Episode 64: Organizational Mindfulness: Making It A Natural Part Of Your Day With Peter Bostelmann
The concept of mindfulness is usually associated with individual practice that the term “organizational mindfulness” can come across as strange. It is a real method, though, and it effectively helps companies improve performance, relationships and dynamics within their teams. In 2019, Amy Vetter had the pleasure of interviewing Peter Bostelmann, Chief Mindfulness Officer at SAP Global Mindfulness Practice. They discussed how corporations can integrate mindfulness practices into their workday to cultivate an improved culture. Peter also shared his journey on how SAP began to implement these technology practices into the workplace to create greater engagement, human connection and kindness among their employees.
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Episode 64: Organizational Mindfulness: Making It A Natural Part Of Your Day With Peter Bostelmann
I interviewed Peter Bostelmann, the Chief Mindfulness Officer and Founder of SAP Global Mindfulness Practice. Under his leadership, mindfulness-based training and support structures for a lasting cultural change have been piloted refined and are being offered to all SAP employees globally. Peter initiated the foundation for the lasting success of this practice by building a passionate community of teachers and ambassadors. He is an integral leadership coach and trained as an industrial engineer. He brings many years of leadership experience in international business to his efforts in bringing mindfulness programs to scale at global organizations.
This interview was originally recorded when I met Peter. We discussed how corporations could integrate mindfulness practices into their workday to cultivate an improved culture. He also shared his journey on how SAP began to implement these technology practices into the workplace and the result of creating greater human connection and kindness amongst their employees. I hope you will find this interview helpful and in order to be able to create some mindfulness practices in your own workplace. Please share, subscribe, and review so not only do you get the benefits of these practices, but also the people around you.
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I am with Peter Bostelmann from SAP talking about mindfulness programs. Peter, do you want to start off and give a background on yourself and what you do at SAP?
I’m feeling delighted to be here. My background is I’m an industrial engineer. I’m working for many years with SAP. SAP is the world’s largest business software company for the ones that do not know SAP. More than three-quarters of all business transactions in the world in the background. I touched on the SAP system or running on the SAP system. We have about 100,000 employees worldwide. I’m the Director of the Global Mindfulness Practice at SAP. I shifted my career a couple of years ago. I’m running a whole team of teachers. Most of them are in the main role and are teaching part-time for us, and also, we have a few full-time staff to bring mindfulness as a practice into our organizational culture. That’s what I do.
It’s such an interesting story the fact of your background being an industrial engineer. I’m a CPA that turned Yogi. I can relate to the change, your perception of the world, and being able to incorporate that into the work that you do. Can you talk about your journey and what even led you to want to do this from where you started?
It’s important to say that many years ago, when I was already in my career, a certain bias of mindfulness, this is something for people that are weak or not fast enough or whatever the bias is, was in my way. At that point in time, my partner came into my life, and she practiced mindfulness. I had to despise. I was like, “I do my triathlon. You do your mindfulness. That’s fine.” I wouldn’t have done it. I got curious seeing her coming back from silent retreats and something was changed. She was more smiling, radiating of calm, and happiness. I got intrigued and I started practicing many years ago.
At that point, I had a quite difficult life situation. I found myself on a real long, ten-day silent retreat. Before, I had some cliché in my head that you space out and things become fuzzy, but what I experienced in these ten days, you take away all distractions, no cell phone, you don’t talk, you don’t read, you’re by yourself, observe your breath, and it becomes calmer. Your mind gets calmer and sharper day-by-day. You become more aware of your mental processes. What I experienced there was that I got in connection with a little voice which is always there but it’s clouded into all the louder voices in my inner being.
I felt this is compelling. This little voice is a clear, calm voice. I would call it the inner compass that I felt, “I want to continue this practice. There’s a big gift in it.” What is a gift? The gift is we all try to fix the outside world, “I want to have this situation. I don’t want that situation.” Often, we have only a limited influence on the outside world. Once you notice, you can change the way how you relate to these outside events. If you can change them, then it’s not just a thought, but the physical reaction is changing. It’s a practice. This is powerful that I continued doing this.
This was how did I start. However, for the next couple of years, being in consulting, being with my company, many years ago, mindfulness was not such a popular topic. I was a little careful. I was what we call a closet meditator. I was hiding this like many others, as I figured out later. Now, this is turning. It’s becoming more mainstream. I noticed that something was gradually shifting in my work. At that time, I was a Program Manager and a Delivery Executive. I was leading large-scale implementation projects at SAP with multinational customers. That can be quite some pressure at times if you’re in different times zones, have high number of staff on the ground that have quite a burn rate, you’re between the customer, different entities in your company and try to balance it all out.
What I noticed was that little-by-little, I was better able to distinguish when there was a stressful situation and something was burning to say, “This is important right now.” To put the other stuff to the side so that I could focus better. On one thing, I was less aroused and less nervous by all the other stuff. I also noticed that somehow, I observed my inner processes. It’s like you have a witness who is looking, “What’s going on here?” This helps to see where you are becoming reactive or you might take a little break and a few breaths. This was over a certain time, I noticed that something shifted that I was more calm and more joy even in difficult situations.
My peers and people I’m working with notice it also back to me. In 2011 or 2012, being in the Silicon Valley at SAP and our office here in Palo Alto, most of the time, I got intrigued by other companies in the Silicon Valley, since here in the San Francisco Bay area is the epicenter of these practices. It comes originally from Buddhism in the Western world. I got intrigued by a number of companies that started bringing in mindfulness practices in a secular way. The first one I heard of the next gen tech was Pam Weiss, then I heard from Intel was Hanna and Google, Chade-Meng Tan. He’s quite skilled and making it very popular. I looked at all of it. All were there and we decided that’s from pilots within SAP. I decided, “It would be good to do this.”
Who did you talk to even get that started?
Being aware that there are many people reading that are curious about it, it took quite a while to convince people. Times are shifting. There was an interesting thing happening. I tried basically to find anybody who would give me a budget, I talk the business from the HR, from the learning department. I heard an interesting story again and again. Also, in Europe and Germany which was, “Peter, I’d be interested in training for emotional intelligence and for mental strengths but I’m not sure if our organization is completely ready for this.” I was asking myself, “Maybe our organization is way more ready than we all are afraid of or we all anticipate.”
Organizational Mindfulness: With mindfulness, you will become stronger mentally and find ways to adjust what’s not optimal in how you relate to your work.
I found a way to start the first pilots in Palo Alto and they were quite successful. I knew from myself, I believe mindfulness is powerful but I didn’t know, “Am I only having an exotic hobby?” Other people find it helpful too. The interest also was from day one is quite high. In the beginning, there was a waitlist to understand who was interested, how can we communicate to, and this waitlist since then is growing faster than we deliver trainings. We started the first pilots in Palo Alto in the US in 2013, and then we brought the next pilots to Germany about a year later. Germany is our corporate headquarters at SAP.
A couple of years ago, some people said, “You meditate there in San Francisco and the Bay Area.” Is it working at other places even in the US or around the world? The positive surprise we had in Germany was the pilots were even better right there than they were here in the US. What we do is a two-day course that’s called Search Inside Yourself. It’s a program that initially got developed at Google. Google released it to the public. It’s not Google anymore. It’s a Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute, which is based in San Francisco. We are working with them since day one. Now, I’m proud to say it wasn’t Google. It was a program.
The program got adopted, adjusted a little bit, and our feedback is also going back into the program. It’s continuously evolving. It’s a two-day class, sixteen hours, and then we have a lot of follow-up activity offerings. We have trained more than 8,700 people around the world, 50 plus big offices, and it’s growing. It has become our most popular training. We do have a waitlist of 8,000 people. It’s a little bit of a difficult problem. We are educating internal teachers and that’s part of the key success factors. It’s coming from within the culture.
It’s not an idea. It’s something where people in the class experienced a whole array of different things, how they can be more present, more attentive, more self-aware in the situation, and there’s a felt sense. The vast majority of people find something where they feel, “This is helpful. Let me try that. Can we have a couple of few conscious breaths?” Some people start meditating, which is powerful in others. If they wouldn’t have this felt sense experience, this is hurtful. They wouldn’t recommend it to others. The waitlist wouldn’t grow.
That’s an important point to bring out, especially from a business standpoint in order to get things like this approved. What are the critical success factors or business metrics that justified this program to get started? What are you trying to aim for as far as the company is getting benefit from the programs that you deliver?
In our experience, our best practice case is that you have to become very specific. Mindfulness becomes very popular but if you think everybody is doing it, we need to do it. There are different programs out with different focuses. Also, there are different ways to meditate and to do mindfulness. You have to become specific, “What is it that we want to achieve in our company? What are our corporate goals? What possibly some of our pain points? What’s not going well? What could we do better? What do we want to sustain?” The more specific you’ll become, and then also the more specific you are in the program. How it’s supporting this, the most successful you will be.
One of the pieces as an SAP back then in 2012 and 2011 when we started out, we care a lot about employee engagement. It’s a big knowledge company, and engagement, like in many others, is important. We are very high and we were looking at what are measures that we keep this high level. Employee engagement was then one thing we looked at in our data we are gathering from the class to see if there is a change. I would recommend looking for a program that seems suitable, do a pilot, and measure with the pilot, “Is this going well?” You can then think about, “How can we make this bigger?”
To dive one level deeper. Employee engagement as far as employee happiness being measured, turnover, or what are their specific measurements within employee engagement that the company is looking for.
We have a composite index that is called Employee Engagement, which is derived from our annual employee survey, which is out of a number of questions where we see how engaged our employee is and how happy are they with the company I’m not able to share the specifics of this, but I know and there’s an article out in Reuters that how much is 1% employee engagement worst for our whole employee base, which is between €60 million and €80 million net revenue. We could show it with our programs. We looked at 4,800 people that attended our class between 2015 and 2018. We could see that compared to the control group and also in the timeline analysis that the employee engagement is significantly higher. This is showing it’s not only that we run the most popular program, but we also contribute in a significant way to the bottom line.
Employee engagement is one thing we looked at. Another is leadership trust. It’s coming again from the employee survey. That’s not related to the class. The employee is doing it, then we look, “Will they attend a class or class will not? Do we see differences?” Our data science team was doing it. Leadership trust is the second one. The third one where we saw a significant difference is absenteeism. We see the absenteeism is lower. What does mindfulness do? Your mental strengths become stronger, and you adjust yourself that you find better ways to be happy with what is and to adjust what’s not optimal in your way and how you relate to your work.
Feeling more fulfilled in your life helps you get up in the morning and handle difficult situations that you’re dealing with in the workplace or with clients in a way where you were the observer watching it rather than getting yourself emotionally charged.
You get a toolbox at your hand where you see it helps you in better ways to relate to yourself, demands, and challenges. It’s the joyful situations that the work-life is bringing. You’re becoming more aware, you are striving more in what you’re doing, and you get more tools and like, “I’m becoming aware.” Only what you are aware of you can regulate. What you’re not aware of, it’s in the blind spot. It’s simple. The self-awareness increases. You were asking for the key success factors. I have a few more that are very important. We set the right program. We have to be very careful about the language and be aware that there’s still a lot of bias around mindfulness. I know I had a bias and a lot of people still. The typical male cliché is this is something for the softer or the more vulnerable ones.
There are wonderful examples. One of the world’s best tennis players, Novak Djokovic, is an avid meditator. He shares that tennis is a mental game to try to get a good partner, be a competitor, and the reactive zone. He notices this due to his mindfulness practice early on time, becoming tense, and becoming reactive, he has this breathing technique where he calms himself down and gets back into his blue zone of the ones who observe his game. He knows that he has this very long time where he prepares to serve. This is where he senses himself again. How does this relate to somebody who’s having a leadership role or an expert role in an organization? We do bad decisions when we become reactive.
We know that in hindsight then we become triggered. The higher you are in your leadership role, the more difficult the problems you get. This capacity to remain calm or to notice, “I’m losing my calm. What can I do to maintain it again?” This is the key capacity. This is a good story I very often use to explain executives. It might be a false idea that this weakness you. It’s the opposite. Another example I like is Nico Rosberg. He was a Formula 1 World Champion in 2016. He’s a German and an avid meditator. It’s also not the case that it makes you slower.
Organizational Mindfulness: If you think mindfulness is only a stress-reduction technique, it’s the same as saying playing the piano is a stress-reduction technique.
When he is on the race track, he can 100% focus on the race. He’s not thinking about whatever happened in his day before or will happen afterwards. There are two examples of language, which is very important, and the models we’re working with. We are avoiding by any means any spiritual or any religious reference. All we do is practices that are proven by neuroscience that are secular so that we can deploy them around the world. We don’t have to take care about certain religions.
They support you regardless of your belief or non-believers. One more key success factor I find important for many people, they see mindfulness as a stress-reduction technique. It’s this way too short. If you feel, “I like my stress, I don’t need this.” If you think mindfulness is only a stress-reduction technique, it’s the same as saying playing the piano is a stress-reduction technique. It’s a nice side effect. You become calmer and at ease. You should do mindfulness by playing the piano.
In both cases, your train your mind and certain capacities. The way how we position this within SAP is that for us, it’s a leadership development program, talent development program, and it supports well-being. We are working also closely with our health department, but it’s not only a health program and not only to cure deficiencies for people that are close to burnout. It starts way earlier. It helps you to fully leverage your potential.
All of this sounds awesome. However, we know these journeys aren’t easy bringing these types of programs into an organization or it goes linear necessarily. What are some pitfalls that businesses should look out for when trying to put programs in place? If I’m someone thinking this could help my business, what do I need to make sure that I learned from you of lessons learned?
It depends on the business and the situation. It takes skillfulness. As I said before, it’s not a cookie-cutter approach that you do it. I closely look at who would I like to work with? We have a consulting service. SAP is helping companies to bring it to mainly global companies because we want to share our best practice model that we learned in the last number of years. Pitfalls are including not the appropriate program. Mindfulness becomes very popular. More organizations or people I know for few years ago were only HR consultants or consultants, all of a sudden, they are mindfulness experts.
I would look, “What is their background? What is the organization they’re working with? How do they present it?” Trust your intuition or your gut feel. Does this sound like, “Is this a person that I want to work with? Is this sound incredible or is there some question?” The important is that before language and then how you frame it, that you use a program, in my opinion, that has not only makes mindfulness and near concentration technique, but that also brings in kindness, compassion, and empathy, so that it has deeper roots. Only then you will see this effect that it’s happening so that it shifts the organization to college grad.
Another pitfall would be to bring in trainers, train the people and then let them leave. Mindfulness is not an idea, not you haven’t seen one since, and you understand. Mindfulness is a practice. This is why we call our whole program Global Mindfulness Practice. It’s like signing up at the gym and not going there will not change your body. You have to go there and work out. It’s the same as mindfulness. You have to find ways to get in the organization to overcome the skeptics and turn them into cures skeptics. The second one, how to make it sustainable and how to offer things in your culture that it becomes part of civil culture.
Lastly, to make it something normal, to not like, “Now we meditate. Now we have it for a moment,” this is completely sorry. It’s weird and in a way, stupid. To bring in one other example, if you look back 50 years, almost nobody was doing physical exercise, and it was not common sense in society that doing sports is keeping your mind healthy. People will ask you, “Who’s chasing you?” They would see you going for a run. Now, it’s completely clear. I believe in the next years, it will be way more accepted that this mental practice is helpful. Finding a way to integrate it that feels reasonable, good for you, and fits into your religious culture. There’s so much more to say. It’s hard to process them. I hope this is helpful.
Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge with us. I wish you lots of luck with your program.
Thank you.
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For a mindful moment with my interview with Peter Bostelmann, I found it interesting that someone with an industrial engineering background found his way to mindfulness. A lot of us that get into this field or fall into this originally may have a bias about these things and whether they’re true or work and so forth. The journey that we go on as we start to observe and notice how these things feel in our bodies. What do we decide to do with it? This has led Peter into a whole new career and initiatives around this over a fifteen-year-period. That’s an important thing to understand, too, is when you start getting into mindfulness, it’s not an overnight fix. It’s the work that we have to do on a daily basis to incrementally make little changes in our life.
They start layering on one at a time that it doesn’t happen overnight, that it’s a practice. He did a great job of explaining how it’s a practice and how we have to create new habits in our life in order to get the benefit of this. Many times, it’s hard to change habits and our neural channels as we become adults. What happens is when we see the benefit of one thing, whether that’s meditation, or like Peter said, he went on this silent retreat and started observing how his mind got calmer, sharper, and started understanding the messages that were going on inside his body, which he called his inner compass. Once he got a flavor for that, he wanted to understand different ways he could tap into that. Many times, when things are off in our life or stressful, we can feel like we don’t have control.
Organizational Mindfulness: Mindfulness is not just a health program that cures deficiencies in people close to burnout, but a proactive strategy that helps them fully leverage their potential.
These little tiny practices over time are what help us get more control over our mind, over our lives, and start regulating our central nervous system when we can tap into breath, stillness, and notice we’re getting off. What Peter was talking about is as he started having these little shifts along the way. His peers were noticing them as well, which is an important thing to realize that we aren’t alone in this. Once we start making these changes, we are an example for others, someone that’s an engineer can start putting these practices in place and we can tell they’re working. It’s not just that they’re talking about it, they’re living it. That is the real way to affect change. It starts with each of us first, then what happens is we start creating this different type of energy where other people want to be a part of it as well.
It was an important journey that he described of how this started moving through SAP. It was little pilots at a time. A lot of times, we want to put in these programs and go full force but it takes these little tests of, does this work? What doesn’t work? What will you do differently to make this successful and figuring out what types of content are going to help? A lot of times, what happens is that people like myself get hired in the corporations or speaking events. We talk about it once and the people in the audience are like, “I need to do that,” but there’s no follow-up. There’s no follow-through and implementation of how this would continue on beyond that day. That’s why these programs are important.
It’s not just talking about this one, it’s the reminders that you continually put in place in your organization. One of the things I wanted to drill down with him on was how they evaluate the success of a program like this because in order for it to be successful in traditional organizations, it is important that we have a measurement of success. He talked about employee engagement and looking at the populations of people that didn’t go through the program versus who did and how they contributed to the bottom line. Meaning, less turnover, there was less absenteeism, they had more trust in their leaders, and were overall happier in the work that they did. Part of that happiness is being able to be happy with who we are individually, understand how we interact with others, and can control that outcome a little bit better.
The important part of these programs as well is that we’re all talking from the same vocabulary. That’s why you want them to be repeatable throughout the year and not just a one-time thing so that everybody can talk about whatever topic it is in that program and be able to play in their daily work-life so that everyone understands what is happening in the organization, how we are reacting, and having that communication.
It becomes its own culture. When thinking about doing this, understand that there will be pitfalls along the way when you’re putting programs in place because it’s not going to be a cookie-cutter approach as he stressed that every culture has something different, every type of leadership style, and so forth. It’s how you nurture people along the way. What he has seen over time is that the program has brought more kindness, compassion, and empathy to the relationships in the organization, which then creates overall happiness and less turnover.
Something as a food for thought as you move into this is, how can you take a little practice? Maybe it’s two minutes between meetings and start implementing that. How do you lead that as an example on your own and start playing with these things on your team? It doesn’t have to be organizational until you know what works. This is the reason why I’ve started to put out the B3 breaks once a week. These are little practices that are under five minutes that you can put into your day to understand the energy you’re creating and to see if it’s having a better effect on how you’re feeling and the energy you’re creating with the people around you.
I hope that this is helpful to you when thinking about how to put mindfulness in your businesses as a leader and the journey that each of us takes along the way to incorporate this into our bodies and the way that we need to in order for it to be successful. Don’t forget to rate, review, and subscribe to this show as well as if there’s a topic or someone you would like me to interview. There is a survey right on my website, AmyVetter.com, where you can go in and make suggestions. We’d love to know your suggestions to continue on this path of breaking our beliefs and making sure that we’re creating better energy for the people around us.
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About Peter Bostelmann
Peter Bostelmann is the Founder and Director of SAP’s Global Mindfulness Practice.
Under his leadership, mindfulness-based trainings and support structures for lasting impact have been piloted, refined, and are being rolled out to all SAP employees globally.
He initiated the foundation for the lasting success of this SAP program by building a passionate community of mindfulness teachers and ambassadors.
Peter is also a leadership coach and trained as an Industrial Engineer.
He brings more than 20 years of leadership experience in international business to his current efforts in bringing mindfulness programs to scale globally.
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