Carole Daniel, associate professor of Leadership and Change at SKEMA Business School, is intensifying her research into mindfulness and emphasising its growing importance in the business world.
What is your area of expertise, why did you choose it and what is its impact on society?
In 2016, I launched a research programme on mindfulness. The idea came from the implementation of a mindfulness training programme in the ADEO group. At the time, I had just completed a mindfulness training programme myself, and it was my trainer who put me in touch with the ADEO HR team, who wanted to back up their initiative with a research approach.
Mindfulness has ancient spiritual origins (particularly Buddhist), but it mostly garnered interest in the management sciences for the last twenty years. Mindfulness training programmes – the best known of which is the famous MBSR programme (Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction programme) – have indeed shown promise, with multiple benefits on both an individual and collective level.
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A 2014 study estimated that the US National Institute of Health had invested $100 million in mindfulness research (Harrington 2014). And many organisations have embarked on implementing mindfulness training for their managers and employees, such as Goldman Sachs, Ford Motor or Aetna. Some multinationals have even created their own programmes, such as Search Inside Yourself, which originated at Google (Chade-Meng, 2012), and which has spread to leadership development programmes at American Express or LinkedIn.
The benefits of mindfulness in leadership have also been explored by the Mindful Leadership Institute developed by Janice Marturano at General Mills, and mindfulness-based leadership development programmes are now being rolled out at Procter & Gamble, the U.S. Air Force and the World Economic Forum. Sports (e.g. the Bulls and Lakers basketball teams), and education have also seen its benefits: even the prestigious Harvard Business School has embraced it!
How do you transfer your expertise to a non-expert audience like your students at SKEMA?
I have been teaching leadership and change management for over 20 years, and I find the contributions of mindfulness in these two fields very relevant. So I now include the theme of mindful leadership in my courses, and I explain to my students the importance of this cognitive capacity to be – and to remain! – attentive to what unfolds in the present moment, whether it is external events (weak signals) or internal phenomena (stress, fear, frustration…). The students are very aware of the importance of well-being, meaningfulness at work, and respectful and constructive attitudes in the professional sphere, and are very receptive to anything that can promote these factors. For instance I supervised two Master theses that looked at the benefits of mindfulness in business, one of which was published on ThinkForward, our SKEMA Knowledge website. I have also been invited twice to present a Research Corner on “Mindfulness and Social Entrepreneurship” at the SKEMA Social Ventures Summit in 2021 and 2022.
What is your current research on, in what framework are you conducting it and what are the next steps?
My current research focuses on the contributions of mindfulness at the individual and interpersonal levels, with empirical studies focusing on topics such as addiction to work and technology (especially the smartphone) and leadership. On this last theme, I am working with the companies ADEO and BNP Paribas Asset Management, with whom we have 3-year research contracts. A third aspect of my current research is the relationship between mindfulness and responsible behaviour, with an article just published in Ecological Economics!
Is there an idea or a research angle that you would particularly like to pursue in the coming months/years at SKEMA?
The next step in my research programme will be to move to the collective level. We are working with an international team on the role of mindfulness in a military context in Norway. At the same time, we are going to start thinking about a research programme on the relationship between mindfulness and safety, in the context of nuclear power plants. These two research angles follow on from a literature review we published with a researcher from University College London (UCL) which identifies promising research avenues for the study of mindfulness in the project contexts.