The Practice of Reflective Leadership

For more than thir­ty years I’ve been fas­ci­nat­ed by how as lead­ers we increase our self-knowl­edge through reflec­tion and how in turn this helps us:

• gain insight into our beliefs, val­ues and motivations

• chal­lenge unhelp­ful thought pat­terns and behaviors

• increase sen­si­tiv­i­ty to the needs and emo­tions of others

• stay ground­ed and resilient in the face of chal­lenge and adversity.

Beyond these ben­e­fits, it’s also clear that our capac­i­ties to self-reflect, learn and enact per­son­al changes can be a vital mod­el for oth­ers. A lead­er’s per­son­al growth incul­cates the val­ue of self-knowl­edge as part of an orga­ni­za­tion’s culture.

In his book, Wis­er: The Sci­en­tif­ic Roots of Wis­dom, Com­pas­sion, and What Makes Us Good, neu­ropsy­chi­a­trist Dilip Jesse dis­tin­guish­es self-reflec­tion from self-aware­ness, call­ing out self-reflec­tion as seem­ing to be “a unique­ly human trait.”  Mem­bers of oth­er species may rec­og­nize their indi­vid­u­al­i­ty and in that sense be self-aware, but only humans appear to intro­spect, mean­ing we are able to exam­ine “our own men­tal and emo­tion­al process­es to bet­ter under­stand their fun­da­men­tal nature, pur­pose and essence…a pro­found­ly impor­tant and obvi­ous ele­ment of wisdom.”

Would you like to learn more about reflec­tive lead­er­ship prac­tices and see how you can apply them, what­ev­er your orga­ni­za­tion­al role? If so, that’s won­der­ful and you’ll want to start or con­tin­ue your inner work with aware­ness of the fun­da­men­tal rea­sons that it is vital to you. It might, for exam­ple, relate to expe­ri­ences of pain or uncer­tain­ty, anx­i­ety or to deep curios­i­ty about your iden­ti­ty, pur­pose and your vision for your work. To be of val­ue, you must be ready to under­take mean­ing­ful self-inquiry.

If you are ready, please be in touch at this address so that we can set up a time to talk. As a long-time, inde­pen­dent lead­er­ship coach and cul­ture change con­sul­tant, I col­lab­o­rate with clients on design of coach­ing and con­sult­ing efforts cus­tomized to per­son­al needs, inter­ests, appli­ca­tions and aspirations. 

Recent­ly, I’ve assem­bled a guide­book for reflec­tive leaders: 

It’s about 200 pages filled with a wide vari­ety of self-inquiries, exer­cis­es and stim­u­lat­ing ideas. We can use this book as a gen­er­al foun­da­tion and ref­er­ence for coach­ing work we do togeth­er. Here is a selec­tion from the book’s table of contents:

Intro­duc­tion: How to be a reflec­tive leader

Fun­da­men­tals

• What is my core lead­er­ship question?

• What is my conditioning?

Con­nec­tions

• How deep does my empa­thy go?

• How good a part­ner am I?

Self-sup­port

• What are my boundaries?

• How well do I man­age self-doubt?

Tough emo­tions

• How well do I meet anxiety?

• How well do I meet guilt?

Ref­er­ence points

• What are my cor­po­rate values? 

• What is my rela­tion­ship to power?

Growth and change

• What are my blind spots?

• How good am I at get­ting unstuck?

Out­comes

• What is the nature of the orga­ni­za­tion I want to create?

• What is my legacy?

A Vision of Hope

For addi­tion­al infor­ma­tion about me, please access my unfold­ing lead­er­ship website.

I look for­ward to hear­ing from you!

---