JCS: Thanks for joining us for this series called Contemplation Plus. What we’re interested in is contemplation and its myriad of expressions. It’s about contemplation and whatever that means to you at the intersection of an area that is the focus of your work. Let’s call that leadership, if we may. To get started and to think about those intersections, could you talk a bit about your interests and your experiences, in particular in contemplation and/or leadership?
IHS: As a boy, I suffered from severe headaches, and one of my doctors recommended a Tuesday night meditation class that I attended with my mother. The meditations were guided and involved lots of visualization. I remember a circle of black chairs and mental images of serene ponds and white or green lights. Over the years, I’ve tried different meditation styles and practices, and I was fortunate to participate in an outstanding meditation retreat while in law school. Meditation did not become a regular practice for me, however, until much later.
I was working in Chicago at the time, and there was a used bookstore near the station where I would browse while waiting for my evening train. Rather than seeking books related to my job or professional success, I was magnetically drawn to books on Eastern spirituality and meditation. I felt a jolt of electricity each time I entered the bookstore and was energized to read my new purchases on the ride home. Through the mental static, it grew clearer to me the type of questions my life wanted to answer: Who am I? Why are we here? How do we create peace? What is life asking of us?
In the dozen years since, while still feeling very much like a beginner meditator, I have developed a daily practice of focused consciousness on breathing and the Zen method of “just sitting” every morning. I also sit many evenings with different Zen groups and incorporate short walking meditations throughout most days.
Leadership, in the capital “L” word historical sense, has also always fascinated me. I am also curious about the way leadership manifests in families, in teams and groups, and among peers in various social situations. My dad was a history teacher, so his dramatic stories of Mahatma Gandhi, Hariett Tubman, Thaddeus Stevens, and Martin Luther King Jr. were alive in our home as examples of what to value in life—reducing suffering for others, achieving liberation, helping to empower and liberate marginalized populations.
For a year while in college, I lived in South Africa and watched Nelson Mandela’s inspirational leadership of the multi-party negotiation process to end apartheid. A little more than a decade later I started an eight-year adventure working for Senator and then President Obama through the global financial crisis. There are people and movements that play a disproportionately positive role in human history. In my role now as dean of the Batten School for the past six years, I am eager to cultivate new leaders like the ones I have admired—people with the skills, the self-awareness and self-consciousness, and the other-awareness and other-consciousness to be the creative, courageous, and compassionate changemakers that the world needs more of.
In my role now as dean of the Batten School for the past six years, I am eager to cultivate new leaders like the ones I have admired—people with the skills, the self-awareness and self-consciousness, and the other-awareness and other-consciousness to be the creative, courageous, and compassionate changemakers that the world needs more of.
JCS: Just building on that last piece, leaders of the future: How might contemplative practices play a role? How might the cultivation of new leaders have some contemplative training or stance or orientation?
IHS: As I reflect on the relationship between contemplative practices and the practice of leadership, it is exciting to think about the potential benefits for new leaders. First, many contemplative practices help individuals see reality more clearly, recognize the distortions created by judgments and emotional reactions, become aware of habitual cravings or aversions, and recognize the constancy of change. In my own meditation practice, for example, my intention often is to witness what is happening in my body and mind as closely, objectively, and nonjudgmentally as I can. What is causing happiness or distress? What is beneath an uncomfortable thought or sensation? How is my breath or mood or patience affected by certain ideas or assumptions? These skills of enhancing clarity take considerable effort to develop, but they are valuable for learning about myself, for understanding others, and for interpreting the context of a given situation with open curiosity rather than preconceived ideas or fixed opinions.
Second, contemplative practices strengthen our ability to manage emotions and behaviors, so we don’t overreact, or underreact, to situations and can instead respond with intentionality and awareness. I like to teach leadership through a lens of negotiation, and, when I teach negotiation, I warn people that we are often our own worst enemies because our anger or frustration or enthusiasm interferes with strategic judgment. This doesn’t mean that emotion in leadership is bad or should be avoided; rather, we are well served to respect it and its power in alignment with our goals.
Third, contemplative practices aim to improve our focus and attention. I worry a lot about how easily our attention gets hijacked as each day we confront situations or use tools that have been designed to steal or manipulate it. We were intending to read an assignment for class, and suddenly we discover, twenty or forty minutes later, that TikTok has replaced our textbook, for example. Or perhaps we were intending a joyful reunion with friends, but an off-color comment by a passing stranger has put us in a bitter mood. If we want to be leaders who manage and protect the focus of our attention, it helps to practice concentration, starting with simpler focal points like the breath or a mantra. We can bring awareness to when and how and why we lose the energy of focus. We can learn what works to help us maintain or quickly restore focus. Meditation training is well suited for this. It also humbles us quickly as we confront our susceptibility to distraction. And the same challenges of distraction vs. focus that individuals face also relate to organizations going through change. Mental clarity, emotional regulation, and attention management are elements of good decision-making, which is a core component of leadership.
A fourth benefit of contemplative practices is resilience for leaders. Resilience is helped in part by reducing stress and exhaustion and paying better attention to self-care needs. Even more powerfully, contemplative practices help people make meaning from hardships and trauma. I think of Martin Luther King Jr. coping with one of the bombings of his house. He wondered whether he had the strength to continue leading the boycott, and he turned to prayer to make meaning of the moment and reaffirm the purpose of his sacrifice. At moments of crisis or conflict, a contemplative practice is often a ballast for leadership fortitude.
These types of leadership benefits derived from contemplative practice are rich with research and practice opportunities, many of which I hope will be investigated by our Batten and CSC colleagues at UVA. For now, I want to mention one more hypothesis: Certain contemplative practices promote prosocial leadership behavior, which I would define to include values like compassion, truth, generosity, and sustainability. Meditation can help us appreciate our universal interconnectedness with other beings and our shared capacity for suffering. As people with contemplative practices develop an understanding of the types of thoughts, speech, and behaviors that increase suffering, we seek to avoid them in favor of their opposites. In traditional Buddhist practice, the three poisons to watch out for include greed/selfishness, hatred/anger, and ignorance/delusion. The opposites are generosity, love, and wisdom. I’m excited to see how contemplative practices will cultivate leadership practices that promote these positive values for the world. This is a critically important and urgent opportunity for the Batten School and CSC.
If we want to be leaders who manage and protect the focus of our attention, it helps to practice concentration, starting with simpler focal points like the breath or a mantra. We can bring awareness to when and how and why we lose the energy of focus. We can learn what works to help us maintain or quickly restore focus
JCS: Can you talk a little more about the kind of examples or exemplary leaders that you have in mind?
IHS: I prefer to think of examples of leadership rather than examples of leaders, mostly because outstanding leadership can be exercised by people we don’t think of as “leaders,” and someone can exercise outstanding leadership on Tuesday and make a poor leadership choice on Wednesday; or their leadership during a revolutionary period might be terrific, but their leadership during a period of reconciliation might be less effective.
But of course I have my personal heroes, and there are exemplary leaders whom I admire and seek to study and learn from. I think of Nelson Mandela taking enormous risks to agree to negotiate with the South African Nationalist Party without the awareness of his African National Congress colleagues. This was a daring and dangerous move, without a road map nor any guarantee of success. Throughout the multiyear negotiation period, Mandela routinely showed grace and humanity to those who had been unwilling to accept his humanity for decades. The way he rose to the occasion of pleading for peace and calm in South Africa after the assassination of his ANC colleague, Chris Hani in 1993, was instrumental in preventing a race war. Time after time over many years Mandela managed the full range of emotions – joy, enthusiasm, anger, and more — with masterful effect. He leveraged curiosity about white South Africans and their history, language, sports, and family lives into fantastic diplomatic success. Proud yet humble. Tactical and strategic. Flexible and principled.
I also think of Harriet Tubman, a painting of whom, as a gift from my dad, hangs in my Pavilion home on the UVA Lawn. Deeply inspired by her faith in God, she demonstrated otherworldly courage on more than a dozen missions to free 70 enslaved people through the Underground Railroad. She represents for me a model of bravery, focus, determination, and grit.
Certain contemplative practices promote prosocial leadership behavior, which I would define to include values like compassion, truth, generosity, and sustainability.
We can take Mandela and Tubman as models to work towards because so many of us with leadership roles today seem paralyzed in comparison, by fear of what others might think, by concerns for our own safety, or by the costs of uncertainty in a world deemed volatile, complex, and ambiguous. As dean of a top leadership school and with UVA’s profound public service mission and legacy, I feel a special responsibility to help develop new generations of courageous and humane leaders with the contemplative resources to persevere and help us learn to thrive during our own challenging times.
JCS: What is the repertoire of skill sets, of competencies, that a contemplative leader could have, that a leader could derive from contemplation?
IHS: Let me start with a few general observations about leadership before turning to specific skills. First, leadership, as a choice to accept responsibility for empowering a community to pursue shared values, can be developed as a portfolio of skills. It can be taught and learned, practiced and improved. Certain individuals may be born with special leadership talents—akin to “natural” artists or athletes—but even those with inborn talent train to hone their craft. And everyone, naturally talented or not, can improve leadership effectiveness. Second, everybody can exercise leadership regardless of their role in a community or an organization. The nature of that leadership may vary based on their authority or access to resources, but people can “lead from anywhere,” as we like to say at Batten.
The third observation is that leadership is not limited to individuals. Nelson Mandela would not have survived twenty-seven years in prison without the African National Congress. The Montgomery Bus Boycott needed all the people who agreed to walk or organize carpools or raise money for taxis rather than ride the buses. We remember and tell leadership stories often about individuals even as most leadership work is done by, with, and through many people. Moreover, teams and organizations or countries can demonstrate leadership as entities, compounding and reinforcing the actions of individuals or other groups. Leadership is a team sport.
Fourth, most often it is context that determines the nature of leadership that is required. Effective Leadership for an army unit will look different than for a university department or a church choir. Leadership on the Supreme Court is different than leadership in Congress. Leadership during a moment of crisis is different from the leadership required during a period of triumph or stagnation, and certainly leading a group with shared values requires different skills than leading a highly diverse or polarized community. When we talk about leadership, we mix together different ideas and facets of behavior—for example, taking initiative, developing or articulating a vision, building group identity, motivating cooperation or sacrifice, resolving conflicts, managing operations, responding to crises, facilitating healing, and more. But we should really ask: what does a particular context and constituency require? Discerning, developing, and delivering the best available answer to that question, jointly with others, seems to be the essence of leadership. The qualities of awareness, clarity, emotional balance, focused attention, resilience, and community – the qualities enhanced through contemplation as we have discussed – are extremely valuable.
Now, obviously, there are specific skill sets that are helpful to people choosing to exercise leadership for their communities: communication, negotiation, problem solving and analysis, design, strategy, conflict management, among others. And a particular context will require certain substantive expertise, systems understanding, or pattern recognition. My hypothesis is that learning all of this, which we expect from students at Batten, is enhanced with contemplative practice.
We can take Mandela and Tubman as models to work towards because so many of us with leadership roles today seem paralyzed in comparison, by fear of what others might think, by concerns for our own safety, or by the costs of uncertainty in a world deemed volatile, complex, and ambiguous.
As an adult, I started taking piano lessons. I would practice scales and arpeggios and techniques, not because these exercises themselves were intended as performance music, but rather because they were helpful in enhancing the ease and quality of the music I wanted to play. Similarly, our work at the Batten School teaches many of the core techniques and skills of leadership and public policy that will be broadly applicable. Contemplative practices promise to enhance student learning of these skills and their ability to apply them appropriately in specific leadership contexts as required.
JCS: Yes. In a similar way, I think through what we call contemplative fluency. There are certain kinds of scales, bars, and fundamentals you’ve learned, and once you know how to play them, in the same way, in contemplative training, then you develop fluency where you know when to apply what and how and to what degree and in what circumstance.
One of the things that you mentioned which I want to circle back to is the idea of context and how important it is for leaders to think about themselves in context. In particular I’ve been thinking about contemplation as a skill set of contextualizing oneself. As a way to think about how oneself is within any given context, a kind of reflexivity of oneself embedded in a context of worlds that are social, ecological, political, and so on. I’m wondering if that makes sense to you and if you have thoughts on the contextualizing process as a contemplative praxis.
IHS: Famed social psychologist Kurt Lewin taught that behavior is a function of people and the environment. To really understand what’s happening, we must look at a person and the context in which they find themselves, the relationships, their environment, the constraints they face, the other experiences they’ve had in their lives. We are not automatons who just float out there. We exist in relational context with other people and with the wider natural and constructed world. This is true for both a person choosing to exercise leadership and also for the community where they hope to lead.
Many contemplative practices remind us to come back again and again to consciousness of where we are, and to see where we are more clearly. It’s easy to drift off in delusion or fantasy, and our practice is often to deepen our understanding of this here and this now. We have many different filters that make it hard for us to see reality, and I’m not sure we ever see it perfectly, but we can practice trying to see it more clearly—minute by minute, moment by moment, to just have a clearer, more objective, less filtered, perspective on this moment, this breath, this sensation, this point in time, and the flow of this mysterious river of life that we all must learn to navigate together.
As a quick side note, an interesting area for further research would relate to our new forms of contextual communities, namely our digital worlds, social media communities, and digitally-dominant relationships. Increasingly, leaders will have to be aware of how their digital ecosystem and artificially intelligent agents are affecting them and others, and how that may change the demands, risks, burdens, and opportunities for leadership.
JCS: The idea of humility comes to mind when you’re speaking, like, wow: What is it to know something you don’t know? To be in a receptive stance? And it seems like, as a leader, to be in a position where you can receive new knowledge, where you can be in a position to generate new knowledge, and create conditions for the generation of new knowledge, is also something that I think shares a lot with the kind of contemplative way of thinking and living in the world as well, right? What is it to create the conditions for new knowledge to emerge, for new collectives?
IHS: People in leadership positions—or companies or countries, for that matter—who lose the capacity to create and critically evaluate new knowledge are unlikely to survive. Sure, they may have a period of success, but it’s rarely sustainable. Do we think it’s possible to cultivate that regenerative capacity for knowledge and understanding? Taking the long, planetary view, can we keep alive the curiosity, the humility, the hunger to keep questioning our assumptions, our data, our goals, and our blind spots?
Curiosity and not-knowing are such an important part of leadership education.
There was a wonderful Zen teacher, Bernie Glassman, who founded the Zen Peacemakers Order, which identifies three tenets for life and action. The three tenets are: not knowing, bearing witness, and loving action. Approach every situation with an attitude of not-knowing, Bernie might say. Set aside preconceived answers and allow yourself to marinate in the uncertainty and questioning. With that orientation, commit to bearing witness. Be a student, pay attention, listen carefully, and seek to learn. Finally, consider how you might be of service through loving action. This is a simple and elegant summary of a great deal of contemplative practice from my experience. And I think knowledge and action inspired from this foundation will reduce a lot of suffering and unleash a lot of creativity and healing in the world. That’s why curiosity and not-knowing are such an important part of leadership education.
JCS: I love that sequence, too: not knowing, bearing witness, loving action. And that they feed into each other.
IHS: I find it helpful almost every day. And contemplative practice provides a useful foundation for ethical considerations, and for understanding our interconnectedness with others and the responsibilities we share in furthering a healthy, functioning community. I’m currently studying the Zen ethical precepts, and our class critically considers each of the ten precepts using different contemplative approaches and intellectual perspectives. For example, one of the precepts is “non-killing,” another is “non-stealing.” These are not unfamiliar as ethical guidelines. But we contemplate intensely on these precepts, one at a time, to consider the ways that we are, in our lives now, part of killing or stealing. For example, how might we be stealing from others by wanting to speak first, or showing up late to a meeting, or eating beyond the point of hunger, or even using up nonrenewable natural resources? How is greed operating in our lives? And if it’s not greed vis-à-vis another person, what about greed vis-à-vis future generations that may have different opportunities because of our choices today. Our practice is to let these ethical questions penetrate our daily awareness and decision making. In theory at least, this practice would contribute to less greedy, more generous behavior while also enabling leadership to develop organizations and societies based on these values. What do we have to lose?
JCS: Well, that’s a great segue for my next question, which is: What do contemplative leaders of the future look like? Or to put it a slightly different way: What would contemplation at the intersection of leadership look like in the future?
IHS: It’s amazing how far aspects of contemplative practice have worked themselves into mainstream institutions and publications. And there are multitudes of training programs offered on “conscious leadership,” “mindful leadership,” and related topics. Several UVA classes have incorporated contemplative experiences. Even the US military for a while adopted certain meditation practices, I am told. I am optimistic about these developments, as they are likely to have positive results for the people who engage and others.
But I also want us to be a little bit careful. Contemplative practices are generally slow. They are not quick fixes or silver bullets. From my own experience, there are no magic elixirs or any get rich quick results from this work.
JCS: Or get enlightened quick . . .
IHS: Right. Not in my experience. There are stories of Zen students who find enlightenment based on a slap to the face or an a-ha moment with a teacher. But my beginner’s experience so far, though dating back almost four decades to my first visualization meditation practices, is that this work is slow, more akin to learning piano, and perhaps across lifetimes, in some points of view. Building the muscle memory and habits of awareness and discernment takes time, and we should be humble and keep an open mind as we experiment with contemplation practices. That said, it’s a positive development that more people are getting exposed. It wasn’t that long ago that one would have faced negative social pressure if not career consequences for speaking in the workplace about contemplative practice beyond Christian prayer. And now contemplation in many places would be a neutral or positive signal for career advancement.
I hope that more people will benefit from contemplative practices and that the quality of leadership—and the resilience, presence, and clarity of leaders—will rise as a result. Ultimately, leadership, just like contemplation, is a practice to be developed with deliberate effort over time. The more conscious awareness and intention we bring to the difficult and often dangerous work of leadership in uncertain times the better.
In addition, one of the things we haven’t talked much about today is the social and group aspect of contemplative practice. While much of the contemplative work being in one’s mind is solitary, there is an important emphasis across many contemplative and faith traditions on community, on sharing, on conversation, and collective service. I think this is something to emphasize for future leaders, especially at a moment of social fragmentation and high levels of loneliness. Our future is a shared future. Our leadership is a collective challenge. Our connectedness, or disconnectedness, may very well determine our ability to coexist or even flourish on this glorious yet fragile planet.
Ultimately, leadership, just like contemplation, is a practice to be developed with deliberate effort over time. The more conscious awareness and intention we bring to the difficult and often dangerous work of leadership in uncertain times the better.
If I may, I’d love to share the way I and many others conclude, or sometimes start, meditation sessions, which is to wish that all beings everywhere (including all readers of this conversation) be happy, be healthy, be at ease and free of suffering. And finally, to wish or even vow that our contemplative practice (like our leadership practice) is for the benefit of others and a world at peace.
JCS: Well, I appreciate all of this Ian. It’s been a very enriching conversation. Thank you.
IHS: Thank you. Great to be with you.
