Organizational Health - Developing Leader Mental Fitness

 From the kitchen table of Michael Legut, PhD

In my last two blogs, I discuss how to improve the organizational health (OH) of your company by arranging work tasks to fit with a team member's strongest talents (link to OH People Make It Go blog). I also provided ideas for repairing team dysfunctions (link to OH Leaders and Teams blog). However to effectively manage the organizational health of your company, you must also consider the mental fitness of your leaders.

Key Takeaways

• Building mental fitness is similar to the way you might look at building muscles to improve your physical fitness
• If a leader is always in a ‘fight or flight” mode - Saboteur Thinking - that behavior will eventually impact their health, their leadership capability, the job performance of team members.
• Mental fitness involves daily practice with creating some physical cues, such as deep breathing, visualization and/or muscle relaxation techniques to interrupt Saboteur thinking.
• Applying mindfulness to aspects of your organization’s health can help improve productivity, employee retention, and employee engagement. 

Mental fitness, like physical fitness, is critical to organization health because it is the brain power and mindfulness of leaders that produce better business decisions, strategic direction and effective team leadership. We all know leaders who have superior intelligence, but may lack mindfulness for personal relationships and the well-being of others. These individuals may be very successful leaders in the short term, but are limited by their habits, and reactions to job pressures and stress. This is because stress tends to trigger hard-wired survival responses of flight or fight. Responses to stress often show up in interactions that stifle mindfulness and block a leader’s ability to empathize, explore and apply the best solution to business problems. Unfortunately, some business leaders define their leadership style as one that requires constant survival mode thinking, and they have been rewarded for this leadership style.

Mental Fitness and Organizational Health

There are many articles on how to learn mindfulness and build mental fitness. One thought-leader on this topic is Shirzad Chamine. His practical approach – Positive Intelligence – suggests that building mental fitness is similar to the way you might look at building muscles to improve your physical fitness. That is, first you need to understand which muscles you need to build and then create a routine to help you consistently work on exercising those muscles. Because our minds are trained to trigger survival mode thinking when we perceive a threat, understanding the thought patterns (self-talk and beliefs) that operate when we are faced with stressful situations can help us learn how to change that pattern and become a more mindful leader.

Shirzad calls these thought patterns Saboteurs because, as his research suggests, those thought and beliefs tend to sabotage our ability to respond to stressful situations from a healthier perspective. He suggests “Saboteur” thinking often triggers response such as judging, avoidance, control, hyper-achievement, pleasing others, restlessness and other behaviors. These behaviors also tend to limit a person’s ability to engage in building healthy relationships with team members and others in the organization.

You can image how that occurs. If a person is working in a “fight or flight” mode, they tend to behave as if there is a threat and they are more reactive, self-centered and defensive. Obviously, if a leader is always in a ‘fight or flight” mode, that behavior will eventually impact their health, their leadership capability, the job performance of team members, and the organizational health of the company. It is important to note that in some situations these behaviors can be useful when the business situation requires it. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to change reactive thinking and behavior when that leadership style has been rewarded and part of past career successes.  My point here is that if a leader cannot flex to mindful behaviors, the long term outcomes of reactive behavior can have a negative impact on organizational health in terms of talent retention, team productivity, employee morale and engagement. 

Positive Intelligence, Mindful Leadership and Mental Fitness

Building mental fitness and changing “fight or flight” – Saboteur – thinking and behaviors, requires understanding what triggers your survival mode thought patterns and reframing those situational triggers as gifts or opportunities. This is the concept the Shirzad labels a Positive Intelligence. Essentially the process involves understanding when the Saboteur thinking is occurring, pausing that thinking, and tapping into more positive – Sage – thinking to engage more empathy, exploration, innovation, and other actions that can help you navigate to more healthier solutions. 

Learning how to shift to mindful, Sage, thinking is where building mental muscles comes into play. Given that the “fight or flight” response is hard-wired, achieving Positive Intelligence requires regular mental work-outs to engage your Sage thinking. This involves daily practice with creating some physical cues, such as deep breathing, visualization and/or muscle relaxation techniques to interrupt the Saboteur thinking and engage more Sage-like mindful thinking. Shirzad Chamine’s book on Positive Intelligence provides much more detail on how to assess and build your mental fitness by tapping into your mindful “Sage” power, and there are many tools you can use to learn mindfulness. 

So how can using mindfulness improve leader mental fitness and help sustain organizational health? As I mentioned previously, when a leader is consistently in survival mode thinking, they are likely to behave in a manner that is more reactive, defensive and self-centered. Operating in a survival mode can be useful when the situation is truly threatening. However, when a person is always leading and behaving in this manner, that behavior can have negative effect on business decisions, team relationships and on organizational health. While some leaders may label mindfulness as too “touchy feely”, building your mindful leadership ability can help you see different perspective and leadership opportunities. This can help drive competitive advantages related to improving productivity, employee retention, and employee engagement.

Here are three thought-starters to help build your mental fitness and achieve more mindful leadership in your company.

1) As a leader, consider how you operate in pressure or stressful situations. Does your first response tend to be judging (self or others), avoidance, control, hyper-achievement, pleasing others, rationalizing or other behaviors that are reactive, defensive or self-centered? Think about how often you interact with others while you are in survival mode. If you are in a military conflict it is important to be in survival mode but in a business setting, you will need to learn how to let go of those responses. Some brief deep breathing, muscles relaxation or visualization can help you pause your survival mode thinking and explore other options. Reframe the situation as a gift or opportunity, and choose to look at it from an empathetic, exploratory and innovative perspective. Take note of the leadership options that you might pursue when you see the situation from this positive perspective, and take action to engage those mindful behaviors. 

2) In your team meetings do a “temperature” check by asking each team member to write down a one word response to this question. What was your feeling as you sat at your desk just prior to this meeting? Tell them you are doing a team temperature check and you will look at those one word responses after the meeting. When you return to your office, quietly read those responses and determine if your team is operating in a stressful mode. If the responses are trending toward stressful feelings, i.e. stressed, anxious, angry, hurried, consider opportunities to change one thing in your team meetings to help members engage in a more mindful activity. 

One such activity is known as a “Yes and” innovation brainstorming. This is where one problem or agenda item is selected and, using a round-robin method, each team member provides one idea to the topic by stating “Yes and”, and adding their idea to the previous one. All ideas are written on post-it notes and in the next meeting those ideas are categorized as A (Highly Possible), B (Possible) C (Not sure, more exploration needed). This approach can help your team shift from a reactive mode toward one of exploring, innovating and rethinking possibilities to business problems. 

3) As I mentioned previously, applying mindfulness to aspects of your organization’s health can help improve productivity, employee retention, and employee engagement. Because leaders have a significant impact on organizational health, it can be useful to look at your leadership development programs as well as leader promotion and succession criteria. Consider adding mindful thinking, stress management as well as positive intelligence approaches to leadership development processes. Here the goal is to explore how you might change training and advancement criteria to develop a leader’s ability to apply mindful habits in their work so that they can effectively support the organizational health of your company. 

To summarize, hopefully these ideas will help you think about how leader mental fitness can help you leader differently and improve the organizational health of your company. As you read this and other blogs I’ve written, you will see that improving organizational health is on-going commitment to a journey that can change culture and employee experience in your company. 

As always my goal is to help leaders understand how to improve their leadership skills, build effective work teams and contribute to their company’s organizational health. I can be reached at www.leaderimage.com or on my LinkedIn page for additional consultations.