The Mind of the Leader

Rasmus Hougaard: So we're a global professional services firm doing training, and leadership training with large organizations around the world. We're global, in 28 countries, and what we started to observe over the past few – well, I would say five – years is that mindfulness is a really core skill. I'm sure we'll get to that through this interview, but we started to notice that more than mindfulness is needed for leaders to truly engage their workforce, to really create a sense of commitment, loyalty, and thereby more well-being and performance.

So, what we decided was to do a bit of a research project, so we allocated two years, we partnered up with Harvard Business Review, we assessed around 35,000 leaders, interviewed around 250 executives of Microsoft, Google, Accenture, McKinsey, and so on, to really understand what is it from the mind perspective that leaders need in the 21st century to be successful in leading themselves, their people and their organization for basically great results.

Rachel Salaman: Well, you mentioned there about people leading themselves. What do you mean by that?

Rasmus Hougaard: So, leading self, well let's take the quote of Peter Drucker, the big leadership pioneer, who said, "You cannot manage other people unless you know how to manage yourself first." A lot of leadership training and leadership development, and leadership education, is really focused around a strategy, the vision, the bottom line, the spreadsheets, which is all very important. But if we start our leadership journey with just learning to do all those external things, it's really like building a house starting with the roof, missing the foundation.

So what we mean by "leading ourselves" is that the foundation of leading others is really, first of all, understanding ourselves, because only when we really understand ourselves, understand our mind, understand our personality and values, are we able to lead ourselves effectively, and only when we can understand and lead ourselves effectively can we lead and understand our people effectively, and only when we do that we can actually lead our organization. So leadership starts in the mind, it starts with understanding and leading ourselves, and then we can apply that to our people and our organization.

Rachel Salaman: In the book you say that managers need to lead with mindfulness, selflessness and compassion, which you shorten to "MSC." Could you tell us why you singled out those three things in particular?

Rasmus Hougaard: Yeah. It's actually more a "how" we single it out, because it wasn't a choice of ours, we were fairly research oriented in our way of approaching this project. So in our assessment of the 35,000 leaders, and in the interviews with 250 executives, these were the three qualities that stood out really, really strongly. And then that's combined with trawling through masses of research on leadership and on neurology, which just supported that these three qualities are eminently important for leaders nowadays.

Rachel Salaman: In the research you did with those leaders, did you get a sense that they understood the meaning of these three things, mindfulness, selflessness and compassion, as they're all subject to a little bit of personal interpretation, aren't they?

Rasmus Hougaard: Absolutely, and many of them didn't use these words. I will take the example of the President and CEO of Marriott International, Arne Sorenson. When I mentioned the word "compassion" to him, he said, “Well, that's an interesting word I don't often use. A word that is important for me and for my culture is 'caring.'” He then shared that they have a whole business philosophy, the founding philosophy of Marriott, which is one of the largest companies in the world with 750,000 employees and 8,000 hotels.

He basically said, our philosophy, the way we run our business – not HR, the way we run our business – is, if we take care of our people and they take care of our guests, then business takes care of itself. So no, these leaders did not use these terms necessarily, some of them did, some of them didn't, but care, compassion, kindness, whatever you want to call it, coming back to the same intention of wanting to be of benefit for others, wanting to see others thrive and be happy, and the same with mindfulness and selflessness.

Rachel Salaman: Well, mindfulness is a slightly more familiar term in the business world these days, but it still can mean a lot of different things to different people. What does it mean to you?

Rasmus Hougaard: Right. So mindfulness, you're right, is a very, very popular term and practice nowadays. We work with more than 500 international companies, bringing mindfulness to the leaders and employees. Our definition of it, at least on the first basic level, is that mindfulness is the ability to manage our own attention. We are basically living and working in what we call "the PAID reality," a place where we are under pressure. The P and A, always on; I, information overload; and D, distracted environments. What is happening when we're in this reality is, according to research, that we're losing our ability to pay attention, simply not able to focus at will on the task at hand for an extended period of time.

Research has found that 47 percent of the time, for people that are working in organizations, their minds are simply involuntarily drifting away, so almost half of our time at work our mind is not present with what we're doing. So back to that definition, mindfulness, it's the ability to manage our attention at a very foundational level. Then, if we take it a bit deeper, it is the combination of being able to focus and being able to be aware of ourselves. So, self-awareness and focus, that's really what mindfulness is.

Rachel Salaman: So how can people get better self-awareness through mindfulness?

Rasmus Hougaard: I'll take a quote from the CEO of The Nature Conservancy, Mark Tercek, who used to be a Goldman Sachs executive: “Mindfulness allows the awareness of avoiding reactivity and applying responsivity." So awareness is the skill of noticing what's going on in our mind moment to moment, and rather than, when we're under pressure, go on autopilot and just react, having the ability to respond most appropriate to any situation.

A colleague coming into our office, needing something from us, the reactive reaction may be just to say, "I don't have time," or maybe even to give the time when it wouldn't be the most appropriate thing to do. The response would be to have a second of gap in your mind and decide whether you're engaging in this conversation now, and how, or not.

Mindfulness has shown, from a research perspective, to be the key creator of awareness, so when we do mindfulness practice, we learn to observe our mind and thereby gain an insight into our awareness and how we can manage it. So, mindfulness is the key to awareness. We did a project at a Silicon Valley tech organization, where people trained for four weeks with 10 minutes of mindfulness practice every day, and as a result they increased their awareness by 35 percent, so it doesn't take as much as you might think.

Rachel Salaman: No, but still some busy managers might be thinking, "Gosh, I haven't got time for that kind of thing." What are your tips for them if they feel that they can't even find 10 minutes at work? Should they be perhaps doing it before they get to work?

Rasmus Hougaard: It's a very good question. First of all, we should all have time for it, simply because of the 47 percent of our time our mind is wandering. What we have found is that focus increases life awareness with around 30 percent after a few weeks of practice, so the return on investment from spending some minutes on this a day is just incredible.

So back to your question, what is a good time to do this? We generally recommend this is something that is done in the morning, just before starting the day, that really helps to set a direction of focus and awareness throughout the day. With our clients, when we do training programs with them, it is sometimes something that people do in groups together in a meeting space.

Rachel Salaman: For example, a team leader might say to his or her team, "At 8.30 every morning we're going to meet in X meeting room and do 10 to 15 minutes of mindfulness together"?

Rasmus Hougaard: Yes, exactly, that is what is happening in many more offices around the world than you would think, yes.

Rachel Salaman: In the book you say that mindfulness can help managers adopt what you call a "beginner's mind," which is useful in understanding their teams. Could you explain what that is and how it helps?

Rasmus Hougaard: So, a beginner's mind is the opposite of what is called "cognitive rigidity." So basically our mind, when we experience something for the first time we immediately create, let's say, a still image. It's almost like the mind takes a still image of that person or that task and stores it deep down in the brain.

And the next time we see that person, for a split second we see the person and then the brain throws up that old picture we took the last time we saw that person, and we're really just looking at a replicate of what we experienced the first time, meaning we don't really see what is out there, our mind is creating reality.

This is just a neurological fact. So that has an obvious impact on how we understand our people, how we understand our teams, because if what we bring up in team meetings is our understanding of what they were the first time or yesterday – and not what they are today – we're completely missing out on the ability of seeing the potential in people, we're missing out on hearing their voices, we're missing out on hearing their insights, because we are stuck in our old paradigm of who they are.

So beginner's mind is the opposite of that, and research has found that the more you engage with mindfulness, the more you develop a beginner's mind, which could also be called creativity, seeing with fresh eyes, seeing with a fresh perspective on reality, on people and yourself, which obviously helps you to see the potential rather than just the limitations that your own mind has created.

Rachel Salaman: I thought it was interesting that in the book you talk about the dangers of empathy, which might surprise some people. Why is empathy dangerous?

Rasmus Hougaard: Yeah, that's a good question, and that's a bit of a surprise for pretty much everybody nowadays. First of all, I have to say it's not based on our own research. Secondly, there is absolutely a strong, strong, strong need for empathy for leaders. Tons of research has shown that empathy allows leaders to put themselves in others' shoes and really help other people where they are.

I'll take a quote of Jeff Weiner, the CEO of LinkedIn, who says that, "If you apply empathy and you come into the office and you meet a colleague who is under tremendous pressure, really stressed out, almost burning out, with empathy, you will go to that person, you'll immediately recognize that pain, and the empathetic reaction is literally to sit down next to that person and suffer with that person."

That is obviously not very helpful in leadership because we're supposed to take a lead in guiding, supporting, supervising, coaching others in getting the most out of their work life, so recent research has found that empathy in leadership leads to burnout because we take on a lot of stuff from others.

A good example of this is 35 percent of doctors in the U.S. suffer from burnout at some point in their career. It has also been proven that empathy leads to a lack of acting with diversity. So because of empathy, we empathize more with the people that are like us, meaning we hire the people that are like us, we listen to the people that are like us, we promote the people that are like us, meaning we create a very strong lack of diversity.

It has also been proven that empathy is very fleeting, so if we see something that arouses our empathy, empathy is very short lived, for a moment we are re-aroused by it and we may do a quick action, like somebody coming into our office feeling stressed, empathy would help that person to not feel stressed in the moment, but the day after, empathy is gone and we are not empathizing and we're not supporting that person anymore.

So what research has found is that empathy is not great in leadership. But, compassion is a great alternative, compassion is exactly the opposite, it is utilizing empathy, realizing the problems of others, but then spurring that into strong action. So, compassion is an alternative to empathy that researchers nowadays are really recommending.

Rachel Salaman: And we'll be talking more about compassion in a bit, but before we leave mindfulness let's look more broadly at organizations, because in the book you offer a lot of useful practical tips for creating a more mindful workplace. For example, what are your tips for mindful meetings?

Rasmus Hougaard: So we give a few examples of that, specifically from the work that we're doing with Microsoft. First of all, when people enter a meeting many people are coming from another meeting, meaning their minds are really busy and preoccupied with the meeting they just left, and they were probably five minutes late, so they're jumping into the new meeting room but their mind is not really present.

So, for the first, let's say, 15 minutes, people are not really paying attention to each other or to the agenda, the objective, but really paying attention to what they've just come from. Then maybe there's half an hour of focus, possibly, and then the last 15 minutes people are starting to tune in to the next thing that will happen. So there's a lot of wasted time in meetings nowadays.

One of the reasons is bringing in a lot of technology into the meeting rooms, which is very distracting for people, when they're looking at Facebook or the news or emails during meetings. Basically, if you're not paying attention in meetings you're wasting your own time, you're wasting other people's time. So what are the things that can be done?

One is to – at the beginning of the meeting, like in the case of Microsoft – spend one minute in silence, and it doesn't even have to be a mindfulness practice, it can be just, "OK guys, we're about to start an important meeting, let's just take a moment to settle our minds." That's the first thing, just getting rid of a lot of mental distraction. The second thing is, don't bring all your technology into the room, at least unless it's used for taking the minutes. These are some of the really practical tips that many companies are doing nowadays.

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Rachel Salaman: Turning to the "S" of the MSC framework, which is selflessness. In the book you include an insightful section on the problem with I, the ego. Could you share some of those ideas?

Rasmus Hougaard: So ego is definitely a problem in leadership. Dominic Barton, the CEO of McKinsey, has spent the past eight years discussing with leaders, what is important for leadership, and his conclusion is the most important element for effective leadership is selflessness – the opposite of having an ego.

So research has found that if you, as a leader, have a strong ego and bring that into your leadership, first of all you are very vulnerable to criticism, because an ego means you're very attached to certain perceptions of yourself, meaning if somebody else challenges those you're very vulnerable, and you're also very vulnerable for manipulation. If you have a big ego, others just need to know that ego and what drives you, and then push the right buttons and that will make you do things in a certain way.

Research has also found that ego is making us very narrow-minded. We are only wanting to see anything that confirms the observations that support our ego. Then finally, when we have a strong sense of ego we end up in what is called a CEO bubble, basically where we don't know what's going on around us because we're so preoccupied with ourselves and we don't understand our people and we don't understand our culture. So ego is a real problem in leadership.

Rachel Salaman: And yet I suppose a lot of leaders do have quite well-developed egos because that's how they ended up as leaders. What are some barriers to gaining selfless leadership?

Rasmus Hougaard: So first of all, back to the comment about many leaders having strong egos: while that is definitely true, there are equally many leaders that do not have that. What we got quite touched about over the past 10 years with our work, and certainly with this research, is seeing how many leaders in the corporate world and in public that are really leading to make a positive difference in the world.

An example is Jennifer Woo, who is the Chairman and CEO of the Lane Crawford Joyce Group, one of the largest Chinese corporations, who is basically saying that corporations are only here to serve society, to serve the community, and I think that is something that we see more and more in leaders nowadays.

To come to the question of selflessness, selflessness is exactly that ability of taking yourself out of the equation. Leadership is not about you, it's not about your results or your desires or your needs, but it is about selflessly serving a bigger cause, which could be community, which could be the world, which could be the organization, which could be the team. Of course, you need to take care of yourself, get enough sleep, make sure you get your promotion, all of that, but if it's about you before anything else then you and your organization and society and the world will be in trouble.

Rachel Salaman: At the same time, in the book you say that selflessness in leaders needs to go hand-in-hand with self-confidence, because otherwise a leader may come across as a bit of a pushover. Can you talk us through what a selfless self-confident leader looks like?

Rasmus Hougaard: I think many people will have met a self-confident but selfless leader. It is the person who does not doubt in his or her own abilities, in his or her ability to create change and deliver results. So there is not any concerns about oneself, but at the same time there is no absorption about my own needs, but there is a strong orientation to using the power, to using the skills I have, to enable others to grow, to enable others to enter the stage and get the praise.

So, a selfless self-confident leader is one that gives more praise than blame, one that takes the blame rather than passing it on to the team. So selfless and self-confident leaders really don't want that and enable people rather than hampering them, rather than taking the stage light himself, for himself.

Rachel Salaman: And looking again at the organization as a whole, how can selflessness manifest itself in an organizational culture, and how can we encourage that?

Rasmus Hougaard: A great example I think of a selfless culture has been Cisco, who we work with globally, and who have a very, very strong orientation to team spirits. So you won't see many pictures of the founder, you won't see many pictures of the sales person of the week, you will see pictures on the walls that are the teams, that are the joint efforts, that are the things that they've done to the world, so it's really more about the team, about your organization, than about the individual.

Just a little disclaimer: I'm mentioning some good companies here and all companies have good things, great things, and not so great things, so when I mention these companies it's not to say that they're glorified and perfect, it's just they do good things, and I think in terms of selflessness.

Rachel Salaman: Now we've touched briefly on compassion, which is the "C" of your MSC framework. In the book you include a useful section on self-compassion, being kind to yourself. One of your tips is to remind ourselves that we're doing our best, but there's no reason to assume that people are doing their best, so couldn't that mantra be an excuse for underperformers to continue to underperform?

Rasmus Hougaard: Yes, that is definitely true. In writing this book and in researching this book it is written for, and inspired by, fairly senior leaders, and my experience with this population is they are incredibly, incredibly high performing. They will always push themselves hard, to the detriment of their own wellbeing and health.

So the point here is, when you are that kind of overachiever you will never be satisfied, and therefore you almost mentally punish yourself daily. So with this tip, that is definitely with this population in mind, so ease a bit up on yourself, be a bit kinder to yourself, because that will help you to be more creative, to be more focused, and basically deliver the results that you want. Hammering yourself in the head doesn't help.

Rachel Salaman: Well, thinking about ourselves first does make sense, a bit like putting on your own oxygen mask before helping others in a midair emergency, but this can lead to unhealthy self-orientation at times, which would work against the selflessness that we discussed a bit earlier. How can we avoid that, looking too much and thinking too much about ourselves?

Rasmus Hougaard: That's a really great question, and psychologically it's interesting research, finding that doing something for others actually makes us happier than doing something for ourselves. Specifically, if you go and buy a spa retreat for a friend, that will make you happier than if you buy a spa retreat for yourself.

There is a lot of focus on wellbeing and taking care of ourselves and so on nowadays, which is really useful and important, especially for these high achievers, but if it becomes self-indulgence, that is not going to make you happier, it's not going to make you more balanced, it's not going to give you more well-being. So we definitely need to look at others if we want to feel well, and that's where compassion obviously comes into the picture. So how do we avoid that self-orientation, or how do we avoid self-indulgence?

We do that by, in any engagement we have with our people, and when we come home to our family, to have one mantra in mind, which is, "How can I be of benefit to this person in this very situation? How can I help this person to have a little bit better lives by means of my interaction with that person?" So, have that as a mantra, and that's basically bringing compassion into everything you do.

Rachel Salaman: Well, when it comes to leading with compassion, in the book you talk about "wise compassion." What is this?

Rasmus Hougaard: Wise compassion is something that is incredibly important. I think all human beings, at least most of us, have a strong orientation towards compassion. We want to be good and we want to do good. Lots of research has backed this. But in this desire to do good and be good there is the risk of doing disservice to the people we are leading.

As an example, you are the leader of a team, one person in this team is doing things that are detrimental to the team culture, and you may think, if you're just purely bringing compassion into it, that you don't want to tell this person because it's going to hurt his or her feelings and therefore not be nice.

That is completely misunderstood compassion. Compassion has to be paired with wisdom or professionalism, wise judgment and discernment. So in this case of a team member that is bringing bad vibes into the group, it is a real service to this person, as hard and as tough as we can be, to give and to receive that feedback, to give that, otherwise that person is not going to be able to improve and therefore stay in the job.

The same goes for laying off people. Sometimes, as a leader, we have to lay off people, but bringing compassion and wise compassion into that, the wisdom is, otherwise it's going to hurt your whole organization. The compassion is, do it with the intention of being of benefit and bring everything you can to the table to support this person in his or her transition.

Rachel Salaman: That sounds like a little bit of a fine line to tread for some people, who might not know how compassionate to be and when to, let's say, be a little bit crueler to be kind. So, what are some tips for treading that fine line?

Rasmus Hougaard: I actually don't think it's so much a fine line, I think it is more of a combination. It's a matter of having strong compassion, but as part of that having a strong, let's say, candor and transparency, that you really say what has to be said without worrying about hurting people, and making sure that whatever you say, it's done with the intention to be of benefit, to be of help.

Rachel Salaman: We've covered a lot of ground in this discussion. What for you are the top takeaways for busy managers who want to lead themselves and others better?

Rasmus Hougaard: In an interview we did with an executive of Audi Volkswagen Group, he basically said, "Leadership is about unlearning management and relearning being human." I think, for the past 30 years, there's been a very strong orientation towards leaders being a role, being a status, being a hierarchy, which has disallowed people from actually just expressing who they are as human beings.

What we're seeing is a huge trend in large organizations globally of developing more truly human leadership, with more people-centric organizations and cultures. So, I would say one thing to consider for leaders is what is it that you want to express, what is it that you are as a human being, and bring that in to the way you lead your people. That, according to our research, is what is providing the best results in terms of engagement, commitment, and productivity, both for yourself but also for the people you lead and your organization you are heading.

Rachel Salaman: So do you mean that leaders need to think about their values, is that the kind of thing you're referring to?

Rasmus Hougaard: Absolutely, the values, that is so important, to bring that into the leadership, but also just to forget about being a manager and just be a human being. The workforce is increasingly younger and younger because the Millennial population is growing, and if you're leading a group of Millennials, or even just one Millennial, they're not interested in a manager that is distant and disconnected. They want a person, they want a real human being that they can relate to, not an authority, not a status, not a role, not a power, they want a human being that they are led by.

So if you want to be successful in the modern workforce, being human rather than being a manager is really the tip, and bringing your values into that is really important.

Rachel Salaman: Rasmus Hougaard, thanks very much for joining us today.

Rasmus Hougaard: Thanks so much, Rachel.

Rachel Salaman: The name of Rasmus's book again is "The Mind of the Leader: How to Lead Yourself, Your People and Your Organization for Extraordinary Results," and it's co-authored with Jacqueline Carter. You may be interested in an app that goes along with the book, also called The Mind of the Leader, and you can find that on Google Play and in the IOS app store.

I'll be back in a few weeks with another Expert Interview. Until then, goodbye.