line. In contrast, a significant volume of research demonstrates that mindfulness does improve a wide range of desirable work skills such as relationships with colleagues and customers, focus and concentration, strategic thinking, decision making and overall resilience. It can also increase staff engagement and productivity.

Setting the sums aside, although the bottom line is important, sometimes by looking beyond it and caring for your employees’ well-being and making the workplace a great place to be, you gain greater commitment and buy in from your staff. Measuring the value of staff commitment and well-being is clearly impossible, but it cannot fail to produce a positive impact all round.

Mindfully improving employee engagement and retention

‘Engaged employees’ are fully involved in and enthusiastic about their work. This engagement motivates them to work in harmony with their organisation. An employee’s positive or negative emotional attachment to their job, colleagues and the organisation as a whole is important. Employee engagement is distinctively different from employee satisfaction, motivation and organisational culture.

Mindfulness can improve employee engagement and retention. Practising mindfulness leads to improved work engagement because it elicits positive emotions and improves psychological functioning.

Mindfully engaging staff

If your company runs an annual staff survey which includes questions relating to employee engagement , you could use these questions as a baseline. Try running a mindfulness pilot (with the full support of the senior management team and line managers), and compare current responses to those of previous years. You may be surprised at the positivity expressed by staff who have completed the mindfulness course compared with the attitudes of colleagues who did not attend.

Offer staff with a poor attendance record as a result of ill health the opportunity to attend mindfulness training. Transport for London encouraged such staff to undergo mindfulness training in their own time. It resulted in a 51 per cent reduction in sick leave, for a wide range of health conditions. Days off as a result of stress, anxiety and depression dropped by 78 per cent during the four years following the course and 55 per cent of participants reported increased happiness at work.

Creating the right work/life balance for all employees

As this book repeatedly stresses, working long hours does not increase your productivity, it usually decreases it. The same is true for staff members. Some organisations develop a working culture in which long hours are the norm. Employees feel that they need to be seen to be in the office for more hours than they’re paid in order to fit in. Emails are often sent late at night, making other employees feel that they’re in some way deficient because they’re not working at that hour. In a similar way, some organisations expect staff to be in instant contact outside normal working hours.

As a leader, you’ve the power to support working practices that promote a healthy balance between people’s personal and working lives.

Mindfully balancing life and work

Constant connectivity is bad for performance. Try introducing ‘no contact times’ and encourage staff to switch off their mobile devices when away from work.

Keep an eye on the times that you and other senior managers send emails. If the working style that best suits you involves rest and relaxation after normal working hours and then a little time working in peace late in the evening or first thing in the morning, set your emails to send in normal working hours (you can easily set this system up). By doing so, you’re not sending the message to others that they too have to be working late at night or early in the morning.

As Chapter 18 covers, lack of control over workload or working methods can be a major source of stress. Where possible, encourage workers to work in a manner that suits them. Encourage individuality, as long as core work hours are covered, work gets done and targets are met.

Offer staff mindfulness training to examine objectively their current work/life balance and to establish a way of working that is more nourishing and rewarding for them personally.

Offer staff a ‘quiet room’ to go to when they need 10 minutes of silence to regain their sense of balance and improve their productivity. Doing so sends a positive message to staff that their need for a few minutes of quiet mindfulness is recognised; providing this area is so much better than employees sneaking off to store cupboards or toilet cubicles.

Mindfulness can transform both your own and your employees’ perception of change and how to manage it. Fortunately, your organisation can become more mindful while still keeping a keen eye on the bottom line. Maybe you’ve done your own sums and return on investment calculations. Introducing mindful work practices into your organisation can be difficult when you occupy a junior role, but as a leader you can use your power and influence to change things for the better. You can choose to continue leading as you always have, or start to model some mindful behaviour and start a quiet revolution. You’ve the power – the choice is yours.