From Burnout To Breakthrough - How Practicing Mindfulness Together Impacts Team Results

Connecting with thousands of leaders globally over the last two years, there are three common themes I hear. First, complexity and speed of disruption feels impossible to manage leaving many of us burned out. Second, the state of burnout and stress is causing many executive teams to be disconnected from one another and from creative solutions. This disconnection makes it hard to align on priorities and leaves people with too many fragmented to-do’s, exacerbating burnout. Third, many of the necessary transformation initiatives required to adapt are not really creating breakthroughs. Instead, they meet with resistance.

If any of this sounds like an organization or team you know, read on.

At a recent client session with a large global bank, the head of the team put her finger on the solution. She realized that what her matrixed team needed first was to trust each other. She realized creative solutions and alignment would follow that. Their organization is going through major restructuring and her team is responsible for a big part of the delivery. Feeling the pressure of execution, their weekly team meetings have been focused on tactics with many people multi-tasking during team meetings. The team survey showed the team felt: disengaged (with burnout), disconnected (siloed with insufficient trust), and distracted (too many priorities).

During our session together, the team learned first how to connect with themselves, to notice the inner state they were bringing to the team meeting. We did a mindfulness practice to “arrive together”. To combat distraction, they learned to focus and pay attention. To combat disconnection, they learned how to be vulnerable with each other and name the fear that many of them felt related to the restructuring. They learned to listen deeply. Over the course of our session, the team moved scores in feeling belonging and trust. They learned they could survive difficult conversations and felt the relief of sharing what they had been holding inside. As energy was released, engagement and new ideas started to percolate. They started to take individual responsibility for their own state and shared responsibility for the level of psychological safety of the team.

To learn more about the science behind group mindfulness and awareness practices, I sat down to talk with Jutta Tobias Mortlock. She is a PhD social psychologist and Senior Lecturer at City, University of London. Jutta’s research and public outreach work is focused on the link between wellbeing and sustainable performance at work, especially in high-stakes settings such as in the Armed Forces and in extreme poverty contexts. She is known for making science practical and relevant to people’s lives. Jutta has introduced 12,000 adult learners to mindfulness including thousands of senior leaders, many of whom were skeptical about mindfulness and its relevance to their work lives. Jutta has been directing funded research projects on innovative ways to bring mindfulness to high-stress work teams in UK Defense.

Henna Inam: Most research on mindfulness is based on individual mindfulness practice. What was your inspiration to do research on group mindfulness?

Jutta Tobias Mortlock: While I’m a fan of individual mindfulness practice, it turns out that scientists worked out 30 years ago that teams who work together in a collectively mindful way are highly resilient groups, highly capable of managing unexpected stressors collectively, operating reliably despite facing even the most challenging situations. In a collectively mindful team, stress and challenge is a collective responsibility, with every team member looking out for one another, rather than individual team members shouldering stress and challenge individually, in isolation of others.

I realized that it makes sense to put together individual mindfulness practice, to help individuals better understand and overcome their personal stress, with collective mindfulness practices, to help groups learn to see ‘stress’ and ‘burnout’ as a collective challenge. I called this “Team Mindfulness Training” (TMT).

Inam: What did you learn from your research study on group mindfulness?

Mortlock: In our first multi-phase mixed-method field Randomised Controlled Trial (RCT) of “next-gen” TMT mindfulness training, we compared this new type of mindfulness training (essentially a combination of individual with collective mindfulness practices) to “1^st gen” mindfulness training based on Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR). We measured individual resilience (via self-report surveys) and performance (via objective computer test measuring working memory performance, a standard proxy of individual performance) as well as perceptions of collective mindfulness (via self-reported surveys) at 3 times: immediately before, immediately after, and 2 months after the RCT.

We found that the new training seemed no less effective in raising individual resilience and performance compared to standard mindfulness training, and TMT may be more effective in raising collective mindfulness. That made sense. But we also found something really interesting, something important that’s not typically examined in standard mindfulness trials: individuals felt more able to apply and use the mindfulness practices they had learned on their mindfulness training courses during times of stress when they were also trained in developing a “collectively mindful” team culture. This indicates that there seems to be an interdependence effect at play: the application of individual mindfulness skills may be dependent on the development of collective mindfulness in the social context in which people apply their newly learned mindfulness practices.

This is potentially crucial for mindfulness to become embedded in people’s (social or work) lives. Context seems to matter greatly.

Inam: What did the group need to commit to in terms of time?

Mortlock: The group committed to 8 sessions in total, one two-hour session per week. This is the same commitment as for standard mindfulness training based on MBSR.

To create a valid comparison between TMT and MBSR, we cut the MBSR content of the newly designed TMT training in half (which is also in line with scientific reviews of MBSR-based training, essentially arguing that as long as all five features of MBSR are in place in a given training, the actual length of mindfulness meditation practice doesn’t really seem to make a big difference – so we argued that this was acceptable), and then we added “collective mindfulness practices” on top of that.

Inam: Since time is often a barrier in terms of groups coming together (particularly in hybrid workplaces) what practices were the most important based on the research?

Mortlock: This is difficult to answer because we didn’t scientifically evaluate which specific TMT practice was more effective and which was less effective. Instead, we have always only compared overall effectiveness of TMT to MBSR-based mindfulness training.

But because I’ve now trialed several different ‘bespoke’ versions of TMT in different military teams, let me outline below what the three essential ingredients are that make TMT work.

I hope this illustrates that it’s not really about hybrid vs face to face teams – instead, it’s about people co-creating (with each other and with the help of the training facilitator) a mindset shift towards a “collective mind” in how to relate to stress. I call this “prosocial engagement” in mindfulness training.

Here’s what “prosocial engagement” in mindfulness training looks and sounds like:

· Prosocial regulation: Cultivating a perception shift from seeing oneself as independent to being interdependent with others to succeed – this is fighting the self-centered narrative that is so unhelpful for people’s mental health, as well as for performance in today’s interconnected world.

· Prosocial interrelating: Learning how to rapidly develop high-quality interpersonal relationships. People experience how people looking out for each other is a powerful buffer against the impact of stress that every individual will feel at some point. We all know how good it feels when someone has our back – and in today’s organizations, people feel less socially connected and they draw on less social capital in their work relationships. In addition, our data indicates it may be absolutely essential to have a prosocial culture of respect and care in place for a culture of better self-care to emerge. In short, it makes sense and it’s smart to add an explicit focus on learning to rapidly build high-quality relationships, because this seems really good for individual self-care to become more acceptable and for mindfulness practice to become “the thing we do around here”.

· Cultivating idea doubt: Idea doubt is not the same as self-doubt. Idea doubt is about being able to doubt the validity of one’s own ideas. Mindfulness holds so much potential for workplaces because it can enable us to change our relationship with the situation at hand. This rotation in perspective enables us to be smarter and wiser. In workplaces, idea doubt is particularly helpful because it tames the illusion that I know better than you, that you may dismiss my ideas out of hand, and so on. Great workplaces welcome idea doubt. This enhances their ability to see different perspectives about the challenges they face, and it greatly enhances their ability to find solutions fit for purpose. But – this type of interacting with each other is only possible when we have high-quality, social capital-based relationships in place, which is why this is the last and probably most important part of the mindfulness training we’ve piloted.

Adding “prosocial engagement” to mindfulness training isn’t only for people working in intact or static teams where everyone participates all together in the mindfulness training. That can be done with any group of individuals interested in social engagement – and we’re all actually naturally interested in that.

Inam: Do you have any advice for teams who want to achieve the results you’ve outlined about what the essential practices might be for them in the workplace?

Mortlock: Leaders should do the following:

· Proactively anticipate stress with their team: This involves sharing with their team not only what (intellectually) is an upcoming stressful situation for them, but also share what this means for them personally. Invite team members to reciprocate sharing different perspectives about the upcoming challenge, and explore how the team might master the challenge by supporting each individual’s concern as a unit.

· Proactively getting to know the human behind the role: invest time and energy in understanding the drivers, specific needs, and specific skills that team members bring to the group. Explore who can teach the group something new, spend time getting to know each other to overcome the interpersonal uncertainty that often makes stressful work situations even more stressful.

· Communicate more, especially when there’s uncertainty about particular situations or challenges. Communicating that you don’t know the solution to a problem normalizes sharing of half-baked ideas, which is particularly helpful when work challenges are complex and where solutions are not easily accessible.

Inam: What is your wish for additional research in this area?

Mortlock: I would love to partner with more mindfulness researchers and practitioners who are also interested in this “prosocial turn” in mindfulness training, so that we can eventually design the next generation of mindfulness programs that people can use and benefit from in high stress situations.

If this topic interests you and you have a team that would like to pilot this please reach out to us.