How can leaders increase their influence in a deafeningly noisy world?
For many leaders in our frantically busy world, leadership has become a cacophony of competing priorities and relentless expectations. Overworked, overwrought, and often overwhelmed, today’s leaders are at risk of losing sight of the true purpose of leadership – to inspire, guide and empower others.
In the words of author David Whyte: “The great tragedy of speed as an answer to the complexities and responsibilities of existence is that very soon we cannot recognize anything or anyone who is not traveling at the same velocity as we are.”
It’s like sitting on a high-speed train, the landscape whooshing past so fast that it blurs your vision. Move too fast for too long, and you lose sight of what is right before your eyes. Genuinely impactful leadership is the opposite of this. It’s not about speeding up and doing more; it’s about slowing down and becoming more. Planning, executing and managing tasks to achieve results must be aligned with the human qualities of awareness, presence, clarity and courage that are necessary to build connection and trust.
In other words, meaningful impact is about aligning who you are with how you lead.
Introducing Mindful Command
Over the last 45 years of being an officer in the UK’s Royal Navy, a business leader, and a leadership coach, I’ve found that impactful leaders all have the capacity to quieten the voices in their heads and speak and act only from their own true voice. When they do, people listen.
Those leaders have certain qualities in common: they are aware, clear, grounded, stable, and ready to do the right thing in any situation.
Drawing from this experience, I have developed the Mindful Command framework: a holistic and practical guide to embodying these qualities from the inside out. It’s for leaders who want to increase their impact by cultivating the right blend of being and doing.
The doing part of Mindful Command is founded on the military leadership principles of commander’s intent and mission command – an approach that combines clarity of intent with delegated decision-making. The being part embraces the grounded awareness and presence of mindfulness.
The framework itself is formed of four interconnected concepts with supporting tools and practices. They are balanced awareness; clear purpose; fearless compassion; and inner stability. Let’s look at each in turn.
Balanced awareness: the foundation of presence
A significant challenge to impactful leadership is not only the noise around you, but the ‘noise in your head’ – your own biases, assumptions, fears, and doubts. They can do much to distract you from the reality on the ground, disrupting sound decision-making and undermining your positive impact.
The antidote to this is to learn how to pause in the moment and manage your reactive self. This is where the pause tool comes in.
It is a simple three-step mechanism for creating just enough space to bring your conscious self back into play.
Step one: pause Press an imaginary pause button somewhere in your body. If you can, aim for the area around the base of your sternum known as the solar plexus.
Step two: focus As best you can, bring your attention to that area. Place your hand there to support a sense of connection.
Step three: breathe Consciously breathe in and out. Observe your breath slowing and deepening. Notice its movement in and out of your body.
Pausing gives you space to notice the emotional sensations in your body – tightness in your chest, stomach, throat; a clenching of your jaw, shoulders, hands; flushed cheeks – and allow any tension to release. Pausing is also the gateway to balanced awareness. When you pause, you give yourself just enough space to think before you react.
Pausing is an essential skill, because leading with balanced awareness is about stepping back and seeing the whole picture. It has three key touchpoints: self, others, context.
- Self Tune into your thoughts and feelings. Notice the story you’re telling yourself.
- Others Listen quietly and without prejudice to what others are saying.
- Context What’s at stake here? What’s the best realistic outcome? And what’s needed to engage others to achieve it?
Seeing things as they are requires a cool head. You must be able to tune into the complexities, sensibilities and nuances of a situation without allowing them to skew your perspective.
The higher the stakes, the greater the risks and the tougher the decisions required. A balanced view helps you take it all in your stride and create the impact you really want.
Clear purpose: the compass of leadership
Your purpose is your guiding light. It’s your answer to the question: “Why does what I do matter?”
Purpose is personal. It comes from understanding what drives you and how that connects to the people and systems you influence.
Howard Schultz, the founder of Starbucks, built a billion-dollar company not just on coffee, but on a vision of creating a “third place” where people feel seen and connected.
Coca-Cola’s former chief executive Brian Dyson addressed purpose in his commencement speech at the Georgia Tech Institute. He suggested that purpose in life means successfully juggling five balls: work, family, health, friends and spirit.
“You will soon understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back,” said Dyson. “But the other four balls – family, health, friends and spirit – are made of glass. If you drop one of these, they will be irrevocably scuffed, marked, nicked, damaged or even shattered. They will never be the same. You must understand that and strive for balance in your life.”
Take a moment to ask yourself: how clear are your values and priorities to you? How does your purpose connect to your organization’s purpose and your team’s goals? And how authentically do you communicate what matters to you, including when under pressure?
Not being clear on the answers to these questions can have both immediate and long-term impact – on you and the people you lead. Without a clear purpose, you may keep on doing the wrong things, in the wrong way, for the wrong reasons.
Fearless compassion: where courage meets humanity
Fearless compassion is the courage to act with humanity. It requires leaders to acknowledge their own fears and doubts, while holding space for others to do the same.
Fear is not only a normal part of being human, it also plays a valuable role in our lives. At its core, fear is never wrong. It shows up to remind us of something that once caused us suffering, or to alert us to something unknown in the future. However, for fear to be helpful, it’s necessary to see it for what it is, and not for what it at first seems to be.
This is the opposite of ignoring your fear and pushing on through. Instead, you acknowledge your fear and explore its impact on you and your choices. Fear is hard; but hard doesn’t mean bad. When you lean into your fear with a compassionate, inquiring mind, you gain a better understanding of things as they are – and not as they are when distorted by fear.
Fearlessly compassionate leaders lean into discomfort with integrity and empathy. They recognize that strength and sensitivity aren’t opposites; they are partners. As Brené Brown famously said, “Courage starts with showing up and letting ourselves be seen.”
Consider this: perhaps your greatest impact comes from openly acknowledging your own vulnerabilities, and publicly owning your mistakes and committing to learn from them. When you do this you show your people that you’re human and, just like them, you have foibles too. And you generate a psychologically safe environment where people are free to innovate, fail, and grow. According to research from Google’s Project Aristotle, this is the number one predictor of high-performing teams.
Inner stability: weathering the storm
The fourth and final foundation of Mindful Command, inner stability, is in many ways its bedrock. The more stable you feel, the easier it is to balance your awareness, clarify your purpose, quieten your fear, and act compassionately. As Bill O’Brien, the former chief executive of Hanover Insurance, put it: “The success of an intervention depends on the interior condition of the intervenor.”
Your inner stability is what enables you to stand calmly for what matters to you in the face of uncertainty, volatility, and chaos. It’s the difference between a frazzled leader who generates stress and a centered leader who cultivates confidence.
As your impact increases, so do the challenges you face. And your capacity to pause and center yourself – by quietening your thoughts and regulating your emotions – becomes even more important. This isn’t about suppressing your emotions or being stoic. It’s about recognizing your own reactive state and finding your inner calm.
There are various ways to feed your inner stability. The most important is developing the ability to pause in any moment. You can nourish this capacity through the food and drink you consume; sleeping well; meditating; exercising; spending quiet time in nature; and connecting to the important moments of life.
These basic forms of self-care are as necessary as they are obvious – and yet how often do we neglect them? When you look at your calendar, how much ‘white space’ is there for you to invest in the most important source of your impact: you?
Take action now
If you’re looking to “be the difference” and you’re ready to work on yourself, you can take six steps right now to make a difference.
1. Pause regularly Identify moments in your day to pause, focus, breathe. Observe the shift in your inner state
2. Notice your physical posture Check in with your body. Release your shoulders; relax your jaw; ground your feet. Breathe deeply into your core. Observe the shift in your inner state
3. Conduct a purpose audit Ask yourself: what truly matters, and how am I living it?
4. Create space to listen Whether in team meetings or one-to-ones, focus more on listening than speaking
5. Practice self-compassion Acknowledge your mistakes without judgment and commit to learning from them
6. Seek feedback often Invite trusted friends and colleagues to tell you how they experience your presence and impact
Leading for lasting impact
Perhaps Maya Angelou put it best: “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Impact is meant to be felt – but if we’re not present, not fully showing up, then our impact can’t be felt.
For better or worse, we’ve created this noisy, high-speed world. There is much beyond our control, but with Mindful Command we can slow down and anchor our minds. And we can control how we show up every day for the people we lead and love.
Sally-Anne Airey is the founder of Skilful Leaders and the author of Mindful Command: The Way of the Evolving Leader (LID Publishing)
