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Chris Gash
Summary:
Through her research on what it takes to build sustainable working lives, professor and MIT SMR columnist Lynda Gratton has developed what she calls an eight-thread framework of crucial capabilities. The thread most people say they are weakest at is calm — the capacity to create space for reflection and protect the activities that restore their energy. Gratton describes how those who are good at maintaining a sense of calm do it and what they can teach others.
As companies push for greater productivity, an uncomfortable truth is emerging: Many employees no longer have the capacity to keep up. Leaders describe the same pattern everywhere — too many meetings, too little time to think, constant digital interruption, and a pace that leaves no room for recovery. Beneath these symptoms lies a tension I see repeatedly in my work: the pull between productivity and nurture. Productivity without nurture leads to burnout; nurture without productivity leads to fragility. This tension isn’t something we solve once; it’s something we continually navigate.
During the past decade, my research and teaching have focused on how people build sustainable working lives in an era of longevity. Drawing on executive education programs, cross-generational interviews, and field research, I developed an eight-thread framework that captures the capabilities people rely on over long careers. Four threads relate to the capabilities, motivations, and skills specific to building productivity. The other four relate to what we do to nurture ourselves and those around us and are crucial to creating and maintaining harmony in our working lives.
Recently, I’ve been using a rating scale in workshops with executives to assess the current strength of their eight threads. The pattern is consistent. Participants describe their productivity threads as the strongest — particularly mastery, meaning the proficiencies they have built up over their careers. Participants highly rate their capacity to identify their core strengths, regularly find opportunities to deepen their expertise, and find work that energizes them. In contrast, the weakest thread is calm — the capacity and motivation to create space for reflection, center themselves, and protect the activities that restore their energy.
When executives discuss these results, many voice the same dilemma: “I know I need calm, but my job won’t let me.”
And yet, in every workshop, a small minority of attendees — typically around 10% — rate calm as their strongest thread. They are no less busy, no less driven, and no less accountable than their peers. I call them the calm minority. This article explores who they are and what the rest of us can learn from them.
What Distinguishes the Calm Minority
When I’ve interviewed members of the calm minority, what has differentiated them is not their workload but the way they move through it. They face the same pressures as everyone else — the pace, the complexity, the competing demands — yet they manage to maintain a steadiness that others find elusive.
Looking closely, I recognized that their calm tends to arise through three pathways. These pathways reflect the deeper identity question — Who am I? — that runs through my research. Calm is shaped by identity. It emerges from the contexts we come from, the temperaments we carry, and the experiences that form us. In the calm minority, these may be derived from three sources: heritage, personality, and experience.
Pathway 1: Calm From Heritage — Shaped by Context and Early Norms
Some members of the calm minority grew up in an environment where calm was part of everyday life. Whether they had practices that were cultural, familial, or spiritual, they absorbed slower pacing, rituals of rest, and the belief that pauses are productive. Calm was not something they sought out as adults; it was something they had inherited. It came not so much through instruction as through the micropatterns of daily living.
Calm is a way of organizing attention, energy, and emotion in environments that constantly threaten to destabilize them.
Executives described families where steadiness was modeled almost unconsciously. They had a grandparent who approached difficulties with measured thought rather than reactivity, or a household where conflict was handled with restraint. Others traced their calm to broader cultural norms that prize composure or collective support. A Japanese executive spoke of traditions that elevate intentionality and restraint; a Latin American executive noted how strong family ties had created a sense that crises would be faced together, not alone.
In people’s long working lives, this early calm becomes a form of psychological capital. It compounds over time, allowing them to navigate transitions and volatility with more ease.
For those who struggle with calm, the lesson is not to mimic another culture or household but rather to look back at their own. Most people can identify at least one formative person or early experience that modeled steadiness. When they reconnect with these individuals or moments — a teacher who listened without haste, a family ritual that created stillness, a community practice that offered grounding — they often rediscover a forgotten resource they have carried for years that they can use more actively today.
Pathway 2: Calm From Personality — Temperament as an Internal Anchor
Some of the calm minority seemed to carry calm within their temperament. They had a tendency to be more introverted, lower in neuroticism, more autonomy oriented, and naturally drawn to deep, focused work. For them, calm was not a goal to be reached but a default way of moving through the world.
Yet, many described how difficult it was to maintain this temperament in open-plan offices and with constant interruption and rapid-fire messaging — factors that erode the conditions that allow their natural calm to thrive. So over time, they learned to redesign their environments or routines to better fit who they were. They blocked out uninterrupted time on their schedules, protected mornings for high-quality work, and reduced their exposure to noise and distraction.
What makes this pathway particularly useful for others to consider is that aspects of it are replicable. Even people who do not share these temperaments can adopt the underlying principles: protecting “deep time,” reducing sensory and cognitive stimuli, setting clearer boundaries, and choosing depth over noise. They can learn, as this group has, that calm often emerges not from slowing everything down but from eliminating unnecessary activation — a shift accessible to far more people than temperament might suggest.
Pathway 3: Calm From Experience — Learned Through Exposure and Reframing
The most encouraging pathway to calm is the one shaped by experience. Many in the calm minority did not begin their careers as calm individuals. They became calm through exposure, practice, and a gradual reframing of how they responded to pressure.
These members of the calm minority spoke of mentors who modeled measured behavior, managers who valued quality over speed, and organizations that protected boundaries rather than eroding them. Some credited deliberate practices, such as attention training, reflective practices, or rituals of stillness, that gradually rewired their reactions. Others pointed to pivotal moments — a failed project, a restructuring, a health scare, or a conflict handled badly — that forced a shift from reactivity to grounded problem-solving.
Calm emerges from different sources: where we come from, who we are intuitively, and how we have been shaped over time.
What this pathway shows is that calm is trainable. Heritage may offer an early foundation, and temperament may help, but experience demonstrates that calm can be strengthened at any stage. When executives look back at the people or moments that shaped them, they often see how they learned to pause or reframe pressure. What Pathway 3 reveals is that calm is not the absence of speed but the ability to choose when speed is necessary and when it is counterproductive.
If Pathway 1 gives permission and Pathway 2 gives predisposition, Pathway 3 gives method. Taken together, these pathways reveal that calm emerges from different sources: where we come from, who we are intuitively, and how we have been shaped over time.
What the Calm Minority Teaches Us
Calm is partly inherited and partly innate, but the calm minority shows us that this trait can be built, strengthened, and deliberately practiced. The capacity to learn is the factor that is by far the most important. In long and complex working lives, the ability to know how to take a pause becomes a strategic advantage. It shapes not only how we perform under pressure but how long we can sustain meaningful work without burning out or losing clarity.
The first step in thinking about calm in our own lives is recognizing which of the three pathways resonates most with our own experience. Some people may find echoes of early steadiness in their upbringing; others may recognize a temperament that thrives in depth rather than noise; and many will see that their calm has been forged through experience, in moments that demanded reframing, slowing down, or choosing a wiser response. Understanding your starting point matters because it tells you where your strengths already lie and which borrowed practices from the other pathways might help you grow.
From there, the work toward embracing more calm becomes personal. Calm is a way of organizing attention, energy, and emotion in environments that constantly threaten to destabilize them. The calm minority build these capabilities through small, repeated acts.
By borrowing a practice from heritage, a boundary from temperament, or a reframing from experience, we can begin, with one or two deliberate shifts, to strengthen a capability that will sustain us far beyond any productivity tool or short-term surge of effort.
In a world of unrelenting demands, calm is not a luxury. It is a form of leadership. And for those willing to practice it, calm becomes a source of endurance, clarity, and steady influence. It’s a capability that grows more valuable the longer our working lives become.
Topics
Column
Our expert columnists offer opinion and analysis on important issues facing modern businesses and managers.
More in this series
About the Author
Lynda Gratton is a professor of management practice at London Business School and founder of HSM Advisory. Her most recent book is Redesigning Work: How to Transform Your Organization and Make Hybrid Work for Everyone (MIT Press, 2022).
