In the Workplace

In the workplace, it helps to have an elevator speech or two—messages that last as long as it takes to share an elevator ride. In an elevator speech we step out from behind the torrent of tweets, emails, Skypes, and phone calls and deliver a face-to-face, short, compelling message with passion and clarity.

The beauty of delivering an elevator speech is that we force ourselves to simplify and communicate clearly about even the most complex topic. Maybe we are asked, “Hey, what’s this quantum mechanics thing all about?” Or maybe, “I thought you left the company—why are you still working here?” And right there without a misstep we deliver a short, focused speech that simplifies and clarifies while connecting with another human being on the spot. It’s an indispensible skill in today’s workplace.

One of the elevator speeches I’m often invited to give is: “How can mindfulness meditation help me at work?” In my experience, people often seem to expect a catalogue of benefits: how mindfulness meditation can repair our damaged immune system, cultivate self-awareness, reduce stress, lower absenteeism, and improve productivity. And though such an elevator speech can no doubt be helpful, I choose a different approach:  

Mindfulness at work starts with synchronizing with our experience.

Then we can address our primary responsibility: seeing clearly.

By appreciating our circumstances in such a way, we can more skillfully contribute to our world.

And in the end, live a confident, decent life at work.

The thing about elevator speeches is that there is always a hidden hope that when the elevator reaches its destination our colleague will say something like, “Wow, that’s fascinating stuff. Why don’t you come over to my office for a cup of coffee so we can discuss this further?”

So, here we are. For those who would like to explore this topic further, please read on. For all the others, thanks for listening—and this is your floor.

Mindfulness at work starts with synchronizing with our experience.

Being mindful at work is not simply a matter of being alert to the present moment, as if we were intently sightseeing or inspecting our experience. Rather, mindfulness introduces us to the reality that we are fully immersed—utterly harmonized 360 degrees—in the circumstances we find ourselves in. We instinctively take a panoramic view and become emotionally and physically in tune with our experience.

Let’s take a simple example. One of the classic missteps at work is firing off an email in response to a perceived insult or criticism. We’ve arrived at work a bit late and are rushing to make a meeting in fifteen minutes when we notice an email in our inbox from the IT department. The subject line says, “Project over budget, late, being reconsidered.” We know the author, we’ve received these broadsides before, and frankly we’re a bit fed up.

We open the email, glance quickly over familiar criticisms: “...we have some concerns about your estimates…,” “…there has been no follow-up…,” “…meetings have been missed…” Heated up, we fire off a curt response in bold caps: “PLEASE STOP SENDING THESE EMAILS. IN THE FUTURE, JUST CALL.”

We’re feeling pretty good as we leave for the meeting, when we pause. A little flutter in our stomach tells us we may have missed something, that we ought to check one last detail.
Reopening the offending email, we find to our surprise that we are not the intended recipient. The email was addressed to a colleague, copied to several senior managers, and we were blind copied as a courtesy.

Such missteps often cause lasting damage at work, and at times end careers. When we’re mindfully synchronized with our workplace, however, our instincts inhibit such missteps because we are naturally alert to the full picture. We know that the stage is as important as the actors. We recognize an organization to be a web of lively relationships, not a series of isolated transactions “about me.” When we train our minds in mindfulness, we become more and more aware that no matter what we do or say—whether in an email or in the boardroom; in the cafeteria or at a press briefing—there is
always a greater context to consider. Narrowly focusing on ouragenda, ourinsult, ourneeds, simply makes no sense when we are fully synchronized with our workplace.

Then we can address our primary responsibility: seeing clearly.

At work we are all very interested in doingstuff—performing, achieving, executing, and accomplishing. Whether we are on a construction site, in a hospital setting, the corporate world, or academia, we regularly confront standard questions: “What do you do for a living?” “What do I do next?”  “Do they have enough to do?” Work is all about doing—meeting goals and getting stuff done.

For mindfulness practitioners, though, doing our jobs well, while important, is not our primary responsibility at work. Mindfulness reveals that for us to accomplish goals, conduct ourselves ethically, and contribute to our world we must first see clearly.

I’m often asked to work with executives to help them refine and improve their leadership abilities. At the beginning of each assignment, the executive is often eager to set goals, improve performance, and experiment with new techniques. But inevitably I have to slow them down and suggest a different approach.

“You’re pretty good at doing things,” I typically remark to the executive. “You wouldn’t be where you are in your career if you weren’t good at getting stuff done. So, we are not as concerned about what you dofor a living. Rather, we are interested in what you seefor a living.”

It is from that perspective that we refine leadership abilities. “What are the top three central challenges your employees face?” “What unspoken messages are you receiving from your team members, colleagues, or vendors?” “What are people afraid of in your organization? What inspires them?” These and dozens of other vital questions are not about doing anything at all. What’s required is to discern, recognize, and understand.    

For mindfulness practitioners, cultivating this ability to see clearly is at the very heart of the practice. The discipline trains us to step out from behind the curtain of our restless minds and touch reality directly—getting a full, authentic measure of our experience beyond self-deception and impulsiveness. And on the job, such a commitment to first seeing clearly becomes central in inspiring the very best from an organization.  

By appreciating our circumstances in such a way, we can more skillfully contribute to our world.

Typically, at work we want to do what is correct. We want to make the right decisions, we want to be accurate in our assessments, and we always want the facts on our side. Obviously, such an approach makes a lot of sense since trying to be inaccurate, incorrect, and fictional at work would be disastrous (unless of course you’re running a political campaign).

But, in a sense, being correct at work is the easy part. Indeed, many of us know how to do this quite well. The hard part is being skillful.

For mindfulness practitioners, meditation is not about living our lives more correctly. Nor are we interested in becoming meditation experts, entitling us to inflict our spiritual viewpoints on our friends and neighbors. We practice meditation so we can learn about our mind—and not surprisingly the more we learn about our own mind, the more we learn about the minds of others. Appreciating others’ minds can be quite profound and poignant. We can come to know directly the motivations, aspirations, foibles, hopes, and fears of others. Such insight into other people can be a sobering responsibility, and it naturally makes us more skillful and lively in how we accommodate others. By knowing ourselves, we learn to know others as well.

In “Finding and Grooming Breakthrough Innovators,” by Jeffrey Cohn, Jon Katzenbach, and Gus Vlak (Harvard Business Review, December 2008), the authors point out that the defining skill of great organizational innovators is appreciating the hearts and minds of others:  

…innovators must be able to walk into a conference room full of diverse constituents, including colleagues, customers, subordinates, bosses, vendors, and partners, and quickly discern the underlying motivation of each one. They leverage that information to craft and communicate a message that resonates with every constituent. This is the art of bringing a diverse group onto the same page—and it is absolutely essential to transforming an interesting idea into a companywide innovation….

Like successful innovators, mindfulness practitioners are highly attuned to what “resonates” with others. We know that being right or an expert at work is at best half the journey—a journey that cannot be traveled alone. And because we explore our minds on the cushion, we are naturally curious about others and quietly passionate in perfecting “the art of bringing a diverse group onto the same page.”

And in the end, live a decent,

confident life at work.

In my role as a business consultant, I regularly ask my clients to complete the following sentence with the first word that comes to mind:

At work, I want to be…

While my survey is not scientifically reliable, I can report that there are some patterns to the responses. Here are the four most frequent answers:

Successful

Happy

Rewarded

Stress-free

Such responses come as no surprise. Given the demands, risks, and relentless pace of our modern-day workplace, it is little wonder that most of us would like a little stress-free happiness on occasion. Rewards and success—isn’t that what we are all looking for at work?

After forty-four years of work and thirty-four years of mindfulness meditation, I’m not so sure. My survey indicates that most of us thinkwe want to be happy, successful, and stress-free at work, but we also know that such aspirations are wishful thinking. We all know work offers both success and failure; happiness and angst. We know that work, indeed all of life, unavoidably presents both rewards and penalties; joys and disappointments. So, while most may wish to be happy and successful at work, what we really want, from my vantage point, is to be confident: confident that no matter what work offers up, we will remain self-assured and at our ease.

For meditators, coming to this conclusion viscerally and completely is one of the great accomplishments of the practice. Sitting still hour after hour, day after day, year in and year out, we slowly and gently exhaust our futile struggle to secure our lives with paychecks and toys, emotional security pacts and
addictions. We awaken to a simple yet powerful fact of life: when we stop struggling, we are naturally confident and at our ease.

Ironically, such confidence is not a personal experience, so to speak, but something larger and more fundamental. Just as a sparrow flies with ease or a tiger walks with confidence, so too we discover the ease and confidence of our humanness. A sparrow never second guesses its wings; a tiger never arrogantly proclaims its stripes. And as humans, we relax back into our unshakeable confidence that we, too, are perfectly equipped to be on this planet under all circumstances.

Bringing such natural poise to the job is how mindfulness practitioners clean up the toxic emotions and insipid materialism that plagues our workplaces today. Being confident at work is, in the end, the height of decency because…well…that’s what we humans do.