Mindfulness in Corporate America: Is the Trojan Horse Ethical?

Benefits

Myriad cognitive benefits ⁵ have enticed corporate America to welcome mindfulness training. Those who practice mindfulness are less distractible, filtering out extraneous stimuli to better concentrate. They remain vigilant to tasks longer, demonstrate less mind wandering, and are more open to new perspectives, thus optimizing learning and innovation for new solutions within corporate contexts.

Mindfulness practice also improves emotion self-regulation. ⁶ Following stressors, mindfulness can reduce the intensity of negative emotions, enhance emotional recovery, increase reinterpretation of stressors as less personally threatening, and boost one's ability to engage in goal-directed behavior. Overall, mindfulness training cultivates more positive emotions ⁷ and reduces job burnout, ⁸ enhancing employee resilience and quality of life. ⁹

The cognitive and emotion regulation benefits of mindfulness training enhance interpersonal realms important for success at work: an ability to work well in teams, effectively communicate, and resolve conflict. More mindful people also tend to model for others, positively influencing them. Finally, mindfulness practice is associated with less aggressive behaviors ¹⁰ and reduced self-referential processing, ^5,6 fostering skillful interaction with coworkers, team mates, or perceived adversaries.

Employer benefits do not stop here. Mindfulness training may impact the bottom line, by lowering healthcare costs through its associations with healthier behaviors ¹¹ and the potential downstream impact on chronic disease. For example, studies suggest that mindfulness may augment immune system function and lower inflammation. ¹² Moreover, mindfulness training improves performance. ¹³ Consider these findings: compared with controls, mindfulness-trained managers yield improved supervisor-rated performance. More mindful restaurant servers receive higher performance marks, and more mindful physicians are better rated in patient-centered communication and overall patient satisfaction. The mindfulness training offered by Google led to improvements in mental focus, leadership effectiveness, employee well-being, and adaptive stress tolerance, reflected by higher employee morale, less absenteeism, and greater job retention. ¹⁴ And although not directly tied to corporate programs, individuals who completed a mindfulness-based training program have demonstrated a 43% reduction in use of billable healthcare services at 1 year, a significant business benefit. ¹⁵

So, improvements associated with mindfulness training within the corporate arena are multifaceted. What employers in their right mind would not throw a little mindfulness at their employees?

Quandaries

This appears an obvious win–win. Supporting the idea of improving employee health, “workplace ethos,” and quality of life for everyone seems straightforward. If one delves a little deeper, quandaries deserving reflection surface.

First: Is it appropriate to use mindfulness with the intention to benefit profit margins? In corporate America, many consider mindfulness another secular, highly useful cognitive, and attitudinal skill set. To most practitioners, however, the intention in practicing mindfulness is as important as the practice itself. Even Jon Kabat-Zinn, who secularized mindfulness to increase accessibility within the West, talks about mindfulness “at its source” carrying the responsibility of ethical living. ¹⁶ As mindfulness training is ruptured from its source, who defines “ethical living?”

Corporate mindfulness is typically packaged as “just another self-help program,” but runs the risk of further shifting responsibility from institutions, especially businesses and government, to the individual. ¹⁷ Although this may be convenient for the bottom line, what if corporations are a significant cause of the issues that mindfulness is needed to mitigate? Corporations “are notoriously not exactly caring about human beings,” says Business School Professor of Management Ronald Purser, also an ordained Zen Buddhist teacher. “[But] mindfulness has had an overwhelmingly positive popular reception because it suggests that our well-being is totally within our personal control—that we are masters of our own destiny and that practicing mindfulness will make us more healthy and more wise.” ¹⁷

Or perhaps it is the very people taking mindfulness into the corporate realm whose ethics need to be considered. Many individuals involved in “taking mindfulness corporate” are themselves traditional practitioners who keep the value set of their Buddhism under wraps. Some note that mindfulness has so many positive attributes, and so little risk of harm, how can it possibly be problematic to insert it anywhere. But what if the intention is not transparent? Enter the second quandary: Is it ethical to present mindfulness as a secular practice, bereft of Buddhism and abstain from teaching the precept of do no harm? If so, is it then acceptable for the soldiers of awareness and compassion to hide in the Trojan Horse of mindfulness, awaiting the best time to emerge with a full transformative plan?

In sum, large-scale dissemination of mindfulness training through the corporate world may significantly diffuse mindfulness and further rupture it from the source of ethical living. Mindfulness is a convoluted concept to understand entirely, particularly if you are not engaging with it experientially. Scholars argue about whether mindfulness is a state, a trait, a practice, or a way of being. ¹⁸ This definitional conundrum is mostly an academic issue, although the quandary remains as to separating mindfulness from its source. Imagine the Fortune 500 HR Director saying, “Isn't it better for more people to have some (potentially misunderstood) idea of mindfulness, even if it's not exactly what the Buddha ordered?” As nonscientists in corporate America are prone to amplify findings for a focus on sales rather than scientific and clinical accuracy, watered-down practices may be disseminated using “woefully lacking” science. ¹⁹

On the one hand, rupture from the source is a predicament. On the other hand, if there is a thirst, must you dip solely from the spring, or can the thirst be adequately quenched from a stream, a lake, the ocean, or the rain? When one really engages with the practices, one's world-view changes. It is not about understanding concepts or reviewing mindfulness research; transformation results from embodied experience that plays into one's social–ethical compass.

Transformative Possibilities

Despite the noted quandaries, it is possible that infiltrating corporate culture with mindfulness is an avenue for raising the ethical bar within society as a whole. Although the bottom line in the corporate arena is profitable gain, profit margins are intrinsically dependent upon consumer demand. Consumers are increasingly pressuring businesses to focus on ecofriendliness/awareness, human (and animal) rights, social justice, and to operate with transparent infrastructures and leadership. An interesting evolution: as consumer demands more closely reflect the ethics that many (though not all) associate with mindfulness, corporate success may depend upon businesses incorporating these same ethics. Some of the most successful businesses have caught on. ^†

Corporate models that overemphasize profit and efficient business decisions by centralizing authority are losing traction. In contrast, decentralized organizations operated with team environments, providing greater employee autonomy, and standing for “higher purposes,” are rising. The “conscious capitalism” movement centers on the concept that although profit is essential for business, it is not the pinnacle reason a business exists; businesses should have other defined and explicit purposes ²² (think Whole Foods). Mindfulness fits well within this paradigm; it essentially models how corporate structures should “be” in the world. Awareness of such dynamics is increasing and significant sectors of the populace want change, revealing a reciprocal influence.

Ergo, we suggest that mindfulness can transform the corporate climate through a multileveled framework. One, through the development of top–down mindful leadership models. Taking a leaf from 40 years of industrial psychology research, organizational performance and health (e.g., shareholder returns) correlate with value-based leadership, ²³ rather than a narcissistic and competitive CEO culture. Mark Bertolini, Chairman and CEO of Aetna and daily mindfulness/yoga practitioner, says: “…our employees are an invaluable asset. If we take good care of them, they will take good care of our customers. They will be more efficient and innovative, and will engage empathetically with our members to serve their needs and solve their problems.” ²⁴ Studies show benefit to quality of life ²⁵ and productivity ²⁶ using Aetna's mindfulness programs. Leadership translates as people development, aligning with more esoteric dimensions of mindfulness that ascribe to the “transmission” of wisdom passed through consenting lineages. We suggest that mindfulness offers the possibility to develop “Buddha leadership” models based on service (emphasizing awareness, listening/empathy/healing, organizational community building, and sense of calling/stewardship), employee empowerment, mindful decisions, and communicative channels. Only those with appropriate credentials, stable psychological health (egomaniacs need not apply), and advanced emotional/spiritual growth should earn the responsibility/privilege to lead for the greater good of the collective. In line with the adage “some leaders are born, others made,” there is hope to train the latter using mindfulness.

Two, mindfulness offers the opportunity to transform corporations from the bottom-up through mindful “deconditioning” of the workforce from less productive practices. With all the cognitive, intra-, and interpersonal benefits of mindfulness to health and well-being added to the workplace outcomes, ²⁷ mindfulness training can be used to proactively self-train the mind to reduce biased thinking, self-referential perspectives, and irrational behavioral patterns, while cultivating ontological meaning. Transforming employees promises to enhance company performance and profitable growth as a whole.

Finally, mindfulness training may enlist more intricate transformative possibilities through globalizing complex skills development throughout organizations. We suggest that training human resources in mindfulness enables processing of ambiguous and complex information, increasing creativity and resourcefulness as corporations work with “what is.” Moreover, developing compassion through mindfulness translates to higher moral reasoning capacity within business contexts, ²⁸ a dimension that we predict will become an important corporate modus-operandi. Mindfulness facilitates optimally equipped leaders and workforces trained in nonlinear problem solving, metacognition skills, less self versus other relations, and ultimately resilience within an ever-changing corporate culture: factors garnering the competitive edge and driving profit. Might we have ethical living, and business success too?