Paying Attention: The Making of an Exceptional Leader

Photo by Jehyun Sung on Unsplash

What makes a great leader? Decisiveness? Strategy? Or is human-centred leadership the quality we invoke when the old answers no longer hold? We talk about leading with purpose, emotional intelligence and culture, yet leaders are almost exclusively trained in external mechanics like performance frameworks and influence models. Why, if leaders are trained to execute impersonal methods, are we surprised when burnout spreads? Or when decision making becomes reactive, not proactive? There is even more reason to question – does a successful leader depend on their knowledge or how much they are willing to pay attention? A recent review on mindfulness and leadership by Doornich and Lynch argues that skills of attention, awareness and authenticity, developed through mindfulness practices, are not soft extras, but the foundational qualities of a successful leader.

 Too often, leaders assume that achievement comes from doing more, more initiatives, meetings, planning. What leaders often forget is what it means to be. Mindfulness, broadly defined as paying attention without judgment, is not just a gimmick perpetuated by the wellness industry, but a discipline that exposes how little attention leaders are actually trained to give. The strength of these skills shape how leaders react to pressure, how they decide and importantly, how they relate. Innovation, agility and a great KPI are indeed good measures of success, but the route to producing sustainable and consistent output starts first with the leader themselves.

The research establishes the Three Pillars of the Mindful Leader:

1)       Attention – capacity to focus on what is essential, right now

2)       Awareness – open and non-judgemental understanding of thoughts, emotions and patterns

3)       Authenticity – actions that align with internal values, not external pressure

These capacities are measurable, but their impact is felt long before it can be quantified; in how leaders regulate themselves under pressure and how safe others feel around them. Essentially, attention is presence, awareness promotes self-awareness, and authenticity breeds trust, and are, arguably, the foundations of influence.

When put in the professional context, attaining these attributes is difficult. Back to back meetings, metrics of success and goals to achieve results in fragmented attention, the feeling that there is inability to stop. Stress becomes the default condition, and organisational change cycles quietly train people to be functional rather than human. A leader with ability to tune into their own internal capacities, they may both become calmer themselves, but attune their decision making into relational effectiveness.

The impacts of mindful leadership ripple outward, shaping the psychological climate for those they lead. Leaders set the emotional tone of the system far more significantly than a policy ever would. When a leader operates from a reactive state, employees adapt accordingly — self-censoring, optimising for safety rather than truth, and carrying the emotional cost the system refuses to acknowledge. A leader cultivating a positive environment promotes coherent climates, where people expend less energy navigating unspoken tension and more energy contributing creatively. Employees are not told to practice mindfulness, but they experience it through the quality of leadership attention that is directed at them.

So what makes it difficult? Humans are not ‘programmable’ like a machine, there is no hack to achieving mindfulness, or a program designed to deliver attention or authenticity. It’s a long, internal and deeply reflective process. The corporate environment prefers output over introspection, but that is exactly why this research matters. Mindfulness in this context is not therapy, it’s training.

A common misconception is that mindfulness is only about feeling good, but it’s possible that it improves cognitive ability and emotional capacities. Reduced stress is good, sharper awareness is better, and clearer values can be transformative. From organisational structures to the leader themselves, leadership development must first identify the leader as an individual, that the root of quality comes from human capability, not just managerial technique. This research questions our assumptions that leadership is about a checklist, but instead about inner cultivation. Perhaps the real question is not whether mindfulness belongs in leadership, but whether leadership without it is already failing. In an age of speed, certainty, and control, the radical act may be slowing down enough to see clearly starting with the self, and only then, others.

From the depth psychology lens, much of leadership behaviour is not strategic at all, it is compensatory. Leaders act, decide and perform from unconscious patterns shaped by fear, approval-seeking, unintegrated ambition, or fragile identity — often mistaking these patterns for competence. Jung warned that whatever remains unconscious does not disappear, but later shows up as fate. In a professional environment, it can show up as micromanagement, reactivity, charisma without substance and worse, promote cultures that are driven by unspoken anxiety. Mindfulness, when approaching it from this perspective, is not only attentional training, but practice of bringing the shadow into awareness. By observing thoughts, emotions and impulse without first identifying them, leaders create a gap between the stimulus and their reaction. In that gap remains choice, integration and the possibility of leadership that is not driven by unconscious compensation, but by conscious alignment; a shift that is quieter, slower, and far more demanding than most leadership programmes admit.

For the full research article, published in Frontiers in Psychology, 2024, follow this link: The mindful leader: a review of leadership qualities derived from mindfulness meditation - PMC

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