Written by: Alex Bravo, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
This is my third article of the Mindfulness at the workplace saga. As it was explained on the first article, I’ll be elaborating on the benefits that disciplined meditators ‒ that have participated on “The 8 Week Mindfulness program”, which I facilitate ‒ have reported working on 7 competencies that Gallup has defined to be key for a successful leader.
We’ll explore the behaviors, traits and results that leaders that operate on an “auto-pilot” mode have versus the ones that "mindful leaders” have. Throughout the Mindfulness at the Workplace saga, I will consistently recall that meditation is the path to mindfulness. Even when there are very pragmatical mindfulness tools that leaders can use on a daily basis, it is the formal meditation practice that will allow leaders to almost automatically make a pause whenever they are experimenting a stressor or a difficultsituation, take a breath, start recognizing the sensations, emotions, stories and ideas that are arriving to their minds so they can welcome them, accept them, investigate how those sensations, emotions, stories or ideas feel in the body and understand what is really happening in the present moment and finally, identify all the options that they have to proceed, shutting down the auto-pilot mode and its limited vision. It is also important to remember what Mindfulness is: The practice of maintaining a nonjudgemental state of heightened or complete awareness of one’s thoughts, emotions, ideas, stories and sensations on a moment-to-moment basis. The competence to be explored on this article is to develop talent.
As departure point it is worthy to revise what does develop talent means. Talent development refers to the organizational process of positioning employees for career advancement in a way that aligns with the company’s goals building upon employee’s existing skills while identifying relevant new skills and opportunities. Talent development program activities can range from mentoring and coaching to formal training, leadership development, succession planning, on-the-job learning and more. Talent development should be understood as a win-win situation. It offers advantages to employees while providing value to the organization. Today’s employees are spending more time at work at the same time as they are craving more balance in their lives. Talent development initiatives offer employees an opportunity to learn and expand in their areas of interest. This, in turn, makes them happier and more productive ‒ and more likely to continue in an organization.
The “auto-pilot mode” of some leaders can ruin all the efforts of the organization developing talent. These are some of the behaviors that leaders working on an “auto-pilot mode” might experiment developing talent.
They might ignore how relevant is to have talent development conversations with their teams. They might expect that someone else or the organizational context defines who should move from one position to another and what training opportunities should be available to someone.
They might be targeting always the same group of employees whenever they are managing talent development, ignoring a relevant part of the team or leaving them with very limited opportunities.
They do not dedicate significant time to assess the existing skills that their teams have, therefore, they might not be in a good position to identify what are the new skills that should be acquired individually and collectively.
They do not match the new skills that should be developed with the organizational goals, having as a result to develop skills that are not relevant to the organization and might not be relevant also to the career advancement of their teams.
They can have a very limited approach when they try to develop talent. The effort might be limited to a coaching session, to a random training, to on-the-job training or to a mentoring session.
They can focus their effort on delivering talent development based on what they believe is good for the organization and for the team members, without having a conversation in order to understand whether that development is aspirational and relevant to the team members individually.
A frequent pitfall is a tendency to over-focus on theoretical approaches at the expense of the practical needs of the business. This might generate that associates being promoted might not be working at expected levels of competence.
They might undervalue experience and history. Many companies are likely to hire leadership positions from outside the organization, rather than promoting from within. This may cause talent managers to underrate the value of the experience, context and organizational knowledge that existing employees can bring into a new position.
They ignore the upskilling ‒ employees that have already basic skills that you can focus on developing ‒ and reskilling ‒ if there are jobs at risk of becoming obsolete while other roles are emerging ‒ concepts.
They are not interested on getting buy-in from company's top executives in order to provide the best talent development strategy.
On the other hand, these are the behaviors that leaders that have attended to The 8 Week Mindfulness Program have expressed to practice developing talent:
They have thoughtful and meaningful talent development conversations with their team members taking accountability of leading and owning such a relevant process ensuring they match current and future skills with the organizational goals and getting the buy-in of senior management to make it happen.
They interview employees to discover hidden talents and interests. They understand that talent development interviews provide an opportunity for employees to reveal existing capabilities, as well as the ones they are interested in developing.
They understand the meaning of meritocracy and have transparent communication with the team letting them know that performance, ethics and attitudes matter whenever talent development is managed.
They provide different learning options and methods. They understand that talent development isn’t just about formal training. It can also include other methods like on-the-job learning, mentorship programs, coaching, e-learning, self-learning, and more. They involve managers in the process and create directories of learning resources that are readily available to the team members.
They embrace continuous learning. They encourage active learning and focus on developing adaptability. They motivate employees to find time to learn every day. Make continuous learning a cultural core value and find ways to instill this mindset into the team.
They include leadership development. It’s clear to them how relevant is to start identifying the future leaders of the company and prepare a leadership development plan for them developing a leadership talent pipeline.
They put employees in an environment that plays to their strengths. Effective development of leadership talent within a company depends on the careful placement of emerging leaders into positions that suit their functional expertise and leadership strengths.
They recognize that not every high-potential employee is suited to every task is necessary in order to place individuals in situations that promote gradual and sustainable improvement, allowing them to develop and expand their areas of specialization without being spread to thin across the spectrum of management competencies.
They let their direct reports own their processes. They encourage the development of confidence, judgement and initiate in their employees.
They balance new perspectives with experienced employees according to business needs. If the business is making consistent headway against well-understood challenges, a balance in favor of internal promotions might provide a new crop of leaders with a solid concept of the goals of the organization.
This is just a sample of a list of behaviors that disciplined meditators practice within the corporate arena when they develop talent. There might be more behaviors that could be included. Meditation benefits arrive to its practitioners in different ways but if there is something in common is the ability they have to shut down the “auto-pilot mode” to find that there’s always a set of options to consider before making a decision. Understanding this fact is a game changer.
Stay tuned. We’ll elaborate on leading change in the next article.
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Alex Bravo, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Alex Bravo combines 22 years' experience as Sr Director leading CX, Innovation, Transformation and large Operations teams mainly within the Financial Services Industry with 15 years' experience as Sr Executive Coach and Mindfulness Teacher. Given his struggle with anxiety and depression at some point of his career, his purpose is to instill the importance of assessing mental health in the corporate arena and recall to his colleagues that the way they deal with their inner world defines the way they show to themselves, how they interact with others, how they lead and how they love. He is a Harvard Business School Grad and holds a BSc in industrial and Systems Engineering and a MSc in Quality and Productivity.
