The Director of Global Mindfulness Practice for the Germany-based technology giant, SAP, Peter Bostelmann is passionate about bringing mindfulness training and emotional intelligence to the tech industry. Mindfulness training brings a myriad benefits, he says, from increased health and social skills, to heightened creativity and problem solving. Peter discusses with GlobalLeadership.TV host, Walter Link, how mindfulness is supporting the global world of technology, and other industries.
Walter Link: You work for a technology company. For you change is constant, innovation is a constant need and you work also with companies around the world that have many different cultures, many different ways of doing things. What would you say is the benefit for your capacity to serve your clients in these multiple ways?
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Peter Bostelmann: If you look at culture, culture is a set of individual behaviors, so if you change each individual, we change also the culture of individuals towards higher awareness, towards higher creativity, towards better handling of themselves, and handling themselves and their peers, the people they manage, people they report to in difficult situations. It is increasing social skills, and I believe that this type of training, this type of an increased consciousness, will serve the company to access more of the human potential of our employees. It will be good for the people and it will be good for the company.
If you change each individual, we change also the culture of individuals towards higher awareness, towards higher creativity, towards better handling of themselves.
Walter Link: As you and I have discussed many times, it’s a very rapidly developing global movement that’s now underway and that’s significantly changing the way we go about the development of individuals and of culture inside organizations. What do you see about this wider movement and what do you feel is the potential that could grow out of that?
Peter Bostelmann: That’s a great question. I see in my personal perception, maybe because I am becoming more visible in this work that I am doing with SAP, that the demand is increasing. But when I talk to our senior leaders or to the senior leaders I just mentioned in this industrial company, I hear often that people say a few years ago, it would have been unimaginable to talk about mindfulness in this corporate setting. So there is an openness happening.
I think what happens is that people notice that this world is becoming more and more fast turning, the demands are becoming higher. We have to do more and more with less and less people in this globalization in many companies, so people are looking more for something that helps then to handle themselves, to handle the stress but also to handle their sanity, to handle the way, yeah, the psychological health I would say.
Mindfulness is a mental training practice which helps them to be more efficient and be more powerful in what they are doing.
And of course for senior leaders it can be a very lonesome position, it’s a stressful position and I think what happens is for many of them they learn, Oh! – and this is what I am very passionate to work on – to educate them this is nothing spiritual, this is no ‘hippy bulls**t,’ but this is a mental training practice which helps them to be more efficient and be more powerful in what they are doing.
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