The Mind of the Leader: How to Lead Yourself, Your People, and Your Organization for Extraordinary Results

“Leadership today is about unlearning management and relearning being human.”

Rasmus Hougaard, The Mind of the Leader: How to Lead Yourself, Your People, and Your Organization for Extraordinary Results

The Mind of the Leader:

How to Lead Yourself, Your People, and Your Organization for Extraordinary Results

Bibliographic information

About the Author:

This book has been written as a true team effort, it’s a product of the collective work of many of our great colleagues in potential project. Ideally all of them would be on the cover of the book but it would get a little crowded. ^[1]

Rasmus Hougaard is the Founder and Managing Director of Potential Project, the global leading provider of leadership and organizational effectiveness solutions based on training the mind. Rasmus has practiced and taught mindfulness for more than two decades. ^[2]

Jacqueline Carter is an International Partner and North American Director for Potential Project. She has over twenty years of experience working with organizations around the globe to enhance effectiveness and improve performance. Together, they are the authors of One Second Ahead: Enhance Your Performance at Work with Mindfulness.^[3]

Summary of content

This book is giving attentions to the psychological aspect of leadership & its pillars, it’s a well-written book for any leaders of all levels to enhance their leadership abilities through improved behavior. It emphasis on three mental qualities as a foundational bricks  for leadership, it’s called The MSC leadership. The M “Mindfulness”, the S “Selfness” & the C “Compassion”…together these elements are called as a foundational skills for MSC leadership.

Basically its talking about  how to take care of the mind & how it can make us more effective as leaders. It provided great insights and practical applications on how one can develop mindfulness, selflessness, and compassion as a leader.

The authors point out the importance of a leader to increase both sympathy & empathy along with their Social power  for a better understanding towards  the organization and improve the inside/outside communication.

The above approach to leadership is encouraging people to acquire some guidelines & ideologies starting from managing own-self  and then moving to other people. In other meaning it’s a developed system to help leaders of all kinds to be a truly leaders by addressing their own needs first, then those of their people, and finally the culture of their organization.  

The book mainly  is divided into two main parts

• Understand and lead yourself
• Understand and lead your people.

Both parts are talking mainly about learning and applying techniques in mindfulness and then selflessness and finally compassion, the methodology obtained intends to become a “lead-by-example” concept that builds effective leadership skills through understanding people. What the book does is assess how these three character qualities can be used for self-improvement, leadership among co-workers and institutional leadership.

The authors also stress the importance of reflecting deeply on your personal values as a way of helping driving people decisions so that they can feel happier about things in their life. “In an extensive longitudinal experiment, researchers found that doing acts of kindness for others consistently makes people happier than focusing on themselves.”  - the authors said- Its focusing in the maximization of the human capital and resourceful and forgetting the human boundaries . Its sending a message… “You have the ability to choose to do things differently & to have influence positively on people”  and that requires establishing positive habits or practices of how to blow off steam, reducing distraction and developing a greater sense of self-awareness.

Hougaard and Carter provides ironic examples of business leaders and individual experiences along  with really excellent and useful exercises. Their insights are based on their many years of experience with leaders of many & many well-known companies in practicing mindfulness. Those stories & examples are aiming to emphasis on one principle, how to develop this mindful leadership attitude.