What Meditation Can Do for Your Leadership

One of the things that stands in the way of many leaders’ success — and therefore the success of their companies — is their ego. Leadership expert Jim Collins found in his seminal study on what makes companies sustainably great that in two thirds of the comparison cases, it was “the presence of a gargantuan ego that contributed to the demise or continued mediocrity of the company.” Fortunately, mindfulness can help. In fact, in my work teaching meditation to hundreds of executives, I’ve seen that one of the most valuable — and largely unrecognized — benefits for leaders is the ability to transcend their egos.

The defensive tendencies of our ego come at great costs. When it’s threatened, we hold on to past decisions for too long, we react defensively to or “explain away” negative feedback from teams or customers, and we get emotional when we need to be rational. Ray Dalio, founder of the world’s biggest hedge fund, refers in his book, Principles: Life and Work, to the “ego barrier,” which he defines as the “subliminal defense mechanisms that make it hard for you to accept your mistakes and weaknesses.” He also credits meditation as the single most important source of his success.

That’s because mindfulness meditation is an antidote to ego. It creates what Harvard neuroscience researchers describe as “self-transcendent” experiences, where meditators begin to notice that there is no stable self that is separate from others, but rather they are part of a whole. This may sound “woo-woo” but these experiences have major benefits for leaders: They allow them to see things more objectively and to form deeper relationships.

Seeing things more objectively

Our ego wants us to be right, and it perceives failure as a threat. With meditation practice, as our fixation on ego drops away, our tendency to take things personally drops away as well. (MORE)

Source: Harvard Business Review