Reflective Leadership: Takes Time, Well Worth It

A recent snow day all across New England has made me think deeply about how I might have squandered those days when I was a head of school. Partly because I lived on campus, it was easy to pop down to my office and do the organizing and paperwork that I rarely had time for. Fellow staff members were often around and would pop in and our conversations were longer because we had the time, and I could always get a lovely brunch over in the dining room. Not a bad way to spend such an irregular day, and truly nothing lost and absolutely something always gained. But…might I have found a way to use these fairly rare days differently, not to catch up or get ahead, but rather to commit an act of truly generative leadership: to reflect, ponder and learn more deeply about what I was doing well and where, perhaps, I might improve.

Leadership has to be all about growing and getting better. If it is only about completing tasks and getting ahead, aren’t we missing some opportunities?

The opportunity to consider how you did something, what you learned and what you might adjust next time is key to growing as a leader. One of the key lessons about handling any kind of crisis, for example, was the importance of the de-brief.  What did we do well? Where did we fall short? How did we do as a team? What might we do differently next time? Are there any immediate changes and tweaks we might want to implement right away? And, as I have written elsewhere, let’s not forget how many of the practices, especially the post-crisis critique ones, that we use in crisis management, can be readily incorporated into non-crisis moments.

Is it worth the time it might take? Yes, I say—it’s like building leadership muscle for those days you have to run a marathon. Without incorporating it into your practice, you are reducing your work as a leader into 100% operational day-to-day focus. You were not hired to shovel the snow or create a brilliant filing system, but to lead—step out big and propel the mission and goals of your organization forward with significant strategic steps.

Consider also how alone you often feel as the-one-in charge. How needy you sometimes feel, wanting the encouragement and praise that your board chair or boss rarely brings your way. Self-reflection will feed this appetite for accolades in a much healthier manner, ensuring your resilience and ascertaining that they hired the right person for this senior leadership role. Above all, you will be building the self-confidence to be a true leader.

In a recent blog on LinkedIn, leadership expert and writer, Ken Blanchard describes the importance of doing nothing—he rather perfectly quotes The White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland saying: Don’t just do something, stand there? What a great piece of advice for those of us who are task-driven, aways seeking to fix things and always doing. A few things Blanchard and others suggest are: keep a journal (and remember to look back at it from time-to-time), use the early morning as reflection time—fend off that tendency to read 30 emails and answer each one and fire off a dozen new ones ensuring everyone sees you have already been busy at work in the early hours. Use those early hours for yourself as a leader and as a time where you might consider how best to mentor and guide certain people, and to make notes about conversations that you plan to have with your team members to help them reflect a bit about how they themselves are doing.

Elsewhere you may read about mindsets versus skillsets—more music to my ears. Mindsets include broad approaches to work and leadership—with growth mindset leading the pack. GPStrategies (in their report The Four Mindsets Shaping the Future of Work) also lists enterprise, inclusive, and agile mindsets. Considering each and every day how you are incorporating these mindsets would be a productive way of reflecting your approaches to your work in an ongoing manner. Focusing only on skills, or your skillset, will not take you to higher leadership levels more to faster and easier methods and approaches that fix day-to day managerial tasks. As the workplace becomes more and more complex, we have to look at other ways to use our time as leaders and seek environments where time for reflection is seen as core to success rather than wasted.

We all work at a fast pace—running around, problem-solving, working on weekends are the sign and signals of how things should be, right? No, because this approach has run its course and does nothing but exacerbate stress, bad health, absenteeism and the opposite of psychological safety. Showing the value of reflection within the work day indicates the possibility of regeneration and deep growth. It allows leaders to access their hidden gifts and be role models for their team members whom we hope aspire to be those senior leaders someday.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of reflection is how hard it is to protect in practice. Senior leaders are often the most time-pressured people in an organization, with calendars that leave no white space. Building reflection into leadership practice, whether through journaling, a trusted coach, a peer group, or even deliberate walking time, requires treating it as a genuine discipline rather than a luxury.

The leaders who tend to stand out over long careers aren't necessarily the smartest or most decisive in the moment. They're often the ones who have done the most honest thinking about and analysis of their own experience and let that shape who they become.

Back to those snow days of mine. I think using them as times for reflection would in fact only work if I already had regularly scheduled reflection time and the snow days were just added bonuses. For sure making reflection a more routine part of my personal and professional growth would have benefitted my work. What joy I find now, in my work at SmarterWisdom Consulting, knowing that reflecting with my clients on their work is a key component of our partnership in learning how to become stronger leaders.

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