I read somewhere that the large majority of blogs that are started every year never make it three months before the writer quits and leaves the old posts to wither on the vine. So, I’m pretty excited to have made it to the 6 month mark with Reflection Leadership.

I had started writing back in the late summer as a diversion to the daily grind of my job. I had originally started out writing a book that I’d been planning for a couple of years but I wasn’t getting immediate satisfaction out of that kind of writing.

After spending a month simultaneously writing and researching about blogging, I decided to give blogging a go. So I started re-appropriating the material I had written into blog posts and at the end of September Reflection Leadership went live.

I’ve enjoyed the process of building Reflection Leadership from the ground up. I very purposefully didn’t share my project with family and friends because I wanted the blog to grow organically without inflating it with loved ones who felt they had to read it.

So far this strategy has worked. In the last six months there have been just under 3,600 unique visitors to Reflection Leadership and the number of folks following along on Twitter has gone from zero to almost 500. I am most gratified and humbled by the support and following of what I have to say.

In honor of this first 6 month anniversary, I thought I’d share a list of the 10 Most Popular articles here at Reflection Leadership over the first six months in case you missed them the first time around:

Understanding Why People Behave the Way They Do – Everyone behaves the way that they do because they are acting through a filter of the rocks (values, assumptions, beliefs, and expectations) that they carry around. Leaders need to recognize that each individual’s reaction to things is going to be different because of their unique set of rocks.

7 Books That Made Me the Leader I am Today - When I look at my bookshelf, I find seven books that I can point to that meant the most to me at the time when I read them. These are the 7 leadership books that help make me the leader that I am today.

An Introduction to Leader-Member Exchange Theory – Leader-Member Exchange theory suggests that every leader has a unique, individual relationship with each follower and that each of these relationships is different in terms of the quality of the interactions based on whether the follower is part of our “in-group” or “out-group”.

What is Reflection Leadership? – Reflection Leadership encourages leaders to take a step back, to begin to reflect and spend more time looking at the why we do what we do every day. By encouraging leaders to take the time to pay closer attention to what is most important, Reflection Leadership can provide us with the tools we need to become more effective leaders.

Should Leaders Focus on Each Individual Follower? – As leaders, do we always need to focus on leading each of our individual followers?

How Are You At Self-Monitoring? – Research suggests that those who are able to accurately read situational cues and adapt their behavior to those cues are high self-monitors and tend to emerge as leaders more often than those that are low-self monitors.

Reflection on Just Ask Leadership – This is a guest post from author Gary B. Cohen that looks at how Just Ask Leadership intersects with Reflection Leadership.

Have You Found Flow? – This is the first in my series of articles about Flow. When we are able to experience Flow on a regular basis we are able to live a happy and satisfying life. When we are able to experience Flow in our everyday work we find the work more satisfying.

Being a Better Team Member – The best way to help a team that we are part of to be high performing is to take the lead in being the best team member we can be. We can accomplish this by focusing on learning from other team members and always remembering that the team is in it together.

Finding What Motivates Followers – As leaders we need our followers to help us work towards our goals or vision. When we are able to motivate our employees they will provide that help. By using Follower Reflection we are able to find what motivates each person individually, allowing us to produce motivated and loyal followers.

My Reflection: I very much appreciate you taking time out of your busy life to spend a few minutes each week reading my material. I hope I can continue to keep your interest by providing meaningful information that you find useful.

You also might be interested in:

1. Being a Better Team Member
2. Should Leaders Focus on Each Individual Follower?
3. The Challenge of Leader-Member Exchange Theory

I’m devoting this week’s articles to author Gary B. Cohen’s recent book, Just Ask Leadership: Why Great Managers Always Ask the Right Questions. In previous articles I reviewed the book and shared an interview with Gary. Today’s article is a guest post from Gary on how Just Ask Leadership intersects with Reflection Leadership.

With so many organizations, governments, and industries imperiled by poor decision-making, leadership has come under question. And justifiably so. The knee-jerk response in times of crisis is for leaders to command more and ask less—to entrust decision-making to fewer and fewer people. But exceptional leaders know that it’s time to ask more, not less.

Reflection Leadership asks leaders to put a mirror up to themselves, the environment, their followers, the organization’s vision, and the systems they use. Reflection requires a pause – deliberation that’s not corrupted by a full schedule book. And reflection is by its nature a question-asking process. Witness some of the questions in this blog’s posts:

• Do we tend to just be a group working on the same stuff or are we a real team?
• Why is it that Erin always seems to be doing work above and beyond, but Julie is content just doing the minimum required and what should I do about it?
• What is the current state of governmental regulation related to our organization and is it likely to change?
• Who are our direct and indirect competitors?

Questions put us in a thoughtful, open-minded mode. They create an environment that allows meaningful changes – personal, leadership, and organizational – to occur.

Not all questions do this, of course. Some questions can spoil discovery (Why did it take so long to figure that out? Why don’t you give your other work this much attention and effort?), undermine authority (Have you gotten proper clearance for that? Why will they care what you think?), or feel like outright attacks (Are you insane? What makes you think you can encroach on my area of expertise?).

At their best, though, questions lead to more engaged and accountable coworkers. Leaders who ask open-ended questions, customized to their audience (that demonstrate knowledge of their preferences and skills), will attract followers. These followers are more apt to become future leaders because they’re being asked for their opinion on matters that concern them and the organization. They know that they have some control over how they do their work, but must be accountable for and learn from their results.

Just Ask leaders know that asking great questions is the first step. They must also strike the right tone – verbally and with body language – and demonstrate that they are truly listening to the answers their coworkers give.

It’s a big step for leaders to stop being answer-providers and become great question-askers. Leaders pride themselves on successful actions and decisions. These actions and decisions are what propelled them into their leadership positions, and some leaders feel compelled to keep acting and deciding in order to justify their titles and paychecks. It’s tremendously hard for leaders to resist the temptation to do others’ work for any number of reasons (both selfish and self-less), but they must. Leaders should focus on serving as a resource, asking important questions, and providing vision, and allow others a chance to shine, so that their energy and intelligence isn’t wasted.

Leader’s Reflection: Asking sends the message that we’re all in this together. Asking creates cohesion and resiliency, which is critical in these uncertain times. A culture of question-askers will test all answers, rigorously and often. And everyone, on all levels, will be inspired to contribute (both questions and answers), knowing they will receive credit for their contributions.

Gary B. Cohen is Partner and Co-founder of CO2 Partners, LCC, working as an executive coach and consultant. He is the author of Just Ask Leadership. For more information please visit: www.justaskleadership.com.

You also might be interested in:

1. Just Ask Leadership – A Book Review
2. Just Ask Leadership – An Interview with Gary B. Cohen (Part II)
3. Just Ask Leadership – An Interview with Gary B. Cohen

Effective leaders are really good at being able to read situations and accurately understand what is going on. They are also able to successfully adjust their behavior, based on the situation, to respond appropriately. One of the things that determines our ability to be able to accurately read situations and respond with the appropriate behavior is our level of self-monitoring.

The concept of self-monitoring was added to the psychology of personality back in the mid-1970’s when it was developed by Mark Snyder. According to Snyder, individuals fall along a continuum from Low Self-Monitoring to High Self-Monitoring.

Those falling on the high end of the scale tend to be able to read situations and use the cues they pick up from the environment or social setting to determine their behavior. Those that fall on the lower end of the scale either aren’t able to read the situational cues as well or don’t use them to change their behavior.

Continuing with my previous description on understanding why people behave the way they do, when we filter an event we’ve experienced using the rocks that we carry around (our values, assumptions, beliefs and expectations), those of us that are high self-monitors will add perceptions and judgements that are related to the external cues, where those that are low self-monitors will add perceptions and judgments that are related to their own internal conditions.

Importance of Self-Monitoring for Leaders

There is research that suggests that those who are high self-monitors tend to emerge as leaders with more frequency than low self-monitors. So if we accept this as true, leaders and those wanting to become leaders should be aware of our self-monitoring ability.

The first step is to use Self Reflection to understand our level of self-monitoring. When we see what is going on around us, do we ignore the situational cues and react the way we always react? (While this makes us consistent, we may be consistently responding inappropriately.) Or, do we adapt our approach and behavior based on the cues we are picking up?

Once we have an idea of our level of self-monitoring there are two areas that we can focus on to improve our ability to self-monitor; reading situational cues and adapting our behavior accordingly.

Picking Up On Cues

Some folks are just better than others at reading people and situations. But there is a sure-fire way to begin to be better at reading situational cues and that is to pay attention. Clearly, it is much harder to read another person if we aren’t focused on that person.

There is a whole sub-field of psychology that is devoted to reading nonverbal cues such as body language. If we aren’t paying attention to someone’s body language, we are missing some important cues to the situation.

This paying attention is even more important if we do much of our work by phone. I’ve spent thousands of hours coaching and mentoring people on the phone and when I pay attention I’m able to pick up cues in the conversation; the words they use or don’t use, the tone of their voice, their level of engagement.

If we pay attention we begin to recognize the cues around us. Over time, as we recognize different cues we can put together a “library” of cues that we see and the different behaviors we have tried in response to those cues. This is some what of a trial and error process. We may recognize the cues, but our reaction may be completely inappropriate. So the next time we recognize those particular cues, we need to try a different reaction looking for the one that has the positive outcome we seek.

Adapting Behavior

When we are able to recognize the cues in situations, we then need to be able to adapt our behavior to the situation. Again, some folks are just better at adapting their behavior than others. When you get used to being in situations where individuals are inconsistent in their actions and/or their messaging, you tend to get better at adapting your own behavior to the situation, sometimes out of sheer self-preservation.

The secret here is not acting in a way that dismisses ourself and who we are in order to just “look good” to others. Rather it is to understand the situation for what it is and to bring out those parts of ourself, or as I like to say dig a little deeper into the bag of rocks that we carry around, to find the most appropriate response to the situation that is still true to who we are.

In order to do this, we need to have a good understanding of who we are and what rocks (values, assumptions, beliefs and expectations) we are carrying around with us.

When we are able to adapt our behavior based on the cues of the situation, it allows us to seek positive results. This is really at the heart of what Stephen Covey talks about when he says that highly effective people Think Win-Win. When we are able to read situational cues accurately, it opens the door for us to change OUR behavior to produce truly win-win results.

Leader’s Reflection: Research suggests that those who are able to accurately read situational cues and adapt their behavior to those cues are high self-monitors and tend to emerge as leaders more often than those that are low-self monitors. Leaders can begin to improve their ability to pick up on situational cues by paying attention. Once we’re able to recognize situational cues, we need to adapt our behavior to the situation and seek win-win results by having a good understanding of our values, assumptions, beliefs and expectations.

You also might be interested in:

1. 6 Months of Reflection Leadership
2. Are You a Type A or Type B Leader?
3. Leaders Need to Monitor Their Own Behavior

I’ve often said that Reflection Leadership starts with being able to take the time to stop and reflect on what is going on around us. But what happens when you feel like you can’t take the time to stop and reflect? I found myself in this exact situation this week.

There’s Work To Be Done

I’m currently working on the final stages of a large project that started a year ago that will culminate with a large number of deliverables 17 days from now. This project touches most of the organization and has required the efforts of a large number of people across many departments. My role has included shepherding the entire project along and more importantly this month, I am responsible for getting the last part of the project completed.

Because of team decisions made earlier in the project, we find ourselves with a large amount of work to do in the last three weeks of the year, which will require a small group of folks to work over the holiday week. A time that has traditionally been a slow time for us.

This week, as we try to not only make sure we will meet our first of the year deadline but also limit the amount of work that will need to be done in the last week, we are working feverishly. The beginning of the week didn’t start off well with the added drama that I talked about earlier that has upped everyone’s stress level.

Getting The Work Done

After working half a day on Sunday to get a jump on the week, I’ve worked four straight double-digit days, including over 16 hours on Monday. Having the knowledge that this project will be done after this stressful three-week period was justification for accepting what is going on this week. I certainly didn’t need to take the time to stop and reflect on what is going on. I just needed to plow through the work and get it done.

By Wednesday, my body had other plans for me. I woke up experiencing narrowed vision, not being able to see as well peripherally. I was having trouble eating and I had some serious heartburn. But, there was still work to be done. So I worked another 12 hour day plowing through.

After the way I felt on Wednesday, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to sustain this pace for the next two weeks. I’m becoming more and more aware of the fact that I’m not as young and resilient as I once was. On Thursday morning I came to the conclusion that I really didn’t have a choice, I was going to have to take time to stop for reflection.

Taking The Time to Reflect

When the weather is warmer and I find myself in this type of situation, I’ll go for a bike ride in the morning along the beautiful Delaware River. The fresh air and the scenery rushing by allows my head to clear and my thinking to be more focused.

But going for a ride in the dark with the temperatures in the 20s was not going to happen, so I trudged down to ride the exercise bike for the first time in over a week.

Usually when I ride indoors I either watch a TV show or movie or listen to music and read. But this day, I knew I had to take the time I needed. I put on my Meditation playlist and just rode. During that ride, I was able to effective stop and reset my thinking so that I can start to better understand how to get the work done without succumbing to the stress.

Many times I’ve talked about the different parts of Reflection Leadership and that for leaders to be effective we need to practice all of the parts of Reflection Leadership. But sometimes we find ourselves in situations where the only important thing is self-preservation. If we are unable to preserve ourselves, we certainly can’t be effect leaders and, even worse, it could have some very serious physical and mental consequences.

What my week has shown me is that sometimes Reflection Leadership needs to be stripped down to its most basic essence and we need to actually stop and recognize what we are doing to ourselves and reflect on what we can do to continue to be productive without be self-destructive.

Leader’s Reflection: Reflection Leadership is all about being able to stop and reflect on what is going on around us so that we can have a clearer understanding of what we need to do to lead effective. But sometimes, when we are the most overwhelmed and stressed, Reflection Leadership means taking the time to stop and recognize that we need to preserve ourselves.

You also might be interested in:

1. Staying Focused When Things Get in the Way
2. A Giving of Thanks
3. 6 Months of Reflection Leadership

I really wish I could figure out the lesson that the universe is trying to get me learn. For the second time in just over five years, I’m finding myself in a situation where I just can’t win. After a successful tenure at three (and a half) different jobs, the last two have turned out to be hard to understand.

I was brought up in a time when hard work and perseverance was not only strived for, but rewarded. When looking at the generation that I belong to, I end up being a tweener. I was born in the first few days of 1965 and most folks view those born up to 1964 as part of the baby boom generation and those starting in 1965 being in Gen X.

My parents were literally baby boomers, born towards the end of World War II, but I tend towards the best qualities of both the Baby Boom generation and Gen X. Honestly, I consider myself the first of the Sesame Street Generation, since I was 4 years old when the show first aired, the original target audience.

So the timing of my upbringing has instilled in me a wonderful work ethic, where I do the work because it’s what needs to be done. And when you do want needs to be done and contribute in a substantial way to the progress of the organization you are rewarded through greater responsibility, greater challenges and an opportunity to lead.

This served me well for the first twenty-two years of my working life. But something seems to have happened in the last eight years. In both of the last two places I have worked, sticking to a dedicated work ethic and doing what needs to be done, while contributing to the progress of the organization is no match for those with an agenda that also have a power base in the organization.

I’ve recently been experiencing this for the second in five years in a second organization and I have to say, as someone who knows leadership development and organizational development, I am flabbergasted at getting blind sided by this…again. What I can’t discern is if this is a trend or if I keep being drawn to the wrong types of organization.

I’m always amazed how difficult organizational and leadership issues can be to detect and do anything about when we are in the midst of the issues ourselves. This is why having external consultants and coaches makes so much sense. They are able to see the forest through the trees and get at the heart of issues that we get stuck on because we are mired in the day-to-day struggles.

Now that I’ve gone through this experience twice, I’m still not sure what I could have done differently to avoid the situation. Playing the political games, having an agenda and always approaching things with a CYA focus seems to be counterproductive and doesn’t appeal to me.

But one thing has become clear to me, something has changed and I don’t like where we are heading. Because nice guys really shouldn’t finish last. Hard work, loyalty and dedication should still mean something.

Leader’s Reflection: Based on my experience over the past eight years, nice guys (those who do the work that needs to be done and contribute to the progress of the organization in a substantial way) have to find ways to counteract those who have a power base that have their own agenda.

You also might be interested in:

1. Sources of Power
2. Influence, Power and Authority
3. Characteristics of Flow: Loss of Ego

In two of my previous articles, I looked at an explanation of why people behave the way they do and why it’s important for leaders to monitor their own behavior. In this article, I’d like to explore why this is all so important for leaders to understand as they are working with others.

To quickly review: as we experience various “events” we filter what we experience through the rocks that we carry around with us (our values, assumptions, beliefs, and expectations). This filter allows us to add our perception and judgement to what we’ve observed, leading us to a conclusion about what we have experienced. This conclusion is then altered by our current emotions and feelings and finally we react to initial event. Most times we go through this process in milliseconds, making it seem like we have an “immediate” reaction.

As I’ve said before, one of our fundamental roles as leaders is to encourage others to follow and one best ways to do that is to understand what motivates our followers and discover how we can help them to achieve their goals.

What Rocks Are They Carrying Around?

I’ve observed in the past that a key to this, of course, is understanding who they are as individuals by working in a deliberate way to understand what rocks they are carrying around in their bags. But this is only part of the equation. It allows us to understand what rocks they may be using to filter events through, but this may still not explain their behavior.

Make no mistake, when we get to know those around us and they allow us to see the rocks they carry around with them it can go a long way to understanding how they will react. But knowing what our coworkers values and beliefs are won’t always account for their behavior if the conclusion they have drawn is faulty or their current emotions and feelings end up driving their behavior.

Have They Come To The Right Conclusion?

As individuals we need to take care and slow down our reaction time so that we know we have accurate information in order to appropriately process what we have experienced.

As leaders, we can help those we work with to see events more clearly. This is where transparency comes into play (I recognize that transparency is becoming a quickly overused buzzword these days, but I am using it here on purpose.).

When we provide others with the information that was previous hidden to them, they can immediately have a better understanding of what they’re experiencing. The more information we can give to folks, the more information they have at their disposal so that they can choose to use the appropriate rocks to filter their experiences through.

How Are They Feeling?

The other thing we can do as leaders it to not only recognize the emotions and feelings of others, but also help them to articulate those emotions and feelings. When we help others to recognize their emotions and feelings it helps mitigate how much emotions will drive their behavior.

This in itself is easier said than done because many of us have trouble recognizing and articulating our own feelings, let alone what others are feeling. But by drawing attention to the fact that we all have emotions and feelings and that they have an effect on our behavior, instead of pretending that there is no place for emotions and feelings in the workplace, we start to help others be in better control of their emotions.

You may remember the FISH! phenomenon that happened several years back. One of the four pillars that the FISH! philosophy was built upon was “Choose Your Attitude” and for good reason.

Every day we should accept and acknowledge our attitude, otherwise it has the potential to overwhelm our interactions with others. As leaders we can help create the workplace that we want by helping others to not only accept their attitude, but to choose a positive attitude each day.

We all know that when we have a positive attitude, the positive emotions and feelings will follow. And when we are experiencing positive emotions and feelings we are more likely to behave in ways that are more congruent with our rocks.

Leader’s Reflection: In order for leaders to be attuned to the behaviors of those around them, they not only need to see and respect the rocks others are carrying, they also need to make sure they are giving their followers the crucial information they need to accurately interpret the events happening around them. Leaders also need to help others recognize and articulate their emotions and feelings so that appropriate behavior and reactions are not overtaken by emotions.

You also might be interested in:

1. Leaders Need to Monitor Their Own Behavior
2. Understanding Why People Behave the Way They Do
3. What Rocks Are You Carrying Around?

I’ve been following Dr. Bret Simmons’ recent posts on Leadership Development. In a comment left on this post, Mary Jo Asmus describes how she tries to incorporate reflection when working with her coaching clients.

This all started me thinking about my own approach to leadership development and how reflection is at the heart of it.

Leadership Can Be Learned

While I believe that leadership can be taught, it can only be taught to those who want to learn. So really, I should say that I believe that leadership can be learned. That’s where leadership development has to start, with individuals who are ready, willing and able to learn. If we aren’t interested in being a leader or learning to be a more effective leader, having someone try to teach us leadership is a waste of time.

I’ve never been a big fan of learning individual leadership theories. I think sometimes we can get caught up in the latest and greatest leadership theory and try to explain everything through the lens of that theory. The world is much too complicated to be able to apply a single leadership theory to every situation. Like the saying goes, if all we have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Leadership is Personal

I’ve always thought that leadership is more personal and less academic. I don’t think we can be effective leaders just by following a single program or a theory. It’s much more personal than that. I really think to be great leaders we need to take bits and pieces of different leadership programs and theories and find a way to make them part of who we are.

To me, leadership development needs to begin with the individual. Sometimes we’ll see it written that effective leaders need to “lead themselves before they can lead others.” While I agree with this, I think it’s more correct to say that leaders need to know and understand themselves before they can effectively lead others.

So to me, leadership development needs to begin with understanding ourselves. We need to know who we are, what we’re about, what we care and are passionate about. We need to understand why we act and react the way we do. In the beginning, whether what we find is good or bad doesn’t really matter. We have to start with a baseline understanding of who we are. From there we can begin to work on those aspects of ourselves we want to change.

Leadership Reflection

This is where Reflection Leadership comes in. Reflection needs to be part of every leader’s practice. The only way to really understand ourselves is to take the time to reflect on who we are.

We need to be able to articulate our values, assumptions, beliefs and expectations. We need to be able to understand our personality traits and how these traits play out in our daily interactions. When we are able to truly understand ourselves as individuals, it helps us to better understand others and everything else that is going on around us.

When we use reflection to get a better understanding of who we are, we create a habit or a reflection practice that can serve us in more ways, ways that allow us to reflect on all of the things leaders need to pay attention to on a daily basis.

Once we’ve created the habit of reflecting on a daily basis, we can begin to take the time to reflect on our followers, our personal vision and our vision for the organization, the systems that we’ve created to support the vision, and the environment in which we’re operating.

Leadership development needs to be about developing effective leaders. Effective leadership starts with individuals who are authentic as a result of knowing who they are as individuals. Reflection allows us to take the time to stop and understand not only who we are and why we do what we do, it also allows us to better understand what is going on around us so that we can take more thoughtful action.

Leader’s Reflection: Leadership development means more than just learning how to be a leader. It means learning how to use reflection to better understand ourselves. Once we are able to truly understand ourselves we can continue to use reflection on a regular basis to better understand what is going on around us.

You also might be interested in:

1. Leadership Development: Just in Case or Just in Time
2. Personal Development and Well Being Blog Carnival – 11/15/09
3. February Leadership Development Blog Carnival

Practicing what I call Reflection Leadership helps us, as leaders, to be able take the time to reflect on what’s going on around us. By taking this time to reflect, we are able to rise above the clatter of everyday issues to recognize those things that are most important. This reflection also allows us see with greater clarity what needs to be done in any give situation.

But where do we start? Reflection Leadership isn’t about locking our office door so that we can contemplate our navel lint. The whole purpose of the reflection is to do help us to better understand what is going on so that we can lead more effectively. What we discover through our reflection needs to be useful in our leadership practice or we won’t do it. The time we spend reflecting needs to be productive.

Below I’ve listed the four steps needed to make Reflection Leadership a productive part of your current leadership practice.

4 Steps to Practicing Reflection Leadership

1. Stop. This is the step that is most crucial. If you can’t find the time to stop running from issue to issue, you will never be able to reflect in a meaningful way about what is going on. You know that you haven’t been taking the time to stop when you constantly feel harried and overwhelmed because there is too much to do.

2. Develop a Reflection Practice. Reflection Leadership is not something you do once or twice, or only when you have time, or only when the going gets tough (or when things are easiest). It needs to be practiced regularly in order help you be an effective leader. You need to create a practice that is done on a regular basis. The more you do it on a regular basis, the sooner it will become habit and the sooner it will be engrained into your everyday work.

3. Act upon your reflections. A reflection practice cannot be about sitting around and contemplating your navel lint. In fact, taking the time to stop and reflect really does become a waste of time if you don’t do anything with what you discover through your reflection. Your reflection should lead to some sort of action; a change in your perspective, a change in how you relate to others or a change in how you relate to the world around you.

4. Go back and reflect again. Just like any typical feedback system, Reflection Leadership requires ongoing reflection. Many times the changes that we make create unforeseen results and additional reflection is needed to determine if the changes we have made were beneficial and sufficient.

Just like anything new, the first hard part is getting started. So commit today to finding a way to practice Reflection Leadership. But more important is getting past the second hard part and that is sustaining the practice. Your results will not be immediate, so you’ll need to have patience and continue working at it. But if you follow these steps and continue to make Reflection Leadership an ongoing part everyday experience overtime it will help you to become a more effective leader.

How do you incorporate reflection time into your daily leadership practice? What results have you seen?

You also might be interested in:

1. What is Reflection Leadership?
2. Creating a Reflection Practice
3. What is Systems Reflection?

Reflection Leadership is all about being able to take the time to stop and reflect on those things that are most important in our leadership practice. The kinds of things that we need to reflect on include the individuals that follow us, the vision that we have for where we want to go, the systems we have in place in our organization, and the environment in which our organization operates. Perhaps most importantly, we need to be able to reflect on who we are, both as individuals and as leaders.

For many folks, the hardest part of Reflection Leadership is being able to stop, look and listen so that we can begin to understand what is going on around us. Since we tend to work at such a breakneck speed, it is hard to justify to ourselves being able to stop and do nothing. But stopping to reflect is hardly doing nothing. Stopping and napping would be doing nothing, but reflection is an action activity. It is true that we need to stop in order to do it, but it is an activity nonetheless.

Getting Started

Like most new habits that we want to create, the first step needs to be the decision to get started. Once we have made the decision that we need to be more reflective in our leadership, we need to create a Reflection Practice. I’m not going to spend time here talking about how to be successful at creating a new positive behavior. Others do a much better job of explaining how to do it. Instead I want to focus on what a Reflection Practice is so that it can be incorporated in daily activities.

Reflection Practice is the activity of quieting the mind and body to allow for reflection to happen. It is something the reflective leader needs to work at daily in order to be able to focus on the all of the areas of Reflection Leadership.

The reflection practice can be called by many names: meditation, prayer, getting in tune with the Universal mind. While it certainly can take on mystical or spiritual qualities it doesn’t really need to. A reflection practice will be as unique as the individual involved. The important thing is that it requires the reflective leader to stop and take the time to reflect.

Creating a Reflection Practice
There are some basic steps that we need to follow in order to create an effective reflection practice:

Set aside time every day

Once we recognize the need to stop and reflect, it has to become a habit. The only way to create and maintain this habit is to do it on a regular basis, after all that’s what makes it a habit. We need to find a time in the day that belongs only to us. Allow no interruptions; no phones, no computers, no screaming kids, no screaming coworkers. The best thing to do is to actually set aside this time in our daily planner and make it unchangeable. We shouldn’t let anything else replace it in our schedule if at all possible.

Find a place conducive to reflecting

The goal here is to find a place that will allow us to quiet our mind and body. It really can be anywhere, but for the duration of the reflecting period we should remain still. So we need to find a place that is quiet, with a minimum of distractions where we can sit comfortably. We want this space to comfortable in a non-painful sort of way, not in a “this is so comfy I want to fall asleep” sort of way. The temperature in the space should not be too hot or too cold. We want to minimize anything that can distract us from our purpose at hand.

Quiet the mind

Once we have found our quiet, comfortable place, we can begin to quiet our mind. At first this can be difficult for many folks. We spend our entire day running from place to place, dealing with issue after issue and it’s hard to just turn all of that off. But here is the good news: it really can be done. Start by sitting still. You can keep your eyes open or close them. Personally, I prefer to close my eyes because it helps me to focus on the task at hand.

In order to quiet the mind, we need to focus on something else. For centuries focus on breathing has been a choice for many and for good reason. It is something we have to do while we are sitting and something we usually don’t pay any attention to throughout our day. We just breath naturally, in and out, in and out. But as we do it as part of our reflection practice, we need to pay attention to each breath. Let everything else go and focus on each breath. If you need help staying focused on each breath, try counting breaths backwards from 50. Each inhale is 1/2, each exhale the next whole number. So as we start, inhaling the first breath, we think 1/2. On the exhale we think 50. The second inhale is 1/2, exhale is 49 and so on. This helps to keep the focus on our breathing.

Choose a reflection focus

As we get more adept at focusing on our breathing, we find that our mind begins to quiet down. It is at this point that we are able to begin seeing what is most important. With a quiet mind we can begin to bring to the front of our thoughts those things that we want to reflect on today. It is not possible to reflect on all of the aspects of Reflection Leadership at the same time, so this is the point where we need to decide what our reflection focus will be today. Maybe it is our personal values or understanding why certain systems in the organization are blocking us from success. Whatever it is we need to choose what today’s focus will be and put a clear statement in our mind of exactly what we want to reflect upon.

Accept what you find

The key here is not to force any particular thoughts or feelings to the surface. While continuing to focus on each breath, we need to pay attention to where our thoughts go. At this point we shouldn’t judge or try to influence the flow of thought, just let them happen and experience them. If we find that we are heading away from our reflection focus for the day, we need to calmly review the clear statement of exactly what we want to reflect upon.

Reflect on what it means

After we have allowed ourselves to generate what seem to be random thoughts about our reflection focus, it is time to reflect on what it all means and what we can do about it. While we are still in our quiet time and space we should start to reflect on what we have found. Sometimes there will be a clear picture that gives us the answer that we are seeking. Sometimes the picture isn’t so clear. It may be that we won’t get any answers from a particular reflection session and will need to come back to the same reflection focus again. We may need to take our reflection away with us to another place and time where we can be more creative in our reflection. But at this point we have accomplished the act of finding the issues that are most important for us to pay attention to.

When we are able to take these steps and follow them everyday, we will have a reflection practice that begins to yield results. We will be able to quiet our minds to cut through the daily noise so that we are able to focus on those things that are most important.

You also might be interested in:

1. 4 Steps to Practicing Reflection Leadership
2. Characteristics of Flow: Deepened Concentration
3. Reflection and Leadership Development

Sometimes I look at leadership a lot like I look at art. I may not be able to explain exactly why a particular painting is good art, but I know it when I see it. The reverse is also true. When I see a bad painting (here I’m thinking of Elvis Painted on Black Velvet) I it is not good art. Leadership tends to work the same way. Some folks make leadership look effortless and are really effective leaders. Others work hard at it and still couldn’t lead their way out of a paper bag.

I was reading Wally Bock’s post, “Can Leadership Be Taught?” and it got me thinking. While I’m still up in the air about the effectiveness of teaching leadership (even though I’ve done it for a number of years), I am convinced that leadership can be learned. I certainly believe that in order to become effective leaders we also need to be lifelong learners. But learning is something we do as individuals it is not something that is done to us. There are different ways that we learn how to be leaders.

How do we learn leadership?

We generally learn how to be a leader from three main sources. First we can learn about leadership by reading books, magazines, journals (even blogs like those listed in this post), or taking courses and workshops. Second we can learn about leadership by observing others lead. The third way we can learn about leadership is the trial by fire method of learning from our own leadership experiences.

Learning by Reading

Learning about leadership through reading or workshops to me is more academic. We get to read about how others have led or about theories of what makes for effective leadership. My concern with this type of learning about leadership is that it is academic. Being able to read about leadership is one thing; being able to turn that learning into practice is something entirely different. Since so much of leadership needs to be situational, it is oftentimes hard to read about a leadership technique that is new to us and has worked so well for others when our situation doesn’t lend itself to that particular technique. In fact, when we try using a technique that isn’t suited to our situation it can backfire and cause bigger issues. Sometimes the best way to learn how to be an effective leader in our own setting is to watch how those around us lead.

Learning by Observing

Observing others lead is more experiential. We get to experience the consequences of others leading, both good and bad. This experience with other leaders may come from being led by others or by watching how someone else leads from afar. This could be someone in our own organization, a colleague outside of the organization, or even someone that we admire as a leader but have never met. We learn leadership by observing others and selecting the things we want to emulate from effective leaders and discarding the things we don’t want to emulate from ineffective leaders. It’s sort of like when we are growing up and we experience how our parents are treating us and we vow never to act that way with our own children. As with most things, we can improve by focusing on the strengths of effective leadership and not focusing on the weaknesses of ineffective leadership. Keeping the good stuff and staying away from the bad stuff.

Learning by Doing

The third, and in my opinion most powerful way to learn about leadership is to, as the old Nike campaign said, just do it. Make no mistake, leadership is hard work and takes an inordinate amount of energy to sustain. Certainly no one likes to learn by trial and error because it takes time and is frustrating and tedious, so learning leadership along the way takes time and energy. It is hard work! But learning leadership by doing it can have much more lasting results in the development of our leadership skills. But, when we use this trial and error method, we need to be sure that as we learn we are constantly reflecting on how we are doing; what works and what doesn’t work so that over time we are improving as leaders.

While I certainly think the most powerful way to learn leadership is by doing, each of these three ways I describe are useful and have their place in our leadership development. So what have you found to be the most helpful way to learn to be a more effective leader?

You also might be interested in:

1. Leadership Development: Just in Case or Just in Time
2. 7 Books That Made Me the Leader I Am Today
3. How Are You At Self-Monitoring?