The challenges of leading through the Covid-19 crisis have included not just remote staff members and customers but business coming to a standstill. Returning to the workplace has been fraught with restrictions, limitations and safety concerns. Leadership in the healthcare sector has been especially difficult, with pressures on already-limited resources, high infection-rates and death-rates, and increased need for total hygiene. One of our co-authors, experienced in the past as a leader of a large hospital and now advising international healthcare authorities, was facing another war zone. He had to listen to anyone with ideas of how to deal with the crisis; had considered unusual and new paths of action; had to act swiftly and with the conviction that any action was better than no action, with nearly everything based on improvisation, whilst surrounded by terrified patients and families and a lack of clarity from governments and the media.

This paper explores participant leader experiences of mindfulness at the workplace and presents an inductive model that highlights the potential of the mindful individuals to transform their work world in the domains of productivity, relationality and power. The model highlights the resources and capacities built through practice and considers capacities developed as antidotes to the three Buddhist poisons of greed, hatred and delusion. Using a phenomenological approach and semi-structured interviews from 53 participant leaders working in a variety of organizational contexts, this paper explores how individuals trained in mindfulness applied and understood this capacity at work. Participant leaders had trained in one of the three different Mindfulness-Based Interventions (MBIs): Executive MBA (EMBA) Mindful Leadership Program, Mindfulness Teacher Training, and an eight-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program. The research distinguishes some key individual meta-capacities (awareness of the wandering mind, embodiment, equanimity and kindness) and individual capacities (resilience, sense of self, multiple perspectives and possibility) that develop. These individual capacities enhanced participant leaders' abilities to work with difficult emotions. The individual changes allowed for new behaviors and experiences in the areas of productivity, power and relationality.

Facilitating change within established, successful and traditional organizations is no easy matter to achieve, yet it is one of the essential skills every senior executive should have. Increasing competition, pressures on budgets, changes in key personnel, changing wider societal conditions, etc. are likely to demand that a senior executive facilitate change to the status quo in their organization. Sometimes additional support is necessary, and external specialists and consultants may be needed to help speed up the processes of change as in the case outlined in this paper. Global Commodities Inc. (GCI) was the dominant producer in a global market, but had become complacent and was coming under threat from competitor activity. The Managing Director had been unable to jolt the organization into action and invited a change management consultancy to work collaboratively in facilitating an organizational review.