Abstract
This is an unusual book in the academic library – and one that is worth reading more than once.
Amanda Sinclair is already well known and respected in the field of leadership (particularly embodied leadership) research. Moreover, this book comes with endorsements from also highly renowned colleagues Manfred Kets de Vries and Donna Ladkin – so it would be difficult from the start to find fault with it!
While this is the first book by Sinclair that I have read, I have read and used some of her papers before – I like the way how they ‘break the mould’ and challenge traditional/conventional patterns and boundaries of academic disciplines and academic thinking. I was not disappointed – she has done it again in this book. The book is not just theory, but has a lot of illustration through stories, experiences and examples. On one hand, it is a very subjective book, and on the other it is very well researched, drawing on a broad and diverse range of literature.
Right from the start, the author poses the question: Why this book? Why yet another book about leadership? And then she answers it in a very thoughtful and personal way: ‘My experience tells me that mindfulness … is very valuable to leaders’ (p. 1) – ‘I want to offer a series of “meditations” on aspects of being in leadership’ (p. 13).
So the emphasis is not just on the intellect – Sinclair addresses the reader directly and states that she wants to ‘invite other parts’: ‘your instincts, your feelings, your memories, your practical wisdom, your hunches about what works and what gets in the way, your breathing and gut, your misgivings, desires and hopes’ (p. 14); ‘My intention was to write simply and directly, from my experience and my heart’ (p. 13). Throughout the book, she sticks to this decision.
The style is almost ‘un-academic’ in that it is clear, simple and straightforward, avoiding jargon where possible. It is less formal than one would expect from an ‘academic’ publication, but without getting too ‘chatty’ – it keeps a respectful distance. It reads more like someone sharing one’s thoughts, rather than someone seeking to persuade or to ‘sell’ ideas, concepts, attitudes. The book lays out its ‘wares’, in a clear, simple, well-organised fashion, but without a ‘marketing’ or ‘hard-selling’ approach – at no point did I feel that the author wanted to pull or push me into her way of seeing things. She highlights her points with examples, mini case studies/vignettes, personal and professional experiences. This makes it a very personal book, the author telling her own story – but it is also a very ‘learned’ book: to some extent it is a reflection of her own career and work, a piece of leadership by example: doing what one preaches. It is also a quietly passionate book.
Its informal style, however, does not place this book anywhere near the ‘Heathrow management library’. A thorough researcher, the author draws on a wide range of references, from Buddhist teachings to psychology to neuroscience, from management theory to philosophy. A slightly irritating detail for me was the referencing style: on one hand, the flow of reading was not disrupted by brackets – but for the curious reader that means even more disruption, constantly switching between the main body of text and the notes section at end. I would have preferred in-text referencing or footnotes.
The book consists of 20 chapters in three sections: ‘Leadership for life’, ‘Leading with body’, ‘Leading with heart’. Part One is the longest (10 chapters); Parts Two and Three have five chapters each. The book is indeed very strongly structured: each chapter starts with a quote that invites, or even calls for, a meditation session – almost ‘enticing’ the reader to make reading this book a mindfulness exercise in itself. This made me aware of a personal dilemma – I actually found it difficult to read the book mindfully as a reviewer: I would have liked to read it in a less ‘instrumental’ way. (So is mindfulness contagious?) After the review, I am looking forward to returning to it in a less ‘driven’ way.
While Part One is the largest part (it takes up about half the book), its title, ‘Leadership for Life’, is not entirely self-evident. The chapters of the first part are more diverse (being, thinking, awareness, attention, stillness, dialogue, connecting, mindfulness in crisis, writing), focusing on varied aspects of mindfulness that are more difficult to bring under one overarching concept. According to Sinclair, the chapters in Part One ‘take some activities that are a familiar part of leading and reconsider how to do them mindfully’ (p. 19); ‘Part One is about the mind and rethinking the more recognisable activities that are part of exercising leadership from a mindfulness perspective’ (p. 17).
Parts Two and Three deal with the more specific areas ‘Leading with Body’ and ‘Leading with Heart’ – both less ‘familiar’ aspects in management theory and practice; ‘… Part Two of the book suggests that paying attention to the body, the senses and the breath, rather than trying to ignore or control them, is a reliable way to being present and mindful’ (p. 17). In a way, the first part lays the foundation for mindful leadership, before the book moves on to more ‘esoteric’ topics that might surprise readers who are less familiar with the language and themes of mindfulness.
Part Two addresses breathing, looking after bodies, engaging the senses, pleasure and creativity. While the theme of creativity would fit into any of the other parts of the book, the practical examples in this chapter are taken from leaders working within the arts or giving ‘embodied leadership’.
Part 3Three deals with feeling, ‘being ourselves’ (identity and authenticity), happiness, ethics and values, love and compassion. While authenticity and ethics have for some time been mainstream discussion topics in business schools, in the wider research community (for a comprehensive review of authentic leadership, see for example Gardner et al., 2011), and even among practitioners, ‘love’, ‘compassion’ and ‘pleasure’ are not part of the usual topic range, or even the vocabulary.
To raise these themes in an academic context takes courage, and Sinclair does not shy as well as way from taking risks. At the same time, she underpins her statements with sound ‘hard-science’ research as well as arguments taken from social sciences and philosophy – again, not an easy task.
While I very much appreciate this book, I have a few issues with it, mostly where I see inherent contradictions.
When talking about leadership, Sinclair concedes, even emphasises that ‘leadership is not necessarily being delivered by those in authority’ (p. 11). She talks about ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ leadership (p. 11), acknowledges that there is ‘a critical distinction here between authority and leadership that many individuals and organisations confuse’ (p. 24f) and that the ‘most inspiring leadership is sometimes not even described as that’ (p. 11). 1 Authority is about ‘getting things done’ (p. 25), especially what ‘others … have determined is important’ (p. 25), whereas ‘leadership isn’t doing’ (p. 26).
However, in organisational practice as well as academia, leadership and authority are often conflated. This struck me at a recent high-level academic research conference on leadership, where the majority of speakers (both in keynotes and papers) talked about ‘leaders’ and ‘executives’ almost as if these terms were synonymous. Only few questioned this tacit assumption, or even surfaced it as an assumption. While Sinclair claims that she does not fall into the ‘trap’ of ‘leader = person in position of authority’, there are few examples of people who exercise leadership ‘further down’ in the hierarchical order of organisations.
Her claim that the term ‘leadership’ has ‘so much baggage […] that many of us want to distance ourselves from it’ (p. 12) begs the question, who is ‘we’, and who is included in that group? Does it include executives and ambitious achievers? Or are we talking among those who already are more mindful of their roles, willing to question their own and their organisation’s assumptions? On the same page, a specific audience group is mentioned and addressed directly, as the author expresses her hope that the book ‘will be useful and readable for those of you who don’t see yourself as leaders’ (p. 12). Where does this leave ‘those in authority’? Or is there an assumption that they would not go anywhere near a book like this?
Some statements, in my view, are too broad, for example the claim that ‘all positive social changes involve leadership by individuals and groups’ (p. 12), which is not backed up. It is a bold statement and feels intuitively right. BUT, who defines what is ‘positive’? Later on, in chapters 19 and 20 an answer to that is attempted, but again, I am not sure to what extent this is preaching to the converted.
The notion of ‘thinking less’ (chapter Two) is also a tricky one: is leadership about thinking differently or thinking less? Quality or quantity? The recent Brexit campaign (about the United Kingdom dropping out of the European Union) has certainly shown that thinking less (in terms of quality) is not helpful (neither on the voters’ side nor the politicians’ – more thinking, both quantitatively and qualitatively, should have led to a more considered outcome!). Habits of thinking are not the same as the capacity to think! (p. 30). It looks as if these different meanings are getting somewhat muddled. On p. 34, the author mentions different types of mind – but then ‘mind’ is not necessarily the same as thinking.
Chapter Three introduces three different states of mind: awareness, reflecting and thinking. These distinctions are helpful in making more sense of chapter Two, but they also highlight a linguistic difficulty, in that ‘thinking’ is both a very generic term which includes different types of thinking, such as reflection, while on the other hand, Sinclair also uses ‘thinking’ for a specific type or category of thinking.
Interestingly, while her concepts are usually well referenced, she mentions neuroscientific research on these states of mind (p. 43), but does not add any references. I am not nitpicking – but I would have been interested in following up those sources!
While Sinclair distances herself from trait approaches that identify position with person, chapter Five (‘Reflecting on identity with less ego’) gets dangerously close to that school of thought again. The emphasis from doing to being can be misunderstood (‘Leadership isn’t doing’, p. 26). However, the author moves away from the pressure of prescriptions (‘a template for how leaders feel they should be, which has typically been treated as reality that is not available for modification’, p. 57)
With chapter 6, ‘Listening from stillness’, I have some problems. In the first place, I could not subscribe to sweeping generalisations such as ‘The activity of listening is central to most leadership jobs and most individuals in authority positions do a lot of it’ (p. 66) – this is far too grand a claim, for which I cannot see any evidence, neither from my own experience nor from the literature. Nor are there any references to underpin this claim … It also contradicts other statements, such as the insight that in ‘many organisational cultures […] ego drives who is seen and succeeds’ (p. 64) – these are not cultures conducive to much listening.
Another issue is the author’s expectation of ‘empathic listening, or hearing not just the words but emotions behind them’ (p. 70) – this is tricky, as emotions are often not expressed clearly, or can be mixed, or ambiguous. The Palo Alto Group and their findings on communication (e.g. Watzlawick et al., 1967) spring to mind: the relationship level always determines the content level in a conversation (Watzlawick et al., 1967, axiom 2) and the relationship conversation is always analogue and hence ambiguous. So the ‘hearing of emotions’ is always an act of subjective interpretation, which can lead to serious misunderstandings. It is a balancing act between hearing that there is emotion and making assumptions about what emotion there is. Similarly, the description of managers thinking about what others think of them links back to those studies on human communication (Watzlawick et al., 1967, also Wilder, 1979) and the notion of reinforcing feedback loops that drive relationships into neurotic behaviours.
‘Listening with the whole body, not just the ears’ (p. 70) sounds great, in terms of embodied leading and following. However, then it becomes rather vague: ‘Listeners can demonstrate that they are there for the speaker with their body, their presence, the gentleness of their gaze, the grace or groundedness with which they are felt to “be there”’ (p. 70). It is not entirely clear how gentleness of gaze, grace or groundedness manifest themselves; and while Sinclair distances herself from mere prescriptions and techniques, it is not obvious how these particular features would differ from, for example, neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) techniques.
‘Connecting’ includes ‘connecting wider communities’ (chapter 8, p. 90ff). The author quotes ‘the […] military teaching mindfulness to combat soldiers whose job it is to crush the enemy’ as an example of contradiction, and she quotes the Buddhist attitude that ‘mindfulness includes a commitment to prevent suffering’, but while she talks about organisations being ‘full of contradictions’, she does not go so far as to question the very existence of organisations whose outputs are unsustainable, damaging or cause suffering (such as car manufacturers, ‘junk’ food chains, or the military).
A minor niggle is the omission of Sarah Pink’s pioneering work in the field of sensory ethnography in chapter 13, ‘Tuning into the senses’ – Riach and Warren’s research on smell and organisational life is mentioned, but Pink’s innovative contributions to meaning-making and reflection through the use of sensory data/knowledge/experience should not be underestimated and would well deserve mentioning in this context.
Another niggle – probably due to my own bias in favour of creative methods in leadership and leadership development – is the shortness of the section on ‘learning from artistic leaders’ – it covers little more than one page and essentially just covers one example (the filmmaker David Lynch). Given that this is a growing field of research as well as application, it might have merited more attention. From musicians to dancers, sculptors to poets, many artistic occupations require a high level of mindfulness, especially where collaborative endeavours are concerned – more applied examples with an in-depth analysis would be appreciated.
Chapters 16 and 17, on feeling and authenticity in leadership, respectively, show Sinclair as a critical scholar – there is no ‘touchy-feely’ sentimentality about her approach: she critically highlights the pitfalls of ‘emotional intelligence’ and ‘authentic leadership’ when these become ‘management fads’ and self-marketing tools and discusses the contradictions arising from the pressures of organisational cultures that demand ‘self-marketing’ from current and aspiring leaders. Interestingly (and I applaud her honesty), she does not offer a solution to either of these problems – being a mindful, reflective practitioner does not necessarily provide ‘solutions’ for systemic failures and paradoxes.
From a management learning point of view, this is not a book for first-year undergraduates. But for MBA students, for example, it should be on the reading list. It is a book for people with an open mind. (Yes, there is a risk that it preaches to the converted: a hard-nosed sceptic who thinks mindfulness is yet another fad or another way to keep people quiet and compliant, will not be convinced.) It is a book for people who are already reflective or prepared to engage in reflection on their own practices and attitudes.
Leading Mindfully sometimes reads like an apologia, not in the sense of a defence against accusations, but of a justification to bring two diverse fields together and prove that, despite many examples to the contrary, they are compatible – an explanation and defence of the author’s views and positions on mindful leadership.
This book is good for reflective practitioners and reflective academics – and it is good for people who are unhappy with the way the term leadership is bandied about, and who are looking for alternatives without throwing the concept of leadership completely out of the window.
Strangely enough, it also reminded me of Monika Kostera’s (2014) Occupy Management – while the two authors come from very different angles, they are both passionately personal as well as professional. And they meet at unusual points: for example, they both talk about leadership and love.
I like Sinclair’s statement that ‘mindfulness is also fundamentally an interpersonal activity’ (p. 75) might surprise those who think of mindfulness in terms of meditation, considering it an essentially individual, even solitary exercise – it certainly speaks to my own experience and helps my research on leader-follower-ship and dance. And while the book takes mostly a reflective stance, Sinclair also includes practical suggestions for actions that leaders can take – not prescriptions with a ‘guaranteed’ outcome of being a ‘better’ leader, but more in the sense of steps that might help to fill a leadership role in a different way. In this context, it surprises me that her view of leadership as relational is only mentioned on page 160, while it is an essential premiss of her whole approach.
It is a thoughtful, a serious book – no laughter. I read it during the ‘Brexit’ campaign in the United Kingdom, shocked and worried about the irrational claims and assertions of the campaigners, appealing to people’s deep-seated feelings of fear, anxiety and prejudice, punctuated by constantly repeated calls for ‘strong leadership’. It made me think a lot about what people want when they demand ‘leadership’. Do they actually know? What is their idea of ‘leadership’, especially ‘strong leadership’? They probably ask for a saviour, a deus ex machina, a messiah (in the Bion/Tavistock conferences sense), someone who does not question but provides clear, simple answers to situations characterised by complexity and uncertainty – basically a nostalgic, utopian wish. The whole experience made this book even more important. Altogether, I found it an encouraging and uplifting book that I enjoyed reading.