Leadership Hub

Reflective Leadership/Management Practice

Leaders aren’t closely supervised the way frontline staff are — which makes reflection your most reliable tool for ongoing growth.

“We do not learn from experience… we learn from reflecting on experience”
— John Dewey

You engage in reflection each time you stop and think about something that happened, analyze it, and create a plan to improve. As a manager or leader, reflective practice has a different focus, supported by different questions: “What just happened? What went well? What might I have done differently? How will I change my approach next time?”

Reflective practice sounds simple — but done well, it may be the most important and most difficult skill a leader can build.

Reflection Calls for Real Skill

  • observing the effects of your behaviour on others – how skilled are you at picking up subtle communication shifts, like an employee’s change in body language in a meeting, the tone of voice of a colleague in another department, or other indicators that a reaction to your behaviour has occurred?
  • Thinking through the consequences of your behaviour — for example, how accurately can you imagine the dinner table conversations each employee is having with their partner or family about their work?
  • Pinpointing the specifics of your behaviour such that you know what to change to get different results — when an employee seems resistant to one of your ideas or suggestions (and assuming your idea is a good one!), with how much certainty can you discern the source of the resistance: your tone of voice, the timing of the conversation, the language you used, or the assumptions you made?
  • Being honest with yourself — how willing are you to unflinchingly look at yourself?

Reflection may be the most important skill of a leader, because leaders aren’t typically supervised directly. Your own leader likely judges your performance by your team’s output and any complaints that reach them — not by observing your day-to-day conversations and decisions. If that’s the case for you, consistent reflection is your best hope for ongoing improvement.

You’ll see many references to reflective practice throughout the Leadership Hub — it’s as useful a tool for CDPs as it is for their leaders, and helping your own staff build their reflective practice is addressed throughout.

New to reflective practice? Get a quick tutorial with the Reflective Practice Primer, or watch this short video on a leader’s process of self-awareness and reflection.

Ready to get started? Try Becoming a More Reflective Manager or Helping Staff Become More Reflective — two Improvement Bursts to put reflection into practice right away.