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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.
