Strengthening Servant Leadership with Leader Mindfulness Training

Abstract

Recent research proposes mindfulness training as a viable method to strengthen other-orientation by enhancing awareness of oneself and others. In this study, we focus on how mindfulness training helps develop servant leaders, an other-oriented approach to leadership, by drawing from pre-intervention inquiry and post-intervention interviews with 62 organizational leaders who participated in an eight-week mindfulness intervention. Leaders reported engaging in newly acquired servant leader behaviors while integrating mindfulness into their leadership work which benefited themselves (personal growth and self-care), their followers (relationship building, follower development and wellbeing, and their teams (culture). This study advances the literature on mindfulness and servant leadership in three ways. First, by building a theoretical bridge between mindfulness-based leader development and servant leadership by demonstrating how these literatures can strengthen each other and be used to develop more holistic leaders. Second, by challenging traditional leader development by identifying how mindfulness knowledge and learnings can be integrated to grow the leader holistically, instead of providing training in specific skills. Third, by providing a conceptual framework that illustrates how mindfulness training develops servant leaders by strengthening leaders’ ability to support and develop their followers.