When I started writing The Leaders Workbook back in 2009, I had discussed leadership and leaders with thousands of people around the world. I came to realize that we often ended up talking about the same topic – how can we become better at what we do? What are the key success factors to grow and develop as leaders? What can we – each one of us – do to develop ourselves?
We often agree that if we only could spend more time thinking about our actions, our plans, the results we create, how we ended up where we happened to be, why we made such and such mistake, how to avoid it in the future…the topic list goes on, while the challenge remains. I found that leaders on all continents, in all sectors, in all industries and on all levels, struggle with the same issue. The challenge of reflecting.
We all accept that we need to stop and rewind from time to time. There are not many I have met that call themselves a leader, who do not agree that we need to focus more on retrospection and reflection. Yet, very few seem to have found the key to reflection in todays busy schedule.
Time
As soon as you agree that reflection is important for you to grow as a leader, to develop yourself and your team, your first quest becomes to find the time for reflection. There are written books on time management, from Steven Covey’s Big Rocks to Getting things Done, from Personal Efficiency Plan (PEP) to Do it Now. There are trainings, theories, and competing theories of course, and wars fought between some of these groups. None of these tools give you more time – they can only help you structure your time better.
No matter how you use your time, I believe that you are able to find the required time to reflect in your busy schedule. Most leaders I know, travel. Some only between their home and their office, others seems to always be stuck at some airport. And travel time is easy to convert to reflection time. When you sit there, stuck in traffic, you can spend quality time with yourself. And if you, like me, spend much time on airports and planes, you have plenty of time to bring out that notepad and jot down your doodles while thinking about how you are doing.
Even if you are not traveling, there are plenty of other opportunities for reflection – if you are working out, spend that time thinking, reflecting on your goals, and your results. You can make it a routine to take five minutes in the morning (or before going to bed at night) to reflect on a topic. Or you could schedule a meeting with yourself every week – 30 mins a week will take you a long way!
Take a couple of minutes right now, and review your weekly activities. Where can you add reflection to an activity? As soon as you figure out that it is quite easy to re-design your time to accommodate for reflection, the next challenge turns up.
Topic
After time, figuring out what to reflect about seems to be the biggest hurdle for leaders I speak with. My answer was: Any reflection is good for you., it does not really matter what you reflect upon, as long as you reflect. In my own reflection, in retrospect obviously, I found that my answer wasn’t very helpful. It was too broad, to open to actually provide a solution.
I realized that most of us had unlearned reflection and reflective behavior, even if reflection is one of two key elements in experiential learning (Kolb, 1984). We need to relearn reflection. As leaders, there are some topics that tend to be more important than others, and the challenge for many leaders is to discover these topics, and to use those as a training ground for relearning reflection. As soon as you start searching for these topics, you realize that those tend to evolve around one main area – leadership.
Questions like «How valid is our goal?», «What is different now, compared to when we started? How does this impact our journey towards the goal?», «Where are we going if we continue down this path?», «What alternative paths are there?», «How can I change my behavior (so I am better suitable to reach our goal)?». The questions themselves may be different, and the answers you seek may not always be what you like to find. That is part of the purpose of reflection – you are to look deeply within to see if you are doing the right thing. For you, for your team, and for the organization.
Impact
I took it upon me to relearn reflection, as well as learning leaders how to reflect. All of the trainings I design are designed with reflection in focus. We use reflection actively to both teach the topic of the training itself, and as a way to exemplify how important reflection is in our learning and development. Often in our trainings, you will go through exercises designed for individual reflection, group reflections and plenum reflections, each iteration adding to your learning. And often without you realizing that what you are doing, is in fact, reflection.
The same is true when you start looking into reflection as a leadership tool. The more you reflect, the more you realize that it comes naturally, and that without it, you are not able to do your job. You will discover that we all reflect, most of the time. By relearning how to use your reflecting skills as a tool in your leaders toolbox, you can increase your ability to see possible challenges early, and seek alternative solutions before you are forced into a corner. You become pro-active.
To create that impact, I invite you to take a couple of minutes to identify three possible topics where you would benefit from reflecting more. If you like, you can share those topics below in the comments.
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Your words and both powerful and thought provoking. I am amazed at how many people I hear complain about how they had to wait at the docotors, or in line at the market. Conversely I also hear so many apologize for making me wait. (I would much prefer they showed appreciation by saying “thank you for waiting”) Any time waiting for me is a time when I have nothing to do except that. Nowhere to go and a perfect time to reflect, read, think, catch my breath. It is the answer to those that wish they had more time, this is the “more” time I use to plan and reflect. Give me a ‘wait’ line anyday! Thank you for your post.
Reflection is a key skill for the 21st century corporate leader for two reasons: a. it enables us to stop, look, listen and feel, which will facilitate less reactivity in business decisions and b. it facilitates connection, and without that serving ourselves, our people and our organizations, we have disconnected decisions and activity. Your blog reinforces the importance of this resource as another aid for our corporate evolution http://bit.ly/Sgzm3l (corporate reflection) and http://bit.ly/Rkcu0G (corporate connection)
Todd: as usual I agree with your views, reflection can be incredibly powerful and I would encourage people to go right back and think about how it was when they started their working lives. There are some really powerful messages there, I got stuck on a train recently and found myself reflecting back 3o years, the results were very interesting and I wrote about it in a post at http://bit.ly/H9XW1U
Thanks for another good one.
Great advice, Kai, and I appreciate your including the sample questions. As for finding time, I think it comes down to telling yourself that this is a priority and attending to it first instead of last (if there is time left). I love David’s practice of “barter coaching” too.
Simple answer – book an appointment, in my case with my on coach, put it in the dairy and keep it sacrosanct, just like I would a hospital appointment.
I also use what I call ‘barter coaching’ with various people I respect. We each give the other some time on current issues at no cost. This works really well when the other person has a different skill set.
Great comments!
What I would love to hear more about is how you use reflection in your current life/work?
Personally, I still find it hard to prioritize reflection when in a busy periode of work – knowing that this is usually the periode that will benefit greatly from taking that time for reflection. How do you do that successfully?
Hi Kai
As a youth worker trained in the 1970’s, reflective practice has been core to my work ever since. So I wholeheartedly support your themes of time, topic and impact. Of the the three, however, reflective practice has real impact – on you as an individual, as well as a professional! Great article! Thanks John
Great points Kai! Since I hired a coach/supervisor I have managed ny reflection much more effectively, in fact I’m often surprised by how much I get from the sessions, despite being a coach myself!
And as a coach to senior people, I find increasingly that what I do is to create structured ‘head space’ for them to work through making sense of the complex world that we all live in these days.
If people (and therefore organisations were to make more time and effort for reflective practices, they would learn faster and better, develop things more effectively and create a thoughtful, proactive culture rather than the frenetic, reactive one that I find is most prevalent in my clients.
Thanks for reminding us all!
Excellent post and great timing. I was just finishing up a post on mental models and the importance of reflection as a way to begin to uncover them.
http://thoughtstreamblog.ca/mental-models-are-all-in-your-head/
As I say in the post, refection in general is a good thing and leaders can facilitate the process by asking questions that require reflection.
A better practice is to ask yourself, and others, questions similar to what you suggest in your post. I also think that if we all took more time to reflect on these types of question our organizations, personal lives and the world as a whole would be a much better place.