15 - Teaching managers to manage themselves: mindfulness and the inside work of management

Summary

What is the relation of this [contemplation] to actions? Simply this. He who attempts to act and do things for others or for the world without deepening his own self-understanding, freedom, integrity and capacity to love, will not have anything to give others. He will communicate to them nothing but the contagion of his own obsessions, his aggressiveness, his ego-centered ambitions, his delusions about ends and means, his doctrinaire prejudices and ideas. There is nothing more tragic in the modern world than the misuse of power and action to which men are driven by their own Faustian misunderstandings and misapprehensions. We have more power at our disposal today than we have ever had, and yet we are more alienated and estranged from the inner ground of meaning and love than we have ever been.

Thomas Merton.

I have only three enemies. My favorite enemy, the one most easily influenced for the better, is the British Empire. My second enemy, the Indian people, is far more difficult. But my most formidable opponent is a man named Mohandas K. Gandhi. With him I seem to have very little influence.

Mahatma Gandhi.

Introduction

Contemporary management education has largely overlooked creating an educational process as systematic as accounting and financial analysis for managing oneself. Students are left to fend for themselves to know how to skillfully handle and transform the inner forces of emotions, physical sensations, thoughts, and beliefs to produce elegant and effective results. The cost of this can been seen in leaders given enormous responsibilities to perform with few tools for managing the inevitable pressures that will come their way. This can lead to scattered, unfocused efforts, destructive actions misaligned to one's stated values, or habitual ways of perceiving that fail to adapt to changing circumstances (Hunter and Chaskalson 2013). Just as leaders need tools to manage external realities, they also need tools to manage the internal ones. Effectiveness starts inside.