About a month ago, my son, Cisco, completed his first trip around the sun outside of the womb.

In the picture above you can see him giving me a big, wet, sloppy kiss as part of the celebration.

Although his technique is not as refined as that of most adults, his timing is often uncanny.

For example, when he was around six months old, he had just started giving kisses to my wife and me.  But we had to work to get them.  We had to lay our heads in his lap, which allowed him to just lean forward and give us a kiss on the cheek.

About a month after he started giving kisses, my mother was passing through town on the way back from visiting her sister as she was dying.  This was the last living member of my mom’s immediate family.

Of course, my mom was quite sad as she travelled to our house, and was sad when she arrived.

She had previously only been around Cisco for a few days of his life, spread out between periods of a couple months, so she was essentially a stranger when she arrived at our house that day.

I mention this because Cisco had never given a kiss to anyone other than my wife and me at this point.  He had not even kissed the nanny who spent 25 hours per week with him for months.

About 15 minutes after my mom arrived, I had laid Cisco down on our bed to put a new shirt him.  My mom came in the room and leaned down toward him.  He immediately reached out with both of his arms to grab my mom’s face.

At first, she hesitated.  I said, “Mom, I think he wants to give you a kiss.”

She leaned a bit closer.  Cisco grabbed her face with authority and pulled her close.  He gave her a big, wet kiss and held her there for a good four or five seconds.

My mom was glowing.  In seconds, Cisco had transformed her sadness to joy.

It seemed quite clear that he felt her sadness and knew exactly what to do to help.

Cisco offers us a lovely reminder that when we slow down a bit and are fully present with the people around us, we become much more sensitive to what they might need to flourish.

This is the most important work of a leader – to help people flourish.

Cisco also reminds us that it doesn’t take a huge effort to help another person transform an unpleasant emotion.  Just presence, and a small gesture is often more than enough.

As we near Christmas, let’s follow Cisco’s lead.

Let’s slow down a bit, be present with our team members, family members, and friends, and let’s not hesitate to offer even the most simple gestures of kindness.

This article originally appeared on The Huffington Post.

1. It helps us save time by only spending energy on the most important issue
2. It helps the team member to focus on what she or he can do, and what she or he really needs to affect change, instead of placing blame on others or making excuses
3. A 1997 study published in the Journal of Educational Psychology suggests that by simply adding the word you to a question we help people find a more accurate answer in less time

“In fact, it is a constitutive characteristic of being human that it always points, and is directed, to something other than itself.” – Viktor Frankl

The key to finding happiness at work may not have anything to do with you at all.

It was a bitter northern Colorado winter day last December. The kind of day when college students hopefully wait for the magical e-mail letting them know class is cancelled. It never came on this day.

The campus was a barren bright white desert as windswept snow swirled across an almost-empty parking lot. I was on campus early for a meeting and as I was walking on an uncleared sidewalk, I saw one of the campus facilities workers on the opposite sidewalk get off his adapted backhoe and start manually and meticulously clearing a portion of the concrete. He was diligently making sure that from edge-to-edge, the sidewalk was completely clear.

As we made eye contact, he stopped what he was doing and silently trudged over to a piece of sidewalk about 10 feet in front of me, and upon noticing me, vigorously restarted his tried method of clearing the sidewalk.

As I passed, I said, “Thanks.”

He looked up and said, “How’s it going today?”

“Okay,” I said, “Ready for the snow to be over! You?”

“As long as I can keep these sidewalks clear for the students, I am a happy man!” he said, laughing hard to himself.

There was no supervisor there to motivate him. There was no one even there (except me) to see and reward him for a job well done. Pay and benefits in that type of job aren’t the greatest. The task itself wasn’t especially designed to be motivating.

So, then, what was motivating him? Maybe a better question is: What was pulling him through the apparent drudgery of the work in the unforgiving weather?

The object of his behavior was not himself, not his paycheck, not some reward or recognition. It seemed to be something more. His behaviors and attitudes seemed oriented toward something more powerful than the usual motivation suspects.

The purpose of a university, the students – as he said himself – was the object inspiring his exceptional work.

He was working to deliver the higher organizational purpose and not for himself.

It is this space between, the invisible leader, between him and the purpose that modern organizations and their leaders need to be especially concerned with. This space, this energy, is characterized in the psychological literature as self-transcendence.

Why should we care?

If you are in your office right now, chances are that that at least one of the people in the offices on either side of you dislikes their job.

With 70 percent of Americans disengaged in their work and managers and leaders theorizing how to motivate a purpose-oriented millennial workforce, commitment and motivation bestsellers are in vogue.

The problem is that most of these books focus on things we can “do” to push employees and not the things we believe in that pull employees toward something greater that themselves.

We try to keep employees happy, not recognizing that happiness and well-being themselves are not sustainable objects of behavior, rather, as Maslow and Frankl hypothesized, these are the side-effects of pursuing a meaning or calling greater than oneself.

Studies back this up. Psychologists have found that when over 435 college students were surveyed, 68% of them indicated that a spiritual calling and sense of higher purpose at work was important to them. When over 370 employees were surveyed, 62% percent of them indicated that a connection to a higher purpose was a critical aspect of their work.

This is precisely why focusing on the psychological and spiritual notion of self-transcendence to a higher organizational purpose is critical in the modern workplace.

Self-Transcendence Pulls, Motivation Pushes

“It is one of the immediate data of life experience that man is pushed by drives but pulled by meaning.” – Viktor E. Frankl

There is a reason we have tow-trucks and not push-trucks. Basic physics tells us that, “…when you push there is one component of force that adds to the weight of the body and hence there is more friction. When you pull the vertical component of force is against the weight of body and hence there is less overall friction. So it is easy to pull than push an object.”

This physics lesson provides an example of why most motivation tactics in our organizations ultimately fail or are short-lived. We are trying to push people by offering rewards, big salaries, and flashy perks. This is hard and expensive pushing! And, it almost always is short-lived.

Self-transcendence, however, pulls.

Self-transcendence can best and most simply be defined as the phenomenon that occurs when one’s behaviors are oriented toward an object outside of oneself. In the workplace, studies have shown that one of the most powerful objects of this behavior is a higher organizational purpose that serves society and others beyond the bounds of the organization.

In their book, Make Your Job a Calling, psychology professors Bryan Dik and Ryan Duffy found that when employees have a calling with a “transcendent summons” (that is, an outside object inspiring behaviors) “…they are more committed to their jobs and organizations, more intrinsically motivated and engaged, and more satisfied with their jobs.”

By creating and fostering organizational cultures that are oriented toward a compelling global purpose, thereby inspiring a self-transcendence to this purpose, we can pull employees toward a inspiring higher organizational purpose.

Because a higher organizational purpose and meaning is never able to be completely satisfied because of its global nature, the pull will always be there.

That is why in organizations with a deeply held and compelling higher organizational purpose, there is a constant striving to deliver the purpose.

That is why, I believe, in the bitter cold, that worker was meticulously clearing the sidewalk.

In this striving to deliver a purpose, happiness and satisfaction are then allowed to ensue – attitudes the American workforce could surely use right now.

This is a guest post by my friend Zach Mercurio.  Zach is a speaker, trainer, and writer who believes that what you do in your life and work will only ever be as good as why you do it. He has found that when people believe they matter, know why, and deliver that why consistently, organizations, teams, and their customers are happier, healthier and more inspired. www.ZachMercurio.com Blog: www.PurposeSpeaks.com

Click Here to Watch the Video Trailer (45 seconds)

PLEASE NOTE THAT WE’VE FILLED UP OUR TEAM AS OF 9 DECEMBER 2015 AND ARE NO LONGER ACCEPTING NEW LAUNCH TEAM MEMBERS.

Would you like a free copy of my new book, The Mindfulness Edge?

We’re giving away 200 copies to our special Launch Team.

Below, you’ll find an overview of the book, and instructions on how you can receive a free copy and be part our Launch Team.

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How to Receive A Free Copy of The Mindfulness Edge

To receive a free copy of The Mindfulness Edge, all we ask is that you do the following:

1)  Help us spread the word the week of 29 February – 4 March, 2016 by sharing your unique link to our book launch promotion via social media and e-mail (click this link to see how it will work).

You would skip right to Page 3 of the promotion and be considered to have purchased the book in the promotion, so you will be eligible for all of the $100s of rewards for referring friends without having to actually buy the book.

2)  Sometime in March, 2016, we ask that you post an honest review of the book on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Goodreads.

3) If you apply and are accepted to be part of the “Advance Copy Team” on the form below (the link is in #4), we ask that you read the advance copy prior to 4 March, 2016 and post a review on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Goodreads the week 7-11 March, 2016.

PLEASE NOTE THAT WE’VE FILLED UP OUR TEAM AS OF 9 DECEMBER 2015 AND ARE NO LONGER ACCEPTING NEW LAUNCH TEAM MEMBERS.

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Overview of:

The Mindfulness Edge: How to Rewire Your Brain for Leadership and Personal Excellence Without Adding to Your Schedule

There is a simple practice that can improve nearly every component of leadership and personal excellence and it doesn’t require adding anything to your busy schedule. In The Mindfulness Edge, you’ll discover how a subtle inner shift, called mindfulness, can transform the things you already do every day into opportunities to change your brain in ways that improve both the “hard skills” and “soft skills” of leadership.  A large body of research in neuroscience suggests that with mindfulness training, you can actually “rewire” your brain for leadership and personal excellence, while also becoming happier.

In this book, you’ll learn how mindfulness training helps you:

• Quickly improve business decisions
• Become more innovative
• Develop the emotional intelligence skills essential for creating and sustaining a winning team culture
• Realize the extraordinary leadership presence that inspires greatness in others
• Live a happier, more meaningful life

Advance Praise for The Mindfulness Edge

“This is an extraordinary book!  The Mindfulness Edge will help you take advantage of your greatest strategic asset: your mind.  This book offers a practical path to mastering your mind – and changing your brain in ways essential for effective leadership – with one simple habit.  Develop this habit and you will not only be more successful both professionally and personally, you’ll be more fulfilled as well.”

Skip Prichard – President & CEO, OCLC, Leadership Insights blogger at skipprichard.com

“I thoroughly enjoyed this valuable book.  Matt Tenney and Tim Gard show quite clearly how mindfulness can transform everyday activities into opportunities to change our brains in ways that improve essential leadership skills.  They also offer a practical, enjoyable path to consistently being the leaders we aspire to be.”

Bob Hottman – CEO, EKS&H

“This is a game-changing book. Based on cutting-edge research and illuminated by real-world examples and practical guidance, The Mindfulness Edge can take your business acumen, leadership skills, and personal growth to a higher level.  I have read roughly 2,000 business books and this one is now in my top 10.”

John Spence – Named one of the top 500 leadership development experts in the world by HR.com

“I found this book very insightful. It serves as a practical training manual for improving self-awareness, and shows how self-awareness impacts nearly every aspect of leadership.  This book will not only help you to be a better leader, it will also help you to enjoy the journey.”

Gregory A. Serrao – Executive Chairman, American Dental Partners, Inc

“In The Mindfulness Edge, Matt Tenney and Tim Gard present – in an engaging and inspiring way – a practical method of ‘strength training’ for the most important ‘muscle’ in your body: your brain. This insightful book is a game plan on how to apply mindfulness training to create the self-awareness and mental agility needed for impactful leadership. This is a must-read for any leader looking to raise the bar of excellence, while also becoming happier!”

Chris Thoen – Sr.  VP, Global Head Flavour Science + Technology, Givaudan Flavours Corp.

“I truly enjoyed this book!  The applications and narrative herein apply not only to leadership but also to life.  With readable and to-the-point information on mindfulness backed by rigorous neuroscience, I strongly recommend The Mindfulness Edge to people new to the practice and to people with a long-standing interest.”

Tara Swart, M.D., Ph.D., CEO, The Unlimited Mind, Senior Lecturer, MIT Sloan, and Author of Neuroscience for Leadership

“I recommend The Mindfulness Edge to leaders of all types.  The book offers a path to self-mastery through mindfulness and guidance for applying that self-mastery to enhance the effectiveness of your employees and company, thereby more positively impacting your clients.  The authors explain the practice in great detail, inviting reflection along the way, and show how mindfulness training can be easily integrated into daily routines with a measurable impact on your home, social, and business worlds.”

Rick Staab – CEO, InterMed

“If you want one book that dives deeply and eloquently into one of the single best ingredients for a healthy and effective brain, The Mindfulness Edge is it. Matt Tenney and Tim Gard pair up to give spot-on insights that will unleash some awesome things already hanging out in your head. Bathe your brain in this book and get ready to find a whole new you.”

Scott G. Halford — Executive Educator, National Hall of Fame Speaker, and author of Activate Your Brain

 “The brilliance of The Mindfulness Edge is that it deviates so significantly from the status quo.  Rather than merely add to the cacophonous volume of information and advice that overcrowds our mental faculties, this book offers practical, achievable guidance on how to skillfully embrace the chaos and complexity of today’s business environment so that we can uncover truly innovative solutions on our own.”

Martin Sirk – CEO, International Congress and Convention Association

“As the business and investment worlds tentatively shift their focus away from short-term transactions towards longer-term relationships, we need excellent leaders to strengthen this trend: Leaders with the skills to align our corporations and institutions with the needs of society, the economy, and the environment. The Mindfulness Edge is a timely and practical guide for those aspiring to this task.”

Colin Melvin – CEO, Hermes EOS

“The Mindfulness Edge offers a fresh and highly-practical approach to mastering mindfulness and creating inspiring, mindful workplaces.”

Michael Carroll – Author of The Mindful Leader

“Matt Tenny and Tim Gard haven written the first, really practical, neuroscience-based guide for enhancing leadership performance through mindfulness. You can start rewiring your brain now!”

Wibo Koole – Director Centrum voor Mindfulness, Amsterdam, and bestselling author of Mindful Leadership: Effective Tools That Help You Focus and Succeed

On a recent flight to a speaking engagement, I had a wonderful conversation with a senior leader of a midsize company. As usually happens, we got on the topic of how serving and caring for team members results in a better bottom line over the long term. This leader, who we’ll call Jeff, was as passionate about the idea of servant leadership as I am.

I asked Jeff about some of the specific actions he has taken over the years to better serve his team members. Although he shared several great practices, the one that really struck me was a step he takes in the hiring process as it applies to people who would have to change locations.

He mentioned that after he and his team have narrowed the pool of potential hires to their top choice, the final interview is scheduled. If the candidate has a family, the company pays to fly the family in to town and put that family up for a few days to allow them to explore the new town.

The last phase of the final interview is a dinner with the candidate and his or her spouse. Jeff’s focus during this interview is to get the spouse to open up about how he or she feels about the move, the new position, and the new location. He mentioned one specific interview in which the wife of the candidate made it very clear that the new location would put a significant strain on the family.

Although the candidate was a great fit in every other way, Jeff decided not to offer him the position. He knew that the strain on the candidate’s family and on his marriage would eventually lead to a lot of unhappiness for him and his family, as well as to suboptimal performance at work, and might result in the new hire having to leave after a few years, which would be more costly for the company over the long term.

A question I often receive during interviews or after keynote speeches is, “How would you summarize what a servant leader does differently than other leaders, in one sentence?” I believe Jeff provided a perfect example of this with how he handled the situation above.

A servant leader places equal or greater emphasis on identifying and helping to meet the legitimate needs of team members as he or she does on bottom results.

Although the legitimate needs people have will differ a bit from person to person, below are a few examples of very legitimate needs that every high-performing team member has:

• The need to be happy
• The need to feel safe
• The need to feel that they belong
• The need to continuously grow both personally and professionally

By ensuring that these legitimate needs are met for team members, a servant leader also ensures that she or he sustains a high-performance culture that attracts and retains highly talented, highly engaged people who consistently deliver bottom-line results.

What are some of the ways you work to meet the above needs for your team members?

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You’re driving in to work, and get stuck in horrible traffic. You’re going to be late.

You pull into the office parking lot 10 minutes after your scheduled start time. But your anxiety starts to wane a bit when you notice that there’s actually an open parking spot right near the front door.

You smile as you drive quickly toward the spot. It’s a miracle that a spot so close could be open at this time.

Your smile disappears, though, when you notice the sign in front of the parking spot. The words read, “Reserved for the CEO.”

Has something like that ever happened to you or someone you know?

Although the phenomenon of parking spots being reserved for executives seems to be pretty rare these days, we should look very closely at anything we do as leaders that could give the appearance that we are somehow elevated above team members on any type of pedestal.

The pedestals for leaders can come in many varieties. They can be very subtle, like simply failing to show a willingness to do what we ask team members to do.

The pedestals can also be much more obvious, like perks, or even pay.

There seems to be an inverse correlation between elevating oneself above team members and leadership effectiveness.

For instance, in an interesting article on CBSNews.com it was noted that the median annual compensation for CEOs of the public companies in the Customer Service Hall of Fame was a little over $3 million, while the median annual compensation for CEOs of companies in the Customer Service Hall of Shame was a whopping $14.9 million. This data suggests that there may be a correlation between selfish senior leaders and poor customer service.*

Of course, there is likely a correlation between being selfish as a leader and poor performance in most, if not all, areas of leadership. A leader who puts himself before his team members is going to have an incredibly difficult time creating and sustaining a highly-engaged, high-performance team.

This is why it is so critical that we look for and remove as many of the little ways we put ourselves on pedestals as leaders as possible. These are signs of selfishness. They are signs of inevitable failure.

A leader who can relate to team members, makes the effort to share in their struggles, and shows a willingness to do anything she asks her team members to do is likely going to be much more effective by every metric.  She knows that if anyone should be placed on a pedestal, it should be the team members who go above and beyond to do great things.

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Have you ever heard someone say, “I’m not an optimist, I’m a realist,”? Do you think those two things are mutually exclusive?

I certainly don’t. And I think it’s absolutely essential for leaders to be a perfect combination of both. Healthy optimism begins with being realistic about the current state of affairs.

One of the key jobs of leadership is to create – or co-create with team members – a compelling, optimistic vision of a future that is a significant improvement of the current situation. In many ways, there can be great advantages to creating a vision so optimistic that it doesn’t even seem possible. This can inspire team members to accomplish something truly great, and can often result in actually achieving what hadn’t seemed possible when the journey began.

One of example of this was the vision John F. Kennedy’s proclaimed to the nation at a Joint Session of Congress on 25 May, 1961, when he announced the goal of landing a man on the moon by the end of the decade. At the time, NASA had essentially no idea how they could possibly put a man on the moon, nor any of the technology that would eventually be used to do it. The US had lagged behind the Soviet Union in even getting a man into space.

But the vision was so compelling to so many people. As a result, the goal was achieved when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon on 20 July, 1969.

Before we can chart a course for such a compelling vision, though, we must be absolutely clear about our starting point. In an oversimplified example, let’s imagine that we’d like to get to Paris, France. However, we’re not sure if we’re starting in Cape Town, South Africa or Sao Paolo, Brazil.

It would be quite a challenge to chart a course to Paris in that case, wouldn’t it?

Similarly, if we don’t have highly realistic, accurate knowledge of the emotional climate of our team, our strengths and weaknesses and those of team members, or other key elements of executing a strategy, even the best strategy is at risk of failing.

We must be able to see our current situation clearly: not how we feel it is – which can be very biased – or how we hope it is, but how it actually is. We need to be brutally honest about where we’re at in order to have the best chance of successfully planning and executing on a plan to get where we want to go.

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