Four Experiences of Reflective Leadership

Yes­ter­day, as I do a few times a year, I walked a labyrinth locat­ed near where I live. I have post­ed before about using this ancient tool for reflec­tion. It was a cool day, gray over­head, but I found it as easy as ever to engage the path to the cen­ter, med­i­tate for awhile there, and then return — out the way I came in. I was not hold­ing any par­tic­u­lar ques­tion in my mind, but rather sim­ply observ­ing the nature of reflec­tion itself. Come with me on that walk.

I have noticed late­ly a major jump in hits to this site from key­word search­es for “reflec­tive lead­er­ship” or sim­i­lar terms. I post­ed a def­i­n­i­tion not too long ago. In this post, I want to come at this def­i­n­i­tion from some oth­er angles. In a sense, this def­i­n­i­tion is nev­er done. Reflec­tive lead­er­ship is always extend­ing and revis­ing itself because the very process of reflec­tive lead­er­ship demands that. For instance, it seems clear that some peo­ple use the term to mean sim­ply “lead­ers think­ing about things” rather than doing all the time.

At this lev­el, ques­tions such as “What key deci­sions are com­ing up?” or “How do we spark more inno­va­tion on the ABC project?” are exam­ples of reflec­tive leadership.

At anoth­er end of the spec­trum, how­ev­er, the ques­tions are much deep­er, per­haps includ­ing such per­son­al inquiries as “What are my inse­cu­ri­ties and how shall I address them? How are they reflect­ed in this orga­ni­za­tion? What are my real moti­va­tions? What are my shad­ows and blindspots?”

And from yet anoth­er angle, the ques­tions that dri­ve reflec­tion may be as deep but more exter­nal­ly focused, such as “What is the change in the world I want to make? How can I best use my gifts to build com­mu­ni­ty? What will gen­uine­ly bring us togeth­er around [a par­tic­u­lar] issue?”

All of these direc­tions get lumped into the buck­et of reflec­tive lead­er­ship. What uni­fies them, even at the lev­el of the think­ing ver­sus doing, is the notion of stop­ping and mak­ing a sub­jec­tive inner turn to look in the mir­ror of what is hap­pen­ing. In this sense, reflec­tive lead­er­ship depends on a per­son mov­ing to a “meta” lev­el — reflect­ing on their work and them­selves. All forms are legit­i­mate, and I would say typ­i­cal­ly peo­ple will move as they grow from the thinking/doing dilem­ma to the larg­er issues of mean­ing. Left-brain con­sid­er­a­tion gives way to right-brain intu­itive, even sym­bol­ic thought.

Four Types of Reflective Experience

Some years ago, the insight came to me that the real change agents in the world were not peo­ple, cer­tain­ly not me. The real change agents were the reflec­tive expe­ri­ences that go on inside peo­ple, and the best I could do would be to pro­vide oppor­tu­ni­ties for those reflec­tions to occur. Have I fol­lowed this notion in all my work? I wish I had, but the truth is I still spend way too much time advis­ing and not enough help­ing oth­ers focus on the wis­dom they can find with­in themselves.

So what are these reflec­tive expe­ri­ences? Are there key ones? I would say there are four that are par­tic­u­lar­ly pow­er­ful — and all found at the deep­er end of the pool. Some are obvi­ous­ly more impor­tant than oth­ers depend­ing on the per­son, but each makes a con­tri­bu­tion to the whole­ness of the indi­vid­ual. They are all about “what comes up” in the pres­ence of cer­tain aspects of life and the world that touch our sub­jec­tiv­i­ty. They bear on twin aspects of who we are: our sen­si­tiv­i­ty to real­i­ty and our inner strength. They are fun­da­men­tal sources of inner work and direct­ly affect how we lead. They are about who we are in the pres­ence of:

• Silence

• Beau­ty

• Time­less­ness

• Community

1. Silence. What comes to mind in the pres­ence of real silence is a pow­er­ful indi­ca­tor of who we are. Silence, when it shows up, can be an enor­mous gift. What­ev­er is in the back­ground of our think­ing, feel­ing, and intu­ition comes for­ward. Any­time there is silence, the mir­ror is present but some­times more dra­mat­i­cal­ly than oth­ers. I remem­ber a par­tic­i­pant at a “silent break­fast.” A silent break­fast means peo­ple come, eat, and reflect indi­vid­u­al­ly while they eat togeth­er, but they don’t engage in con­ver­sa­tion. After the break­fast in ques­tion, when oth­ers had left, the par­tic­i­pant broke into tears. He turned to one of the facil­i­ta­tors of the break­fast. “What I real­ized this morn­ing is that I have been hav­ing a silent break­fast with my fam­i­ly for twen­ty years!” All that stuff about his fam­i­ly was wait­ing in there for silence to catch up with him — the begin­ning of a jour­ney for this man.

I remem­ber a very dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence of silence at the Grand Canyon. You could call it silence but it was­n’t a dead silence at all, but one sim­ply devoid of human noise. The silence was not dif­fer­ent than the sound of the wind and flit of insects, the occa­sion­al chirp of near­by birds. A col­league turned to me. “It feels like what­ev­er ener­gy you put out there,” she said with a nod to the vast empti­ness of the Canyon, “will come back to you ten times over.”

Silence occurs in oth­er places, too, includ­ing poet­ry. There’s a great line at the end of the poem, “The Invi­ta­tion” by Ori­ah Moun­tain Dreamer.

“I want to know if you can be alone with your­self and if you tru­ly like the com­pa­ny you keep in the emp­ty moments.”

This line alone might be a def­i­n­i­tion of reflec­tive lead­er­ship. The chal­lenge of silence is that it fills with what­ev­er needs to be emp­tied out of a per­son. Silence brings it all for­ward. For some peo­ple this brings a sense of peace and joy. For oth­ers, there is fear, regret, or anger. Silence is a pri­ma­ry means by which we “down­load our own stuff” (to use a phrase a friend of mine invent­ed.) Those who can­not sus­tain the down­load often try to run or hide from them­selves. Effec­tive lead­er­ship demands pre­cise­ly that we do not avoid who we are and what is in us.

2. Beau­ty. What hap­pens when we are in the pres­ence of beau­ty? Whether it is an ele­gant paint­ing or a moun­tain vista or look­ing into the face of a child, beau­ty has a way of pow­er­ful­ly com­mu­ni­cat­ing our con­nec­tion to life. Do we see our actions as the brush­strokes of our lives? Do we see our own beau­ty as individuals?

I remem­ber work­ing with a client who seemed to be oper­at­ing a lit­tle super­fi­cial­ly in terms of her vision. It was too rose-col­ored, and at the same time she seemed to com­mu­ni­cate a under­ly­ing despair. One day, after a walk down a long hill a mem­o­ry came to her of her ex-hus­band and how he had told her he thought she was phys­i­cal­ly ugly. This was the bot­tom point of her walk and of a mem­o­ry that was get­ting in her way. She turned and walked back up the hill. She left the dam­age her ex-hus­band had done at the bot­tom and ground­ed her vision in her full and real expe­ri­ence rather than a fan­ta­sy. She cre­at­ed a dif­fer­ent stand vis a vis her own beau­ty and the beau­ty of the world she want­ed to create.

Some­thing about beau­ty caus­es us to see whether we are tru­ly in life or out of it, whether we have expe­ri­enced our poten­tials or drift­ed away from them. In Rain­er Maria Rilke’s famous poem, Archa­ic Tor­so of Apol­lo” it is not us who see beau­ty, but rather it is beau­ty who sees us:

…there is no place/ that does not see you. You must change your life.

Indeed, once we have been seen by beau­ty, we can­not go back to a con­ven­tion­al view of achieve­ment, suc­cess, and self-inter­est. Beau­ty caus­es us to attend to our incom­plete­ness, our wounds, our com­pas­sion — and also to find and hon­or our own gifts. Frankly, in my view, we have lit­tle chance of a true moral com­pass with­out beau­ty. Our cor­po­ra­tions, filled as they are with greed and com­pet­i­tive­ness, have no beau­ty in them at all. (And you can’t sub­sti­tute expen­sive art on the walls). Beau­ty means the beau­ty of an enter­prise, its prod­ucts, the way it gives ser­vice, the rela­tion­ships of trust inter­nal­ly and exter­nal­ly, and espe­cial­ly the beau­ty of the peo­ple who make it up.

3. Time­less­ness. Peter Koesten­baum, the great lead­er­ship teacher, talks about man­agers who live in and are con­stant­ly bound­ed by time as dis­tinct from those for whom time is a flow. If indi­vid­u­als feels trapped in time Koesten­baum would say that they not “liv­ing their mean­ings” as indi­vid­u­als and they may have dif­fi­cult deci­sions to make about what to do with their life and work.

The expe­ri­ence of “time­less­ness” is often about “the flow” when time no longer seems to mat­ter, but it can also include a strong sense of the tran­sience of things and their cycli­cal nature — the cir­cles of life, as it were. In the most imme­di­ate terms, do we choose to live and work in full, rich ways or do we wait for that to hap­pen at some unnamed point? Are we wait­ing for some future to arrive, for “our ship to come in.” Or do we live in the past and our regrets? This is anoth­er way we run away, espe­cial­ly when we sug­gest we are vic­tims of not hav­ing suf­fi­cient time. Mary Oliv­er’s poem, “The Sum­mer Day asks if we know how to be “idle and blessed” and also asks a ques­tion born from pure timelessness:

Tell me, what is it you plan to do/ with your one wild and pre­cious life?

Answer­ing such ques­tions gives lead­ers a sense of their own depth and inner resources, enabling strength and calm­ness and flexibility.

4. Com­mu­ni­ty. This is the pow­er­ful med­i­cine of look­ing into our own rela­tion­ships. Faced with peo­ple, a broad group of peo­ple with dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives, back­grounds, cul­tures, and voic­es, how do I oper­ate with authen­tic­i­ty? What do I see about the com­mu­ni­ty that it does not see about itself? What does the com­mu­ni­ty see about me that I do not see about myself? How do we share that infor­ma­tion? What is my role in empow­er­ing oth­ers and guid­ing action? What does it mean to pro­vide vision as opposed to awak­en­ing it? What is the change I want to be devot­ed to that is larg­er than myself?

These ques­tions take any of us toward the greater reach­es of under­stand­ing our­selves, espe­cial­ly our own con­di­tion­ing — our his­to­ry, fam­i­ly, cul­ture, social cir­cum­stances and per­son­al expe­ri­ences — in effect, how we were made, who we are, and what our lead­er­ship is about. These rich ques­tions, unlim­it­ed in num­ber, press for con­stant under­stand­ing and ever more learn­ing. When peo­ple wall them out, fail­ing to take a reflec­tive stance, their lead­er­ship becomes a closed mat­ter, ceas­ing to grow, and dead­en­ing to oth­ers. Fac­ing com­mu­ni­ty brings up all the ques­tions of influ­ence, impact, val­ues, con­flict and col­lab­o­ra­tion. Who would we be if we sim­ply chose not to lis­ten to these questions?

When there is lis­ten­ing, dia­logue and under­stand­ing, a cer­tain mutu­al­i­ty grows up and we become tru­ly for each oth­er in new ways. In William Stafford’s rich poem about this mutu­al­i­ty, “A Rit­u­al to Read to Each Oth­er,” he warns us about the risks of not reflecting.

For it is impor­tant that awake peo­ple be awake,
or a break­ing line may dis­cour­age them back to sleep;
the sig­nals we give–yes or no, or maybe–
should be clear: the dark­ness around us is deep.

And in this state­ment, I believe Stafford nails down for us exact­ly why reflec­tive lead­er­ship is so impor­tant — why we can trust noth­ing less in oth­ers or in our­selves. The dark­ness can be deep. My father’s recent death cer­tain­ly has caused me to reflect a great deal on the times between the World Wars in which he grew up and on the risks he faced. We would be naive to think that such times could nev­er come again. It’s all a mat­ter of con­scious­ness.

So by way of an evolv­ing def­i­n­i­tion, reflec­tive lead­er­ship is the capac­i­ty of a leader to active­ly invite in and stand in the pres­ence of silence, beau­ty, time­less­ness, and com­mu­ni­ty. This is the fuel for con­stant learn­ing and growth. That’s a sim­ple def­i­n­i­tion, but with a cer­tain “dimen­sion­al­i­ty” to it. You can keep explor­ing for­ev­er, enrich­ing your sense of the val­ue of each of these qual­i­ties and how they have changed you and can change our soci­ety. They are an anti­dote to noise, ugli­ness, stress, and per­son­al isolation.

I have to tell you that as I walked the labyrinth yes­ter­day, all of these thoughts and more came into me. It was as I reached the cen­ter of the labyrinth, the place of deep­est con­nec­tion, that this notion of “what comes up for a per­son” around the four areas emerged with the great­est force. Then, sud­den­ly, real­iz­ing I had walked to the cen­ter, I looked down. There before me was a big pot, and out of it was emerg­ing a clus­ter of deep green stems from the bulbs below. So it “came up for me” in a dou­ble sense, you see, which is often the path of reflec­tion — a metaphor or an image sud­den­ly sur­faces, not some life­less chain of log­ic to be stu­dious­ly played out in the dark.

Exper­i­ment

Some peo­ple say they learn best through exer­cis­es. I would say I learn through exper­i­ments. Here’s one that may assist you with your own expe­ri­ence of reflec­tive lead­er­ship. Read Step 1 and do it before read­ing or mov­ing on to Step 2, locat­ed beneath the pho­to­graph of two men and a cat.

1. Take a few moments to write down a time when you have observed some­one in a lead­er­ship role fail to reflect effec­tive­ly. Iden­ti­fy any sit­u­a­tion in which the leader did not stop, turn inward, and ful­ly con­sid­er what was hap­pen­ing — and you believe he or she should have done so. What do you think caused the lead­er’s behav­ior? Ulti­mate­ly, what were the impacts on oth­ers and on the prob­lem being solved?

2. Now draw a line. Under­neath it, iden­ti­fy at least one spe­cif­ic time when you act­ed in the same or a very sim­i­lar way. (If you can’t think of a time, per­haps you are exem­pli­fy­ing a non-reflec­tive approach!) What did you per­son­al­ly expe­ri­ence that kept you from reflec­tion in your own sit­u­a­tion? What did it feel like? And how does think­ing about your cir­cum­stance and your own reac­tions influ­ence how you now see the leader in your exam­ple above the line?

Final­ly, allow every aspect of the sit­u­a­tion you named for your­self to deeply sink in. Remem­ber it in every detail. Allow what­ev­er thoughts, emo­tions, or images to emerge and record them.

Then ask your­self, “What am I learning?”

Please share your own views of what reflec­tive lead­er­ship is about and your reac­tions to this post. Since I would say no one real­ly knows that much about the top­ic, this could be a great place to start a help­ful dia­logue for us all.

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