Why Mindful Leaders Are Better at Managing Change

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EXECUTING STRATEGIC CHANGE is critical to a company’s performance — whether it’s making an agile pivot to grasp an emerging opportunity or positioning the business for long-term resilience — but it’s a process many leaders struggle to pull off successfully. Such initiatives typically trickle down to staff members, often causing upheaval and provoking anxiety that leads to reluctance or resistance to change. But in other cases, teams embrace new objectives or ways of working, leading to a positive transformation. What causes one team to welcome change while another fights it?

We carried out a study in a large North American company in the mortgage industry that was going through a major strategic transformation and experiencing significant variability in employees’ responses to a change initiative intended to foster a more innovative culture. We explored team leader behaviors and characteristics that might account for these differences. We found that team leader mindfulness appears to play a crucial mediating role in the change management process. Here’s why that is and how managers can apply insights from our study.

Why Organizational Change Is So Challenging

Even though leaders often place a heavy emphasis on communication around change, it’s rarely possible to articulate precisely what’s to come, given that what lies ahead is going to be unfamiliar territory. Consequently, a strategic change will, by its nature, trigger a great deal of ambiguity, since managers must simultaneously figure out how to execute on new objectives and rally teams to move in a new direction.

The latter point — motivating employees — is complicated by individuals’ tendency to hunker down self-protectively when change is in the air. That response means that they are less likely to engage in exploratory behaviors, which are essential to accepting and implementing change. Ambiguity in the early stages of change may leave individuals without concrete objectives or distinct targets toward which to steer. Lacking sufficient direction and experiencing hard-to-manage emotions, employees may focus on shielding themselves from their discomfort with the unknown by preserving the status quo.

This response to ambiguity originates deep in the primal mammalian brain, in the limbic system, where our emotions reside and prioritize survival in the short term and avoidance of discomfort and any perceived threats. Shaped by past experiences, this part of the human brain is biased toward familiarity, running what we can think of as a set of neural algorithms that repels novelty and experimentation in favor of known behaviors that have kept us safe in the past.

For employees to embrace change, managers must foster an environment that encourages exploration and trying new things. For example, one manager in our study shifted from setting longer-term, rigid goals for her team members to giving them short-term goals that could be adjusted as the situation evolved. Having a near-term direction allowed the team to remain focused during the organizational transformation, even as long-term ambiguities remained. Another manager experimented with various forms of communication, such as more frequent team meetings, email updates, and one-on-one check-ins, to determine the most effective methods for keeping the team informed and engaged. Meanwhile, a different manager temporarily rotated roles within his team. This helped team members build an understanding of the different aspects of one another’s work and how each role was being affected by the change. It also fostered empathy and collaboration among team members and uncovered opportunities for improvement in the team workflow.

As we observed how managers could have a profound impact on successfully executing change and helping their team accept it, we further saw that a differentiating factor was mindfulness — that is, the ability to intentionally focus on the experience of the current moment rather than the past or future. Managers who exhibited greater mindfulness as assessed by our questionnaire were better equipped to manage ambiguity for themselves and their employees. Notably, it was the mental discipline of applied mindfulness in the course of the work that made the difference — not simply mindfulness practice in the context of general well-being. In contrast, managers with low levels of mindfulness were more likely to default to routine behaviors, even when those routines were ill-suited to changing circumstances. Without clear guidance from above, they struggled to notice relevant cues in their environment or adapt their approach. As a result, they were less effective at helping their team navigate ambiguity and often reinforced uncertainty rather than reducing it.

Mindful Attention

The core of mindfulness practice is to cultivate the ability to focus attention on the present moment. When we invoke such a state, we can ground ourselves in the situation and more fully engage with all of what is going on in the present moment, perceiving and absorbing more information than usual and processing it flexibly. In this way, mindful attention frees us from being dominated by the limbic system and enables us to be guided by the prefrontal cortex and the executive functions it mediates — such as attention, reasoning, and problem-solving — promoting the acceptance of flexible strategies over rigid, unyielding ones.

Amid the ambiguous objectives of the strategic change, we saw that managers who exhibit higher levels of mindful attention can better confront the challenge of the moment with an open and inquisitive stance and a willingness to take risks. Mindful managers can sail through ambiguous objectives by keeping their attention on present events as they unfold. That allows them to recognize and reject automatic behaviors that aim to duplicate past experiences. Unbounded by fear of the unknown, mindful managers are better able to adapt to change and thus take a more exploratory approach to new situations. In contrast, less mindful managers will exhibit more fear, and their ability to experiment will be curtailed by ambiguous objectives.

In essence, a manager who exhibits mindful attention abilities knows how to remain focused on the present moment, manage their emotions more effectively, and find ways to adapt to the change. They are capable of detecting elements that could be altered and enhanced during the strategic change because they feel secure enough to do so. Ultimately, there is less resistance to the discomfort associated with change and more commitment to the process and requirements related to a strategic transformation.

Mindful Attention’s Implications for Teams

Managers’ adoption of a more exploratory approach to change can positively influence team members, who typically look to their managers to discern which beliefs, emotions, and behaviors are acceptable and which ones are not. Given that managers are typically the first group that senior leaders notify about pending change, they are well positioned to act as a point of reference that can shape their team members’ understanding of and, eventually, reactions to change. Therefore, when managers exhibit relative comfort with ambiguity and embrace experimentation as their standard operating procedure, their teams are more inclined to do the same.

In practical terms, experimentation proves immediately advantageous for teams confronted with a strategic shift. It yields small wins as teams can try out novel ways of operating that are both congruent with the broader change and suitable in their specific contexts — and they can do so in a psychologically safe environment. It creates fast feedback loops that help teams surface unforeseen constraints, clarify expectations, and refine their approaches in real time. Rather than waiting for perfect alignment or complete certainty, teams are empowered to move forward, learning through action while reducing ambiguity and maintaining alignment with evolving strategic goals.

These small wins enhance the implementation of a strategic change because they enlighten people about potential benefits, thereby boosting confidence and diminishing discomfort with the change. By engaging in more experimental behaviors, teams also hone their group ability to learn and adapt — which sets them up to better cope with future changes.

Equipping Managers With Mindfulness Tools

The simple practice of cultivating mindful attention, which originated in Asian contemplative practices, has become secularized and widely accessible thanks to thousands of books, articles, apps, and so on that teach basic meditation techniques. It’s not uncommon for companies to offer mindfulness training programs: Google, Target, and General Mills are among those that have done so.

Currently, most companies that offer workshops on mindfulness techniques do so because the practice has been shown to help individuals reduce stress. Mindfulness practice helps individuals disengage from rumination and better control their attention — which in turn enables them to consciously acknowledge and disengage when a state of fear is causing the limbic system to dominate their response. Numerous techniques for using the breath or the visual system for focusing attention on the present can help people shift out of a state of fear or anxiety. And managers can learn these techniques even if their companies do not offer workshops, through apps like Calm, Insight Timer, and Headspace.

But mindfulness is not merely something individuals do — a passive activity around reducing stress. That reduction of stress must become active and prompt people to engage with their changing environment and with those around them to create a broader wave of change, to truly be successful in a strategic change context. How might these practices enable more experimentation and openness to change in teams and organizations, beyond reducing the protective desire to preserve the status quo?

First, as managers engage in mindfulness, they become better able to relieve their anxiety, interrupt the narrow and habitual patterns of attention that accompany it, and increase their attention to things as they are in the external environment. That may let them see possibilities or problems that others overlook and think of new questions to ask. They may notice who on the team is closer to customers or operations and thus have insights that could clarify ambiguity. Or, they may make the connection that someone on the team with nontraditional work experience might have an insight that could apply to the current situation. With improved observation and listening skills, they become more attuned to others and thus better able to foster an atmos­phere of psychological safety. Applying mindful attention can lead to noticing things that in turn may open up new possibilities for action.

Second, mindful attention that brings us closer to what is happening in the present also aligns with the power of small wins — which help us to recognize the progress we are making in the steps we take now. By noticing when small experiments are paying off, leaders on the front lines of implementing change can make team members aware of paths through the ambiguity and provide them with a sense of accomplishment that can motivate them to keep exploring and moving forward.

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Addressing ambiguity and improving the clarity of the message from senior management during times of strategic change are not sufficient to help teams embrace new directions. It is necessary to ensure that managers possess the psychological skills required to navigate the challenge of strategic change with insight and understand the impact it will have on their teams. Mindfulness is a potent tool for developing these skills.