Seven Practices of a Mindful Leader. Marc Lesser
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What makes up company culture? People. Human beings working together to solve problems. I sometimes call this the “dirty little secret” of the business world, one that’s easy to lose sight of in the midst of the daily pressures, anxieties, and busyness that so frequently overwhelm us. Business is people working together, and business success depends on how well we interact, collaborate, communicate, and care for one another. That’s the essence of what Drucker means.
I think we recognize this, and further, I think this is what we search for, both in the workplace and in general in our lives. We want to create and be part of a supportive, positive culture — a culture of real trust and care, of transparency and integrity, of accountability and achieving results. This type of culture helps us as individuals and collectively to act with clarity, to not hold back, to show up as fully and completely as possible in all our relationships, to flourish and grow, to better serve others, and to reach our goals.
Achieving this isn’t easy. Being human isn’t easy. Working with others can be immensely challenging. Some difficulty always arises, whether that’s painful emotions, stress and uncertainty, budgets and deadlines, interpersonal conflicts, political and marketplace strife, or the unexpected obstacles that appear whenever we pursue meaningful work.
So what do we do? How do we create and sustain what everyone says we need?
In this book, I explore these questions, and I hope to guide and inspire you using the seven practices of mindful leadership that I teach to executives, entrepreneurs, engineers, doctors, teachers, and everyday people around the world. In recent years, mindfulness and mindful leadership have exploded in popularity, but interest in mindfulness does not necessarily translate into becoming a mindful leader. Understanding mindfulness can be challenging; even more difficult is embodying and regularly practicing it in everyday life. In addition, what mindfulness means and how it’s practiced can sometimes get watered down in the context of work, when it isn’t dismissed altogether. Of course, ancient contemplative practices weren’t developed in order to improve business. They are meant to shift our consciousness and way of being in the world. Yet these practices are essential to mindful leadership and to creating the type of supportive organizational culture that allows businesses and people to thrive.
My experience is somewhat unconventional. For most of my adult life, I’ve had one foot in the contemplative world and one foot in the business world, and my approach to mindful leadership has been shaped by both: from my experience as a longtime Zen practitioner and meditation teacher and as a leader, trainer, and consultant helping businesses cultivate mindful leadership and workplace well-being. Most recently I helped create the Search Inside Yourself mindfulness-based emotional intelligence program inside of Google, and I cofounded and led the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute, which has become one of the world’s most prominent leadership training companies.
This book’s seven practices were developed within the Search Inside Yourself program. One thing this experience has taught me is that people are drawn to mindfulness practice in the business world for the same reasons people practice mindfulness and meditation within any contemplative tradition — to transform their lives; to become more aware, focused, and flexible; and to shift from a narrow, egocentric, fear-based way of being to becoming more open, curious, connected, and able to help others. People seek these capacities to help them in every context and relationship, at work and outside of work.
However, the seed for these practices and for my approach to mindful leadership was sown long before, during the ten years I lived, worked, and practiced at the San Francisco Zen Center. These included two years at the City Center in San Francisco, three years at Green Gulch Farm, and five years at Tassajara, the first Zen monastery in the Western world, which is located in the Los Padres wilderness in Central California. At Tassajara, and in the Zen tradition, work is viewed as a vital part of integrating meditation practice with daily life; work is a place of service and a container for continual learning. My first summer at Tassajara, I was the kitchen’s dishwasher, and in following years I joined the kitchen crew, becoming the bread baker and the assistant to the head cook. Then, when I was twenty-eight years old, I found myself as the head cook in the Zen monastery’s kitchen — aspiring to practice and embody mindfulness and mindful leadership as I supervised up to fifteen people in the daily preparation of meals for the center’s seventy residential students and the seventy to eighty overnight guests.
Every day during the summer guest season, our task was to make three simple vegetarian meals for the students and three gourmet-quality vegetarian meals for the guests. Standards and expectations were, and remain, high. Tassajara has a more than fifty-year tradition and reputation for serving delicious, wholesome, and creative food, and it was the foundation from which Greens Restaurant of San Francisco originated, which is still regarded as one of the world’s finest vegetarian restaurants.
Nevertheless, though I was responsible for overseeing a restaurant-quality kitchen and feeding all the students and guests, my primary responsibility was to support a culture of mindfulness practice. My main job was to support a culture in which everyone in the kitchen worked with a sense of urgency, focus, generosity, confidence, and composure. In other words, as the head cook, I had twin goals: to create a radically supportive, loving, and productive work environment and to provide great meals (on time). Neither goal could be sacrificed for the other.
In fact, in a Zen monastery, the kitchen is a central hub of mindfulness practice, and it sits in close proximity to the other central hub, the meditation hall. The kitchen and the meditation hall are considered profoundly interconnected places, places of embracing effort and effortlessness, self and selflessness; places that build community; places for expressing and celebrating care, sustenance, and spirit. The kitchen is a place of work and a place of working together — so that everyone is fully supporting and supported by everyone else — and it is also a place to bring the spirit, awareness, and approach of meditation into the world of activity.
As head cook, I found that most of the time what appeared to be two activities felt like one activity — while being present, aware, and caring for people, we made food and ran the kitchen. Other times, the goals of mindfulness and the need to get things done felt competing, as if we couldn’t achieve both and had to prioritize one over the other. All restaurant kitchens, even Zen kitchens, are fast-moving, dynamic, and stressful environments. They involve lots of prep work with detailed and often complex processes, teams working together in close quarters, shifting priorities, and tight, interconnected, sometimes unreasonable deadlines. Particular to Tassajara’s kitchen is that the staff are all Zen students and not professional cooks or kitchen workers. The location is remote — during my time as head cook, if we ran out of anything, whether that was not having enough eggs or any other key ingredient, the nearest store was more than two hours away. So we had to adapt and improvise. In addition, the kitchen had no electricity. Everything was prepared by hand.
I look back and wonder how we were so successful. I remember one summer afternoon I sat at a table with a group of guests I had not met as we ate lunch in the guest dining room. A woman across from me introduced herself as a graduate business school professor, and her first question was, “Who is the brains behind this operation?” She had never been to Tassajara before, and she was impressed by the quality of the food, the quality of the service, and her overall experience. In many ways, to visitors, Tassajara looks much like a well-run business conference center. I responded that the brains behind this business was that the people working here didn’t view it as a business. Tassajara is a place of practice, of service, of cultivating mindfulness — which means letting go of wanting things to be different than they are and bringing awareness to one’s full, moment-to-moment experience.
Today, I regard the Tassajara kitchen as a model for what mindful work and mindful leadership mean in any context, of how we can experience great joy and great love right in the midst of pressure, exhaustion, and overwhelm. The monastery’s foundation and integration of mindfulness practice provided an essential context and container for everything we did in the kitchen. There was something almost magical about the level of care, learning, and playfulness, not to mention the joy and satisfaction of providing sustenance for the people we served.
It is possible for mindfulness practice, work, and leadership to be contextualized