Improving Team Wellness Through Collective Mindfulness

How mindful is your team? The Harvard Business Review articles “Why Your Team Should Practice Collective Mindfulness” and “What Mindfulness Can Do For A Team” provide a helpful listing of practices to help teams function better and to be more well. Let’s start with a definition.

Team Mindfulness: “Team mindfulness, however, is distinct from individual mindfulness in that it applies to the group as a whole, and to the interaction between its members, as opposed to employees’ individual thought patterns. In other words, it’s the collective awareness of what a team is experiencing at a given moment, without the prejudgements that come at the individual level.”

Team Mindful Practices: Here are a few highlights about what makes up team mindfulness. I added a few character strengths (with teamwork applying to all) that can support each aspect of team mindfulness in practice.

• “Allowing is the wisdom to accept present-moment reality and to approach any situation openly and compassionately. (fairness, forgiveness, honesty and many others)
• Inquiry is the capacity to be curious at three levels: about individual team members and their habits and preferences (including your own); about your team and its dynamics; and about the organizational and societal system around you. (curiosity, humility, social intelligence)
• Meta-awareness is the capacity to observe and describe experiences from an individual, team, and system-wide perspective rather being confined solely within any individual’s personal experiences. Not an either/or — it’s all of the above. You notice your own perspective and that of the team as a whole, all within some degree of awareness of the system as a whole. (appreciation for beauty and excellence, honesty, perspective)”

Photo by Josh Calabrese on Unsplash