VIM Executive Coaching had collected all sorts of executive leadership stories over the years. It is always a pleasure to share and learn. We remember one fellow who was an executive leader for a dairy conglomerate. We were talking one day, and he shared that milk was one of the few products where the more that was taken out of it, the more expensive it became.
Traditionally, he pointed out, skim milk or fat free milk was more expensive than whole milk. We saw his point. And, of course, the individual components of milk such as butterfat and protein, are more expensive than the original product as well.
Given the current price of groceries, we don’t know if the analogy still holds (and, to be honest, we have come to like Oat milk and Almond milk), but the entire concept of less is more resonates and rings true in all areas of our lives.
What are you taking away?
The idea of “less is more” did not start with whole milk, fat free cottage cheese or gluten-free, yeast free, flour-free pizza for that matter, but with mindfulness. It is the purposeful act in meditation of taking away all that is unnecessary and distilling things down to their essence.
Mindfulness allows executive leaders to become their intentional, authentic, compassionate selves. To be that “same self” in all things, the same person in all conditions, the person who remembers the impact of their actions.
For example, in a turf-war between departments, the mindful executive leader will observe, respond and cut through the “he said-she said” and reach a level of understanding without the clutter. The mindful executive makes decisions without bias or malice; without fakery or mockery. The mindful executive understands “what is,” and not what she would like it to be.
Far too often, executive leaders force themselves into situations where decisions are based on in-the-moment reaction. It leads them to making unfortunate mistakes of judgment and it is a costly price to pay.
In a true sense, an executive leader who always reacts rather than responds, is led down the same roads, though the situation doesn’t warrant that particular path. Therefore, in an employee dispute, the reactive executive is often likely to side with an employee she favors rather than the employee who is “right.”
Mindfulness takes away the extraneous and that is a positive result. In mindfulness meditation, we focus on the breath and the senses. The breath brings the outside world into the inside.
A mindful executive leader responds to the situation as it is, not the one that could have been, the one that we would want it to be, but the situation that must be fully dealt with and internalized.
We have all experienced workplaces filled with harmful bias, meanness, harassment and arrogance. We would maintain that those situations are the net result of a lack of mindfulness. In all things, we want to strive to be mindful. It is certainly, one of the many tools we provide for executives in VIM Executive Coaching training.
Many of us go through life seeing how much we can add. It can become a heavy burden. We might consider that what is taken away was never needed from the start. Whether heavy cream or preconceived workplace biases, too much is will come to damage us over time.