Expansive Leadership

Cultivating Mindfulness to Lead Self and Others in a Changing World – A 28-Day Program

Latha Poonamallee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000384666
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Développement personnel
• Subtopic: Réussite personnelle

The structured 28-day mindfulness and contemplative journey presented in this book will help aspiring and current leaders to clarify their identities, and identify and reflect on their mental models to become more expansive leaders.

The present moment demands new ways of being, doing, and relating with the world. To meet this moment, we need fresh, collective, inclusive, and interdependent models of leadership and new approaches to leadership development. This book goes beyond the 'McMindfulness' often seen in mindful leadership books, to offer a multi-faceted approach to develop a more interconnected sense of self and interdependence-centric mindsets needed for expansive leadership, through mindfulness practice. Through this practice, leaders can cultivate the ability to make deliberate choices using slow thinking and overcome any unconscious and implicit biases that are the result of fast-thinking processes. Anchored in insights from over ten years of teaching mindfulness-based leadership development courses, this book is an invitation to explore how to be a leader in an expansive, inclusive, robust, and resilient way. The reader will have an opportunity to define and refine their identity, uncover their personal mental models, and conclude by developing their own leadership philosophy.

Leadership development professionals and teachers can adopt this for their students, coaching, and consulting clients.

Part 1

The Ground

Chapter 1

Preparing the Ground

Preparing

Close your eyes for a moment and let yourself take a deep breath. Deeper than you normally allow for. Imagine for a few moments that we are all interconnected parts of the same web of life; not just you and me as individuals and humans, but the universe at large. What kind of world would that be? What kind of organizations, communities, and societies would we create? What kind of relationships would we embed ourselves in and invest our time in? How would we make decisions? What kind of leadership would we need to foster and support that world? How do we nurture and develop that kind of leadership?

The present moment demands that we invent new ways of being, doing, and relating with the world; new ways to protect ourselves and the world from our own worst impulses to ensure that we don’t exacerbate the fragility of the world we live in. To meet this moment, we need fresh, collective, inclusive, and interdependent models of leadership and new approaches to leadership development. Not just doing the same thing better but doing better things with our lives, resources, talents, and opportunities.

Grounded in my work on integrative mental models and identities,^{1 2 3} I present the Expansive Leadership Model, as a 21^st century alternative to the egocentric and tribal centric leadership models of yesteryears and provide a blueprint for how to use mindfulness and contemplative approaches for developing socially mindful, just, collective, and inclusive leadership. In recent years, mindfulness practice has been enthusiastically adopted by different organizations, sectors, and communities from educators⁴ to therapists⁵ and even business executives. The field of leadership development has seen its share of adoption of mindfulness as well.^{6 7 8 9} Mindfulness and contemplative practice are effective tools for such an undertaking¹⁰ because at the very minimum these approaches foster self-awareness and emotional self-regulation¹¹ that are foundational for effective leadership.

An unknown author wrote:

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom.

Meditation and mindfulness practice nurture our ability to inhabit that space with power and agency. The ability to lead begins with the process of self-discovery, self-awareness, self-leadership, and discovering our connections to other people and the universe at large. Central to this framework is the practical mindfulness training which incorporates:

• Intentionality
• Authenticity
• Prosocial orientation
• Transformation
• Service.

Through mindfulness training, we learn how to cultivate attention and awareness that allows us to live all aspects of our lives with a great sense of skill, connection, openness, and balance. Paying attention to the activity of the mind for even a few minutes yields powerful and potentially valuable information. Our capacity to listen deeply, to make informed decisions, to effectively handle stress, to ignite innovation, and to access previously untapped resources and apply them rely on our capacity to be mindful and present. When we are fully present in the moment, we optimize our capacity for self-awareness, self-regulation, and relationship management. The primary tenet is Respond not React.

Mindfulness is more commonly used for leadership development in instrumental ways such as stress and anxiety reduction, improving resilience, increasing attention and concentration – mostly all towards being more productive in workplace contexts. This approach bypasses the original intent that underlies mindfulness practice and shortchanges the practitioner. The original intent of all mindfulness and contemplative practice is to develop insight, compassion, critical inquiry towards an ethical life (dharma) – especially in the Buddhist tradition that permeates the mindfulness utilization in contemporary western world.¹² By focusing primarily if not solely on the immediate priorities of individual pain reduction, and people’s effectiveness in the capitalistic and material worlds, and by overlooking the moral and spiritual questions, most contemporary approaches to mindfulness-based leadership development bypass the spiritual intent¹³ and truncate an individual’s capacity for holistic development.¹⁴ Welwood refers to Chogyam Trungpa Riponche’s term “spiritual materialism” or “the tendency to commodify spirituality itself in service of our own ego-clinging”:

No matter what the practice or teaching, ego loves to wait in ambush to appropriate spirituality for its own survival and gain.¹⁵

Further, the contemporary focus also obfuscates the persistent structural inequities where the individual experience is not explored in the context of social identities. Without context and an examination of how people challenge, engage, or are silently complicit in the perpetuation of existing inequalities and the destruction of the natural environment.¹⁶

Removed from its moral and communal contexts and lacking in ethical frameworks¹⁷ and expectations,¹⁸ contemporary mindfulness practices – especially in corporate or corporate like settings – is the nexus of cultural appropriation, commodification, and white supremacy. Like Gandhi’s Satyagraha – which in its core is an active fight for truth¹⁹ – is often mischaracterized as passive political resistance, the so-called mindfulness revolution²⁰ has moved the practice from its original purpose of liberation and enlightenment to quelling resistance and serving profits. This phenomenon of McMindfulness²¹ or McDonaldization of mindfulness movement is exemplified by the Time Magazine featuring blond, white women on covers of two issues exalting the mindfulness revolution.²² The fact that the two issues were separated by a decade demonstrates how entrenched this approach has become. The most well-known mindful leadership teachers are all uniformly white, corporate, and promote mindfulness as a way for people to cope with their busy, stressful world and contribute to the bottom-line rather than fortifying and supporting practitioners in challenging fundamental assumptions about the world in which we live. No doubt, a leader needs a calm space to recharge, but to focus solely on that as an outcome of this “mindfulness revolution” is narcissistic, self-referential, and irresponsible. This book proposes a multi-faceted mindfulness approach that takes a whole-person approach including the emotional, cognitive, embodied, experiential, moral and spiritual realms with an explicit goal of facilitating a more interconnected sense of self and expansive mindsets. In addition, this process leverages critical reflection around social identities and mental models that define how we engage with others and the world to look at ourselves anew. It takes bravery and resilience to face up to and sit with negative emotions such as shame and guilt that are bound to occur during such a critical examination. Mindfulness practice can help make sense of and process those negative emotions with resilience.

Growing up in a traditional South Indian brahmin family, stories of sages who had the power to will themselves into samadhi (meditative trance consciousness) through dhyana (meditation) and even connect to the future and past of the universe in that state were stock bedtime stories of my childhood. Throughout my teens and early twenties, I struggled to reconcile what was even then a deep fascination with contemplative practice and my progressive, feminist, anti-caste, anti-bigotry stance. To me, it all seemed part of the same package and I wanted nothing to do with it. I was in my mid-twenties when I started to meditate in earnestness and then continued to deepen my practice over the next two decades when I also obtained a doctorate in organizational behavior and was teaching leadership development in universities and consulting with a few organizations. Pieces started to click together; my personal meditation practice and professional calling of supporting people development merged. Later, when I started to teach by myself as a newly minted faculty member, I first taught the class as I was taught to teach. I have been experimenting and playing with the curriculum over the years to make it my own and address some of my concerns around the ‘development’ part. For example, I taught an entire semester once using popular Hollywood movies. This experimentation continued until my own ‘aha’ moment – using mindfulness and contemplative approaches as a pedagogy for leadership development.

Even though I owed much of my personal growth in emotional self-awareness and self-regulation to my mindfulness practice that started over 20 years ago, it didn’t dawn on me that I could and should utilize it to teach leadership development until around ten years ago. The response to my experimentation with just one module of three weeks was so encouraging that I retooled the entire curriculum around mindfulness. Having taught it many times to different audiences, now I feel confident that I have distilled the essence, refined the process, and clarified and connected the underlying pedagogical principles that I wanted to share it with others who would like to apply it in their own self-development or in their leadership development practice.

I wished to create a mindfulness-based leadership development program particularly focused on cultivating mental models that are morally expansive and interdependence-centric and less egocentric and narrowminded or plagued by -isms. My goal was to develop a transformative, whole-person approach that considers leadership as a layered, complex phenomenon blending individual and structural transformation processes. This was partly in response to the competency approach to leadership development that focuses on behaviors and not at the underlying mental models and mindsets. I designed and implemented with the knowledge that mental models can be changed, and we can all cultivate more interdependent identities and prosocial mental models while acknowledging that we co-hold occasionally conflicting mental models and deal with complex and nuanced choices. Mindfulness practice is an appropriate choice to further this end because it also increases the capacity for cognitive complexity.²³ The program was developed over a ten-year period with different audience groups ranging from undergraduate students in engineering, technology, and business to graduate students in design, architecture, management, leadership and practitioners including managers, consultants, and social and environmental activists. I provide a glimpse into their experience through quotes drawn from their journals to bring to life the concepts and practices.

Like the Bodhisattva who delay their own salvation out of compassion for others, a good leader transcends their personal egocentricism. Sometimes we forget that iconic (and altruistic) leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King, and President Nelson Mandela were also flesh and blood humans like the rest of us. Meditation practice grounds us in the shared human condition – capacity for greatness, altruism, and prosocial mindfulness simultaneously co-existing with egocentricism, fear, anxiety, and the impulse to dehumanize the ‘other.’ The practice allows us to own our greatness while being brave enough to face our ignorant and ignoble impulses. It allows us to make a deliberate choice through slow thinking that helps us overcome our unconscious and implicit biases. The moment of pause is essential to slow our thinking so we can transcend the rote script by which we are all tra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Bio of Dr. Latha Poonamallee
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• PART 1: The Ground
• PART 2: Practice Principles
• PART 3: Know Thyself
• PART 4: The Journey
• Index