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Reflective Leadership/Management Practice

“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 has happened, analyze what happened, and create a plan to improve. When you develop and follow a system for doing this, you are engaging in reflective practice. If you are a former frontline practitioner, you are likely familiar with making this process a formal and deliberate method for continuous professional improvement. As a manager/leader, reflective practice has a different focus, and is supported by different questions. 

“What just happened there? What went well? What might I have done differently? What thoughts is the employee walking away with? How will I change my approach next time?”

At one level, reflective practice sounds simple and obvious. Who doesn’t think about what they’ve done and how to improve it? However, at another level, quality reflection may be the most difficult and important process you will undertake as a leader. Done well, reflection calls for some skills/actions that are often quite difficult:

  • 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, such as 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 are not typically supervised directly. Most managers are not regularly observed by their leaders, so they need to rely on their own abilities to see the results of their actions, analyze, and make plans to change. Your leader likely deduces your level of performance by reviewing your team’s output and attending to complaints by your employees, clients, or colleagues. They likely spend little or no time listening in on your conversations with staff or observing the myriad of other tasks you perform. If this is the case, the consistent practice of reflection is your best hope of ongoing improvement. 

You will see many references to reflective practice in the Leadership Hub. It is as useful a tool for CDPs as it is for their leaders, so helping your staff establish their reflective practice approaches is addressed and encouraged throughout the hub.  

If reflective practice is new to you or you want to review its fundamentals:

If you just want to get started on your reflective practice or help staff with theirs, select one of these Improvement Bursts: Becoming a More Reflective Manager or Helping Staff Become More Reflective, the first two in a collection of general bursts.