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I have been practicing mindfulness and trained in several contemplative traditions for decades. As a coach, my work is both systemic, and grounded in mindfulness and self-regulation. I say this not to establish authority but to be clear about where this critique is coming — from deep inside the practice, not from outside it.
Mindfulness has genuine and extraordinary value. What concerns me is not that it has found its way into leadership development. It is how it has been packaged when it got there.
What mindfulness actually is
At its most basic, mindfulness means paying attention to what is happening in the present moment in a curious and open way. In that sense it is a universal human capacity — not a belief system and not a leadership methodology. It is a way of attending.
Within the mindfulness community, however, there is a longstanding and unresolved debate about what the practice actually entails. One view holds that mindfulness refers to bare attention — a non-reactive, non-judgmental quality of awareness that simply notices what is happening without prescribing what to do about it. The other view holds that mindfulness includes applied ethics — that genuine practice involves not just attending but acting in accordance with a particular set of values that constitute a wholesome state of mind.
This is not an academic distinction. How you answer it has significant consequences for what "mindful leadership" means — and for how honest the claims made in its name actually are.
The commercial temptation
The mindfulness-as-bare-attention view presents a marketing problem for the leadership development industry. If mindfulness simply means paying attention clearly and non-reactively, it tells you what is happening but not what to do about it. A manager who is fully present to their frustration with an underperforming direct report, still has to decide — based on their values, judgment, and sense of responsibility — how to respond. Mindfulness informs that decision. It does not make it.
This makes it genuinely difficult to claim that mindfulness practice reliably produces better leaders. A person can be highly skilled at paying attention and still hold values or make decisions that most people would consider poor leadership. Mindfulness, on this view, is necessary but not sufficient.
The mindfulness-as-applied-ethics view solves this problem — but at a cost. By defining mindfulness to include a specific ethical and behavioral orientation, it becomes possible to argue that practicing mindfulness naturally develops the values and behaviors associated with good leadership. The argument runs: good leaders have these values and behaviors; mindfulness develops these values and behaviors; therefore mindfulness makes you a better leader.
The problem is that the conclusion was built into the premise. The values and behaviors were selected because they fit the desired leadership model, not because mindfulness inherently produces them. It was a commercial and ideological choice dressed up as a natural consequence of practice.
Who decides which ethics and behaviors?
This is the question the mindful leadership industry rarely asks openly — and it is the most important one.
In the contemplative traditions where mindfulness originates, the relationship between attention, ethics, and behavior is philosophically grounded in a deep and complex understanding of the nature of mind, self, and reality. The ethical framework is not arbitrary — it emerges from a specific ontological perspective that has been debated, refined, and transmitted across centuries.
The leadership development industry is not drawing on that complexity. It is selecting values that align with contemporary organizational ideals — authenticity, compassion, psychological safety, servant leadership — and bundling them into the definition of mindfulness in ways that serve commercial purposes.
It is important to distinguish this from the common "McMindfulness critique". My observation is not that the mindfulness being taught to leaders is watered-down and ineffective (although that is also a legitimate question not addressed in this article); it is that it has been conveniently packaged as a values-delivery system for a particular vision of leadership. This creates a unique vulnerability: it becomes nearly impossible to question the underlying leadership model without appearing to attack mindfulness itself.
What mindfulness can genuinely offer leaders
None of this diminishes what mindfulness practice actually does. Practiced seriously and honestly, it develops the capacity to notice what is happening — in the environment, in the people around you, and in yourself — with greater clarity and less reactive distortion. That is genuinely valuable for anyone in a leadership role.
It means a leader is more likely to notice when they are being driven by fear rather than judgment, when they are avoiding a difficult conversation rather than choosing the right moment for it, when their certainty about a situation is closing them off to information that would change their view. These are real and significant capacities.
But they are not the same as having the right values and behaviors. And they do not guarantee good leadership. What they do is create better conditions for the reflection, self-awareness, and honest inquiry that good leadership requires.
Mindfulness is a powerful practice. It deserves to be represented accurately — which means resisting the temptation to over-claim what it produces, and remaining genuinely open to the questions it raises rather than using it to foreclose them.
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