Vikram Khanna
Associate Editor
Only 15 per cent of the global workforce feels engaged at work - that is "highly involved in, and enthusiastic about, their work and workplace".
That is the startling conclusion of the Gallup Organisation's 2017 State of the Global Workplace report, based on surveys done in 155 countries.
For Singapore, the figure was 23 per cent - slightly better than the global average, but still quite dismal. More bad news: A 2016 study by McKinsey & Co of 52,000 corporate leaders showed that while 86 per cent rated themselves as inspiring role models, their staff did not agree. A Gallup engagement survey the same year found that 82 per cent of employees considered their leaders "fundamentally uninspiring". In fact, another study by Mr Rasmus Hougaard, co-author of the recent book The Mind Of The Leader together with the Harvard Business Review, found that 35 per cent of employees would be willing to forgo a pay rise to see their bosses fired. The research also found that 73 per cent of leaders feel distracted from their current tasks "some" or "most" of the time. Two-thirds of leaders admitted that their minds were cluttered with lots of thoughts and a lack of clear priorities, and that they failed to complete their most important tasks.
LEADERSHIP IN CRISIS
If these ground-level findings are any guide, it would seem that corporate leadership is in a state of crisis, despite some US$46 billion (S$63 billion) being spent every year on "leadership development" courses. According to Mr Hougaard, co-founder of The Potential Project - which provides mindfulness training to companies around the world - the big problem is that corporate leaders often ignore the fact that the key to leadership lies in the mind, that their mind creates their reality and that they often unknowingly make choices based on their history or emotions which are then rationalised ex-post, and most importantly, that they first need to lead themselves more effectively before they can lead others.
He explains: "Everything we do in a company comes from the mind. Our performance comes from the mind. lf our mind is not present when we're doing things, we don't perform well. Innovation, creativity, resilience - all of these come from the mind." Most companies do not seem to see the significance of this connection, he points out. "So when they try to change their culture, they rely on tactical things - like changing their policies, their incentives or changing the layout of the office. It's never about changing the mental make-up of people." The Potential Project has worked with more than 350 companies around the world, including household names such as Accenture, American Express, Carlsberg, Cisco, Google, Ikea, Lego, Marriott, McKinsey, Microsoft and Nike. The results, Mr Hougaard claims (and which have been confirmed by many of the companies as well as academic research), include better focus and clarity, more effective prioritisation, less unproductive multitasking and lower stress levels, as well as improvements in creativity, memory and sleep quality.
Mindfulness is a thousand-year-old practice, a form of meditation that essentially involves a focus on the present - a moment-by-moment awareness of thoughts, feelings, sensations and the environment. It has become something of a cult, embraced by thousands of companies and millions of individuals. It has some scientific validation. MR1 scans have showed, for instance, that in people who practise the technique, the pre-frontal cortex of the brain -which is associated with functions such as awareness, concentration and decision-making, as well as problem solving and regulating emotion - becomes thicker. Many successful leaders have practised mindfulness. In an interview with me in 2014, the world's biggest hedge fund manager Ray Dalio credited many of his best investment ideas to his mindful meditation, which he had practised for 25 years. New ideas bubble up from his subconscious, he said, and then he validates them with his conscious mind. If they check out, he acts on them. Apple Computer co-founder Steve Jobs credited his mindful meditation with many of his successful products, including the iPhone. Another daily practitioner, Mr Marc Benioff, the founder of Salesforce, revealed that Mr Jobs advised him to "be mindful and project the future". Prominent meditators in Singapore include Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong and former GIC chief investment officer Ng Kok Song. Mr Lee Kuan Yew also became a practitioner late in his life and found it beneficial.
Mindfulness is even taught at business schools, including Singapore Management University (SMU), which offers courses in mindfulness for the public, which are approved for claims under the Government's SkillsFuture Credit subsidy scheme. I met Mr Hougaard at SMU, where he delivered a talk on mindfulness. My first question to him was, having worked with hundreds of companies, why does he think corporate leadership is in a state of crisis? He pointed out that one important maxim that many corporate leaders ignore, or do not realise, is that, as the former managing partner of McKinsey Dominic Barton put it, "leadership is less about what you do than who you are". He explained that when we are promoted to our first managerial role, we need to show we are effective and we can execute. So for most managers, leadership is a lot about executing well.
"That's important, but as you get to more senior levels, leadership is less about what you do and more about how you engage your people - how you empower them, how you create teams, how you create structures for the company. That involves the values you bring, rather than just your ability to execute." The practice of mindfulness can help change leaders' perspective and mental make-up, increasing their clarity of thought, their compassion and the quality of their decision-making. This also applies to big strategic decisions. Many leaders lack what Mr Hougaard calls "the beginner's mind" - that is, the ability to see things afresh, which is "the first step towards an innovative mindset".
"We often don't actually see what's in front of us," he said. "What we see is the reality created by our mind. based on our history, not actual reality." As an example, he cited the famous quote from then Nokia chief executive officer Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, in response to the introduction of the iPhone in 2007 when Nokia was the market leader: "From a competitor point of view, the iPhone is nothing but a niche product." He just did not see the real potential - or threat - of the 'Phone (which was a major cause of Nokia's market share in mobile phones crashing from 49 per cent in 2007 to 3 per cent in 2013). He lacked the beginner's mind, said Mr Hougaard.
MANAGING TIME
A common problem in the workplace is that people spend 80 per cent of their time on activities that generate 20 per cent of outcomes - known as the "Pareto Principle" in management theory. Mr Hougaard puts this down to what he calls "action addiction". "We're addicted to doing things, not achieving things," he said. "And we do things not because they're important, but because we want to feel important. "A neurochemical called dopamine gets released in the brain when we do something, which makes us comfortable, and it's very addictive. Every time we achieve something small - like replying to an insignificant e-mail, a little dopamine is released. That's what makes us keep doing small things at work and not getting to what is most important." One of the insights of Mr Hougaard and his team -elaborated in another book One Second Ahead - is that delaying certain actions by even one second can make a difference to the quality of those actions. He explained: "The busier we get, the more reactive we become, because we don't have the space to think. Mindfulness gives us that space, that one second, where instead of going into reactive mode when we are confronted with something as mundane as an e-mail, we have that second to think, 'Should I engage with this? How should I engage with this?' It enables us to observe ourselves, rather than being instinctively reactive."
UNPRODUCTIVE MEETINGS
Another common problem in the workplace, which applies especially to CEOs but also to lower-level managers, is the ineffectiveness of meetings. This is because people are often not present, other than physically. They are distracted - for example, checking their mobile phones or absorbed in thoughts unconnected to the meeting. They are not mindful, improving the quality of meetings can make a big difference to company performance, he said.
"Carlsberg. one of the companies we worked with, ran some numbers on this and they found they saved 35 per cent of meeting time. Most meetings are scheduled for an hour, but they don't need an hour:- Management guru Michael Porter and Harvard Business School dean Nitin Nohria did a major study on meetings and CEOs, which was published in the Harvard18). The Business Review (July-August 20 found that, on average. CEOs spent 72 per cent of their time in meetings. Their main conclusion: Shortening meetings can significantly enhance a CEO's efficiency. "In our debriefs, CEOs confessed that one-hour meetings could often be cut to 30 or even 15 minutes," they pointed out.
BEWARE OF MCMINDFULNESS
As happens with anything that takes on cult proportions and becomes a multibillion-dollar industry, the mindfulness movement has attracted its share of critics, some of whom refer to it as "Mcmindfulness". They allege that it has been stripped down and secularised to make it more marketable in the process, diluting and distorting what it was meant to be. For instance, many mindfulness courses are not anchored in deeper ethical values. Buddhist scholars point out that the way it is now taught often fails to distinguish between "good mindfulness" and "bad mindfulness", which makes it possible to create not just more mindful workers and executives, but also more mindful terrorists and white-collar criminals. Some therapists caution that mindfulness might be contraindicated for some individuals, who may not be able to deal with the difficult thoughts and emotions that the practice can bring to the surface. They note that many of the people who teach it have no formal training in mental health. Others point out that the mindfulness movement skirts the issue of why so many corporate environments are stressful in the first place. "Corporations have jumped on the mindfulness bandwagon because it conveniently shifts the burden onto the individual employee," said Dr Ron Purser, a professor of management at San Francisco State University, and Mr David Loy, a Zen teacher. "Stress is framed as a personal problem, and mindfulness is offered as just the right medicine to help employees work more efficiently and calmly within toxic environments". Some of these issues deserve to be taken seriously and the mindfulness movement will no doubt evolve. But meanwhile, for better or worse, its popularity is continuing to spread.
vikram@sph.com sg
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