European explorers first met North American Indians in the sixteenth century, two distinctly opposite visions of the world fatally crashed into each other: while Europeans imported their strict moral code centered on will power, effort and hard work, native Indians had never been exposed to anything like it. To these hunter-gatherer tribes, will power and effort were a useless waste of energy.

Nature would provide everything they needed as She’d always done, and sweating it out in anxious gold-digging was definitely not the way to get into Her good graces. As we all know, that way of life disappeared under strong-willed engines of progress and civilization in the Americas, and most everywhere else in the world. But these primitive and unsophisticated visions of life may just be the remedy to many of our environmental problems hundreds of years later.

The head of cultural transformation for a large Dutch multinational company told me recently that “we seem to be investing so much money in moving people towards the right mindset in order to advance sustainable practices, and what’s frustrating is that when people have the right mindset, you don’t need much money at all to get things done”. This is exactly what Native Indians were trying to tell us! It’s like the difference between a trigger-happy soldier with lots of ammunition on his hands and an Indian hunter who spent all day yesterday proudly applying his father’s and grandfather’s careful teachings to carve out five deadly arrows. The soldier can afford to miss his target as many times as bullets he can fish out of his deep pockets, while our Indian hunter wouldn’t want to fail even once, lest he lose one of his laboriously crafted weapons.

“Well that’s why we need to work hard, to make lots of money, to buy many bullets, to make sure we don’t come home empty-handed”, you might argue. We study expensive MBAs, we kill ourselves writing email after email, soldiering through long meetings, saving our pennies to spend all our pounds, as we run around in circles or rise on speculation bubbles which invariably pop us right back down to where we started. Or maybe this is why we should stop firing stupid bullets at anything that moves in the forest, and learn a few tricks from our Indian hunter friend.

To these apparently primitive societies, covering their needs was not about mindless exploitation of Nature’s resources, but rather very mindful and respectful attention to all those little details betraying the presence of much-needed protein in its many life forms. In the mind of a man deeply connected to his Natural surroundings, no life should ever be wasted, and every life taken should serve the higher purpose of prolonging his family’s and tribe’s life. Sixteenth century European Catholics, Anglicans, Calvinists and Puritans, however, were brought up in a very different environment.

Centuries of armed conflict over territories and resources had destroyed all innocence to the point that Nature had become a mere silent observer of human brutality. Patriarchal thinking had fuelled the growth of civilizations running on expensive gas: slaves kept the backstage running while gold and other natural resources fed defensive armies and aggressive conquests. These early colonizers were often fleeing from a societal system that enslaved them with long hours of heavy work in exchange for a promised celestial reward somewhere in the unforeseeable future.

Still, they carried these constricting beliefs deep inside their souls even as they arrived in a land rich and heavenly abundant as they come. Our planet Earth was a heavenly paradise of abundance to hunter-gatherer tribes of the North American plains, lush forests and plentiful lakes. Worrying, working, counting or accumulating stuff you couldn’t carry with you from settlement to settlement was a terrible waste of time.

Their secret recipe was about not doing, not trying…not pursuing better futures. It was all about breathing, perceiving, admiring, listening, and deeply feeling every movement on the ground. This is how healthy prey fell into their hands, fresh river streams flowed into their mouths and safe settlement grounds emerged before their expert exploring eyes.

I’ve seen so many entrepreneurs launch a new business because they had the money to fund it and not because it was actually a good idea. We spend so many hours complaining about the lack of funding for new initiatives or projects in our companies and countries. And we work so many hours for so many days along so many decades. In search of what? When will we learn the lesson those first Indians generously tried to share with us? Wait until the wind flies in your direction.

Focus on the animal that gives into your hunter skills. Use every failure to hone your ability and sharpen your instinct. And please, please, please! Stop firing all those noisy, expensively-mined lead bullets all over the place. Stop complaining about how you need more of them. Just stop all at once. And now, breathe…

I was 20 years old, just out of undergrad, and sitting among a group Ph.D.’s. My first boss at Bell Labs was an equal-opportunity yeller. When he shouted at me in my first-ever department meeting, I got up, told him when he wanted to talk, not yell, I’d be in my office and walked out. Perhaps this was not the best initial career move. About 30 minutes later, he walked into my office and apologized. He never yelled at me again (though he did keep yelling at the rest of the team), and became one of three manager-mentors that shaped my career at Bell Labs and AT&T — and taught me to manage others and myself. In my career, I’ve had three such memorable bosses. Today, I’ll share one story as well as the biggest lesson I learned from each. Finally, I’ll share the biggest lesson of them all that I hope will help you as you launch your career.

Lesson: Let Your People Go

That first boss, the reformed yeller, provided multiple opportunities for visibility up to the president of Bell Labs, coaching me all the way. He went out on a limb to make me the first person promoted to Member of Technical Staff (MTS) without a Ph.D. or M.S., and under the age of 25. He gave me the freedom to design my own role and the autonomy to accomplish my goals, only “interfering” to remove obstacles and create more visibility.

When I was going to quit to move to Ohio and marry my husband, who had left Basic Research at Bell Labs to teach Physics at Oberlin College, he pulled strings with HR and his counterpart at AT&T for our project (and my next boss) so I wouldn’t quit. These two men arranged my transfer to my new boss’s organization, moved me to Oberlin, Ohio and flew me back and forth for nine years…just so I wouldn’t quit. As you proceed through your career, take note of the great talent you work with and find.

Do what you need to in order to mentor, encourage and support them. Treat them justly and do what’s right for them and the organization over what’s right for you personally. Give them opportunities to excel and succeed and provide shelter when they fail.

Lesson: Light the Fire and Clear the Path

I knew my second boss already, having worked with him for a year or so with mutual respect and admiration. He fully supported my telecommuting, since it “proved” our project in action, and funded a home office with every device imaginable for 1988, including a laptop and cell phone. I commuted weekly to New Jersey and monthly to Europe and Asia. I designed my own job with my own set of outputs and outcomes — he provided the resources to make it happen. He taught me how to succeed at corporate politics without compromising my integrity and championed my work up the executive ladder. He orchestrated a “loan” of me to the president’s office for a special project that was a significant career opportunity.

And, when the project was done, he helped me choose from my available options: stay in the executive suite, go with the business I’d helped start as a result of the project, or return to my organization. I did not want to stay with the executives — there were no role models for me in the C-suite (which they interpreted as no women and I clarified as no humans). I wanted to go back to my boss and his wonderfully addictive leadership style, but he pushed me to join the management team running the new business.

Guide your people’s passion and get out of the way: the autonomy and freedom I was given to create and do my job exponentially increased my passion, excitement and success. My manager-mentors made sure my passions aligned with organizational direction, gave me some high-level boundaries, resources, and introductions to make it happen. They removed obstacles, showed me how to handle challenges, provided opportunities, and took the blame while giving me the credit.

Lesson: Remember, They’re Human

My next boss also believed in autonomy, outcomes over outputs, customer-centricity, and developing his people. The experiences, opportunities, successes, failures, and learnings during that “start-up” time were amazing and we had a lot of fun creating a separate culture. While working for him, I had my first child. In addition to the very generous maternity leave benefits, his support and communication with the rest of the team in New Jersey made it possible for me to work from home, without travel, and still have significant impact on the business. For him, the fact I wasn’t in New Jersey meant I had a politically unbiased perspective on the business’s needs.

He’d handle the politics; I’d handle getting the work done with my team. Unfortunately, AT&T was changing dramatically, and not positively. We all started leaving. But to this day, my friendship with my former boss remains strong. Many companies treat their employees as employees — nicely and kindly, even generously — but not as humans. My manager-mentors made it clear that I mattered not just for what I could do, but also for who I was.

It wasn’t just about the generous maternity leave or the work-from-home flexibility, although I was grateful for both. Boss #2, for instance, required that I take two consecutive weeks of vacation to fully relax. My assistant took care of everything and virtually banned me from checking email, even though we would still do the New York Times crossword puzzle every day — an important ritual for us no matter where I was in the world.

Lesson: Trust Trumps Everything

What else did I learn from three incredible manager-mentors? While there were many lessons, this has stood out for me over the past 30 years: trust trumps everything. And everything flows from trust — learning, credibility, accountability, a sense of purpose and a mission that makes “work” bigger than oneself. Yes, I’ve been extremely blessed and my circumstances were, and unfortunately still are, atypical. But they don’t have to be. As you look at your early career, at the people you work with and the cultures you  work with, please think about how you can apply just one of these lessons, perhaps even just one part of one lesson. The benefits last decades.

Matt Tenney’s new book Serve to Be Great: 11 Leadership Lessons from a Prison, a Monastery, and a Boardroom sets out to demonstrate that by simply shifting focus away from short-term goals and financial gain toward more effectively serving the people on their teams, leaders can create conditions for superior long-term results while simultaneously making the world a better place. Tenney’s extraordinary past provides him with a unique perspective on the power of serving and caring for team members. In Serve to Be Great, Tenney tells the compelling story of how his attempt to embezzle government funds led to five and a half years in military prison.

During his sentence, Tenney’s perspective shifted from selfish to servant, prompting him to live and train as a monk for three years, and finally, to become a social entrepreneur. Tenney has cofounded and led two non-profits, as well as a speaking and training company devoted to helping leaders achieve greater long-term success while also making our world a better place. Here are his 11 lessons to help leaders achieve higher levels of lasting success while also living a more fulfilling life

1. Focus on developing your influence as a leader.

The qualities that make a great leader are quite different from those that make a good employee. An employee’s worth is judged based on how well she carries out the different tasks in her job description. But a leader’s worth is judged based on how well she is able to influence the behaviors of those on her team. (That’s why Tenney says one of the most common mistakes organizations make is promoting people to leadership positions based on their job performance. Job performance offers little to no insight into whether or not a person will succeed at leading a team to success!)

“The most effective way to build influence with others is to consistently demonstrate that you truly care about them and have their best interests in mind,” he confirms. “Herb Kelleher, founder and former chairman of Southwest Airlines, is a great example of how great leaders develop influence. He consistently showed employees how much he cared by doing things like coming in on Thanksgiving Day to help baggage handlers load suitcases onto planes.

“When he wrote a letter asking employees to find a way to save $5 a day for the second half of a year, he signed it, ‘Love, Herb.’ Employees knew that he meant it. And, as a result of the influence Herb had built, employees saved much more than $5 a day on average, helping Southwest keep their then 30-year streak of profitability going.”

2. Create a culture of servant leaders.

Can you imagine being able to attract the most talented people in your industry, ensure that they’re fully engaged while they’re at work, and feel confident that they’ll stay on your team for the long haul? What would that do for your organization? Clearly, a great workplace culture—which is responsible for all three achievements—is one of the most important competitive advantages you can possess.

“The key to creating a highly effective workplace culture that people want to be a part of,” Tenney asserts, “is to make sure that team members feel cared for and that they’re a part of something meaningful and inspiring. This is accomplished easily when you build a culture of servant leadership. An e-commerce company called Next Jump is a great example of the power of building an organization full of people who are devoted to serving others and serving the greater good. “The leaders at Next Jump consistently show how much they care,” he shares.

“The company actually does the employees’ laundry for them. But they also find ways to help employees grow their ability to serve each other and the greater good. The most coveted award at Next Jump is a $30,000 package that goes to the employee who is voted by his or her peers to be the most helpful, selfless person in the company. “A culture like the one at Next Jump produces extraordinary results,” Tenney says.

“In 2012, the company accepted only 35 new hires out of almost 18,000 applicants. That’s a hire rate of 0.2 percent. And, although turnover in the tech space averages around 22 percent, at Next Jump, it’s less than 1 percent. This is despite the fact that highly talented employees there often receive phone calls from other companies offering two to three times the salary they currently receive.”

3. Increase innovation by being more compassionate.

Most leaders are aware of the importance of innovation, but many make the mistake of assuming that creativity and innovation are synonymous. Creativity, which is the ability to generate novel ideas, is not necessary for innovation. Innovation is a function of sticking with and executing on ideas—whether new or old—that don’t conform to the status quo, which results in turning an idea into something tangible, useful, and differentiated.

So if you want innovation, Tenney says, you need to create an environment where people feel safe to take risks and stick with ideas that deviate from the norm. “We need to listen non-critically to ideas,” he says. “We need to encourage and be forgiving of mistakes. In essence, we need to consistently show people that we truly care about them. SAS CEO Jim Goodnight is a great case study for how compassion fuels innovation.

He showed incredible compassion for his people at the onset of the Great Recession by assuring them that no one would lose their job and simply asking that all employees be vigilant with spending. As a result of his care, they felt safe. They continued to disrupt the market with innovations through the recession, setting records for revenues, while most companies in the software industry were struggling to stay alive.”

4. Focus on your most important customer.

Organizations that deliver world-class customer service have a few things in common. First, they spend very little money acquiring new customers because they’re able to keep the ones they have and because those customers are constantly referring others. Second, they don’t have to compete on price because their customers are willing to pay more for the excellent service they receive. And perhaps most important, their external customers aren’t their number one priority. The members of their organization are.

“The best way to ensure that your customers are consistently well cared for is to treat your team members with the same care you expect them to deliver to the customers,” Tenney explains. “By listening well and treating team members with kindness and respect, leaders develop team members who do the same for customers. “When leaders focus on developing happy, loyal team members, happy, loyal customers are a natural side effect.

A very simple way to put this principle into practice is to frequently communicate with team members about what you as the leader can do to help them be happy both at work and at home. Make an effort to show that all ideas are heard and considered, and try to execute on as many feasible ideas as possible.”

5. Get a better ROI on marketing by serving the community.

Push marketing—broadcasting unsolicited messages to large numbers of people—is simply no longer an effective way to reach potential customers. In a world where people consume more information in a few hours than our ancestors did in an entire lifetime, our chances of being heard amid the noise are slim. To stand out from the chaos, Tenney recommends that you make serving the community a priority.

“When organizations develop leaders and team members who really care about others, community service efforts can be really powerful because people tend to talk about and remember them,” he asserts. “In addition to being rewarding (it’s simply the right thing to do!), serving the community is a very powerful way to build trust and rapport with potential customers. “For instance, did you know that the apparel company Life is good has yet to spend a dime on traditional advertising?” he asks. “Years ago, they hosted a festival to raise money for youth going through challenging times.

Afterward, the company realized that the media and word-of-mouth exposure was more valuable than the ad campaigns they had been considering. Up to that point, their growth curve had been pretty flat. Since then, it’s been almost vertical.”

6. Stop fixating on providing perks and pay more attention to the little things.

In Serve to Be Great, Tenney offers several examples of companies that go to great lengths to show employees how much they care by offering incredible perks. But perks alone don’t result in a team culture that people want to be a part of. “The perks aren’t necessary,” Tenney says. “Perks are easily copied and can been seen as a façade. What’s most important is to consistently show team members that you truly care about them—and believe it or not, that doesn’t take a lot of money or effort.

Little things like making time for personal interaction, asking more questions, listening more, and showing sincere appreciation for a person’s efforts can go a long way. Honestly, we leaders need to carve out time for personal interaction; actually put it on our calendars. If we don’t, we might find that we’ve gone days, or even weeks, without connecting personally with team members.”

7. Make serving others a habit.

Hardwiring servant leadership into your behavior is all about being mindful of seemingly small thoughts, decisions, and actions. For example, each time you’re about to interact with someone, ask yourself, How can I help this person? or, How can I contribute to this person’s happiness? You don’t need to have an immediate answer.

Just adopting this attitude changes the dynamic of an interaction in positive ways, says Tenney. He also suggests starting each day by taking at least 5 or 10 minutes to contemplate the question, What can I do to better serve the people on my team today? “The practice that made the biggest difference in my life is using the question, How will this help me to serve others? as a filter for decisions,” he shares. “Before I do something or consume something, I look at it from this perspective. This question helps me to waste less time pursuing things that don’t really matter, and has gradually made serving others the motivation for everything that I do.”

8. Gain power by giving it away.

A common misperception among leaders is that they need to be the ones coming up with all of the great ideas or the people making great things happen. The best leaders, though, are the ones who are able to harness the talent and intelligence of the entire team. You can do this by pushing power down to the lowest levels possible. “This is a great way to serve the people on your team,” Tenney says. “Empowered people become much more engaged in their work.

You can empower your team members by involving them in decision making to the greatest extent possible, ensuring that they truly feel heard. You can also give team members final decision authority on tasks within their area of expertise. Just make sure that you’ve previously communicated the organization’s core values so that they can guide decision making. Let your people know that as long as a decision doesn’t conflict with a core value, you trust that they’ll do the right thing.”

9. Inspire your team to greatness.

One of the greatest gifts we can offer team members is the gift of inspiration. In Serve to Be Great, Tenney cites Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as an example of a leader who had an extraordinary ability to inspire others. He did so by connecting people to a purpose far greater than themselves and by carrying out his work with impeccable character. “An important role of a leader is to clarify not only what the team does for the customer, but what the team does to make the world a better place,” Tenney explains.

“The leader must also ensure that each team member can see clearly how his or her work contributes to that larger vision and find ways to frequently remind team members of their purpose. “You can also inspire greatness in others by working to develop your character so that you consistently do the right thing, even when the personal costs are very high,” he continues. “At some level, we all aspire to be a person who puts others first and always does the right thing. When we see someone else living in that way, it touches something deep inside us. We are reminded of who we can be. We are inspired.” 

10. Measure the things that really matter.

Most of us do a fairly good job of measuring our progress toward quantitative goals. In our personal lives, for instance, we measure progress toward checking items off of our to-do lists, losing weight, or making money. Likewise, large organizations measure things like sales numbers, expenses, and quarterly profits. “What we need to do a better job of measuring is who we are and how well we treat each other,” Tenney asserts.

“When we measure these things, we make a much better effort to improve in them. Remember, it’s who we are and how well we treat each other that drive long-term success. I suggest that you seek feedback on how well you as a leader live the values of the organization and how well you treat the members of your team. You should also measure those things in your team members. By doing so, you’ll make it clear that they’re important and that people must develop these areas to be considered for a leadership position.”

11. Practice mindfulness to become the Ultimate Leader.

Mindfulness training—a simple, science-based practice for training attention and developing emotional intelligence—was the foundation of the transformation that Tenney underwent in military prison. In Serve to Be Great, he describes how the practice of mindfulness helps leaders become the best they can be. “Most people want to do a better job of serving and caring for the people around them,” Tenney comments.

“Mindfulness training helps us close the gap between intention and action. The practice has been proven to be extremely effective at increasing resilience during stressful situations, which will allow you to live up to your ideals of serving and caring for others even when you’re under intense pressure to hit a goal. The practice also gradually makes kindness, compassion, and a spirit of service your natural response to the people around you.

“Beginning the practice is very simple,” he continues. “Just pick a simple activity like drinking water and make an effort to let go of thinking and be fully present for that activity. Commit to being mindful each time you drink water for a week. The next week, continue with drinking water and add another activity. After a couple months, you’ll be practicing mindfulness during most of your day. You’ll notice that you’re happier, more resilient to stress, and more present for the people in your life.”

“Being successful as a leader and living a meaningful, enjoyable life are not mutually exclusive,” concludes Tenney. “In fact, the two actually fuel each other. The very things that make life truly rich are the same things that create and sustain long-term success in both business and in life. “The best news is that it’s all highly trainable,” he adds. “Any one of us can become an extraordinary, highly effective leader who enjoys going to work each day because we know that we’re making our world a better place.”

Serve to Be Great: Leadership Lessons from a Prison, a Monastery, and a Boardroom is available on Amazon

I’m thrilled to discover how many multinational corporations are embracing mindfulness as a desirable skill for their executives and leaders. Google, General Mills and Philips are only some of the global companies involved in helping their highest decision-makers stay present and attentive to the many crucial details hidden in the present moment. The list of top-ranking executives coming forward to advocate benefits of meditation techniques on business efficiency is growing fast: from Arianna Huffington, or Philipp Hildebrand at BlackRock, to Janice Marturano at General Mills, and Chade-Meng Tan at Google.

Even the late Steve Jobs described in his biography how meditation had shaped his fantastically successful vision for Apple.

There’s only one thing that baffles me in this growing wave of deep-breathing enthusiasts: how do they conquer the emotional conflicts that still bother the rest of us? Does their fear of loss simply dissipate between yoga postures? Or do their worst disappointments dissolve silently under the buzz of heavenly mantras and chiming bells?

Almost every brilliantly worded personal testimony I’ve looked up leaves these gritty details out of their poetic success stories. But seriously, this is the most interesting part! In feudal Japan those who dared to train as Samurai warriors had to overcome a seemingly impossible feat before diving into fancy sword movements and kinky jumps in the air: apprentices had to overcome their own fear of death before they could envision any real future as a noble Samurai hero. Do you think they just sat under a beautiful tree for hours until their deepest instinct of survival flew away with the gentle summer breeze? Of course not!

If a young man was ready to embrace one of the noblest and most well respected arts of warfare of his time, he had to expel any and every fear from his body before confronting his enemy on the battlefield. It wasn’t enough to erase negative thoughts from his conscience, as so many so-called self-help books and meditation gurus would have us believe. Physical shivers had to be gone forever if one was to incarnate Bushido accuracy to the point that “the mind forgets about the hand, the hand forgets about the sword”. There really is only one way to achieve this: shivering your body dry. Shivering the fear right out of your system in as many horrific hours of real-life terror as needed.

The path to Samurai glory was never about forgetting or denying that fear had been sinuously sewed in to every muscle fiber in the human body by Evolution.

Unbreakable courage came from surfacing every possible flight instinct hidden in one’s own psyche by exposing oneself to live threats: the more numerous, the more complex and the more unpredictable the better. It took decades of experience, and we can safely assume it didn’t happen while sitting in front of a laptop. Or a tablet.

If we look into preparation rituals for warriors and shamans in aboriginal tribes around the world we find similar rites of passage to maturity once and again in as many formats as cultural interpretations of the world: defying gravity in impossible feats of balance, challenging evermore powerful wild animals to combat or daring to guess which trail wouldn’t lead to certain death…They were all about helping young men experience their deepest fears as the quickest way to release them for good. It’s true that board rooms today hold many unforeseen dangers which could fatally end one’s career at any moment. Our best and brightest leaders, however, seem to breeze right through such hurdles without a scratch, if we believe what they tell us. Or more probably, they hide their wounds from hungry media predators and aggressive, blood-thirsty competitors.

Showing emotion, especially the kind we judge as negative, demeaning or unflattering, is forbidden in the business arena of Fortune rankings. Bringing meditation into our corporations as a subtle maneuver to keep conversations positive defeats the very purpose of these millenary techniques. Mindfulness is not supposed to be about feeling calm, motivated and happy all the time. Quite the opposite: it’s about giving yourself the opportunity to release all that negative mumbo-jumbo that pulls you down before you even know it’s there. And it’s not meant to be pretty.

It’s just meant to be real. Corporations who fail to enable safe spaces where employees can ventilate the negativity out of their systems will inevitably deform the essence of mindfulness practice, nipping such initiatives in the bud: Employees will become frustrated with new impositions of fake peace, tree-hugging exhibitions and deceptive smiles. Meanwhile, executives will grow impatient with zen-looking rituals that don’t achieve any tangible business goals or make a real difference to their productivity.

The secret to Samurai heroism is authenticity.

Staying true to who we are pushes us to embrace our entire self, with our smart ideas and all our sorry little feelings of fear, anger and grief. Without judgment. Without hiding embarrassing details or denying ourselves the right to have a tantrum worthy of our wildest toddler memories. The only way out of our own self-loathing is to swim right into it. Just as Japanese young men had to do hundreds of years ago, we will conquer our emotional whims by facing them, expressing them and giving into them…in spaces where we are not exposed to unwanted stares or undesirable consequences.

Mindfulness is indeed the next frontier of leadership training in a world where noticing the present impact of our business practices on our Natural surroundings is more urgent than ever before. Let’s not use it to escape our wild, unpredictable emotions. Let’s be mindful to embrace the wild Samurai warriors we already are, carrying our scars and sharing our war stories with pride.