Mindfulness as important antecedent of Authentic Leadership identified

Being self-aware means better listening and higher effectiveness

 

 

 

 

 

Good news for all who are not natural born leaders: training your mindfulness consequently, makes your doing as a superior easier. Leaders who learn to observe and evaluate in the here and now their emotions, thoughts and deeds unbiased, tend to be mindful also in dealing with their teams and peers. Hence, being self-aware makes better listening possible, enables open discussions or processing and ensures congruency between values, talk and walk. Leaders are in this way perceived as more authentic and more credible which increases in turn team satisfaction and team performance over time. These are the results of two new consecutive studies, carried out in the Netherlands and Germany, where factors which lead to or facilitate Authentic leadership were examined.

The researchers furthermore recommend all organisations to integrate mindfulness as a main criteria for Leadership into their respective recruiting procedures. Not only because it is of so much value for so-called Positive Leadership, but also because it can be trained in a time- and cost-efficient way to everyone.

Be(com)ing Real: a Multi-source and an Intervention Study on Mindfulness and Authentic Leadership, Nübold/Van Quaquebeke/Hülsheger. In: Journal of Business and Psychology, pp. 1-20, 2019.

 

 

 

For the practice:

I do confirm: mindfulness leads almost directly to authenticity. Unless I know myself very well and reflect on a regular basis I will not be able to shape and influence my life – privately and in my job – matching with my personality. Wow! Not always an easy task, but in the end perfect for me, one could state. What makes mindfulness an even better aspect, though, is that it opens a new door towards people, too. Who does not like to be listened to and understood in a mindful way?! Who does not like have a boss who acts according to his/her words and announcements? Who does not like to support leaders who remember what they have heard from and talked to their employees, treating people regardless of their rank in the organizational hierarchy with respect and interest.