Why Mindful Leaders Are Better at Managing Change

Managers with greater self-awareness and emotional control are better able to lead their teams through the ambiguity of a shift in direction.

- By Jean-François Harvey and Ravi S. Kudesia

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.