Building a Mindful Organization: The Blueprint
Session Summary
A powerful session at the 2022 Mindful Leader Summit led by Marvin Riley and Dr. Susan Sweeney, discuss their roles as CEO and Chief Human Resources Officer at EnPro, a multibillion dollar publicly traded manufacturing company. The conversation focused on how leaders can transform themselves, their teams, and their institutions to create workplaces that nurture both people and performance.
Key Highlights
- Leadership sets the ceiling for transformation: Organizations cannot grow beyond the maturity of their leaders. Self-awareness, community building, and balancing profit with human flourishing are essential at every level.
- Mindfulness practices embed cultural change: Centering, check-ins, storytelling, and circle dialogue make mindfulness practical, shifting organizations from control to connection and learning.
- Love drives sustainable leadership: Fear limits potential, while love allows authenticity, diversity of thought, and creativity to thrive—fueling both human and business success.
Transformation at Three Levels
Riley and Sweeney emphasized that true change begins with individuals. Leaders must cultivate self-awareness and self-acceptance, since organizations cannot grow beyond their leaders’ maturity. Teams, meanwhile, must move from “they” to “we,” breaking out of surface-level politeness and building authentic community where people bring their whole selves. At the institutional level, organizations must balance financial goals with human flourishing, using hierarchy not for control but as a tool for transformation.
Practical Tools for Mindfulness
The speakers offered simple, practical ways to embed mindfulness into daily work. Brief centering practices help focus attention, while check-ins and check-outs build empathy and trust. Using “I” statements encourages authenticity, and practices like circles, storytelling, and literature-based dialogue dissolve hierarchy to foster genuine exchange. Even small gestures of appreciation—like gratitude rituals—help shift culture from transactional to relational, creating stronger connections across the organization.
Leading with Love, Not Fear
A central theme was the choice between fear and love in leadership. Fear suppresses creativity and authenticity, while love creates safety for risk-taking, sharing, and growth. Leaders must let go of ownership and allow ideas to evolve collectively. Diversity, too, is most powerful when organizations embrace varied experiences and perspectives, not just representation. By choosing love-driven leadership, Riley and Sweeney noted, companies see tangible results: safer workplaces, lower turnover, stronger diversity, and even higher profitability.
Final Thoughts
Riley and Sweeney’s session underscored that building mindful organizations requires aligned growth at every level—leaders, teams, and institutions. With simple practices and a mindset rooted in love rather than fear, organizations can move beyond short-term success to create spaces where people thrive and communities flourish.
This article is part of our Best of Summit series where we spotlight the most compelling sessions from our summit.
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