Developing as a leader: The power of mindful engagement

People learn to lead through experience, but even with similar experiences, people can learn different lessons, the wrong lessons, or nothing at all. It depends on how people approach experiences, what they do within them, and how they process them afterwards to maximize learning. Based on our research and consulting activities, we describe a process of mindful engagement with three broad steps: approaching an experience with a developmental mindset by setting specific goals for development and planning a variety of experiments to conduct within an experience; engaging in specific experiments, seeking feedback and managing emotions within the experience to maximize teaming; and committing to a process of structured reflection after the experience to extract and solidify specific lessons for leadership development. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]