Why Reflection Gives Leaders Under Pressure a Sharper Edge

If your days are full but the results are not moving, the problem is rarely effort. More often, it is the absence of any time to consider whether the effort is pointed in the right direction. That is what reflection does, and most leaders under pressure skip it entirely.

This week I have been creating space for leaders to reflect. In the workshops I run as a facilitator, we help leaders deepen their understanding of a particular leadership topic, define an experimental action they will take, and think through how they might achieve it.

I also ask participants to pressure-test those actions, to pre-find failure points or obstacles that might get in the way and to plan their responses. Nothing too innovative in that. The differentiator between a decent leader and a high-performance leader is, however, a surprisingly small thing: reflection. Part of the reason my clients get strong results is that I give them the opportunity to reflect once they have taken those actions.

Why is reflection so powerful?

During busy days we are too preoccupied with delivery to take stock of whether that delivery is having the desired effect, whether it is counter-productive, or whether it is burning time that could go elsewhere. Reflection gives us the opportunity to consider whether what we are doing is the right course of action, and whether there might be a better way of approaching it for greater impact. When I was serving in the military we ran an after-action review following just about everything, working through four questions:

1. what happened,
2. what went well,
3. what had not gone so well and did we know why,
4. what we might change if we were to encounter this, or a similar, situation again.

These four questions form the basis of a simple reflection exercise any person can do in about three to five minutes. In the military, the speed of development and growth of capability was close to exponential, and it became a behavioural pattern because the whole command structure supported it.

Having a sounding board or coach to walk through these questions with you and your team often leads to more being revealed and a greater level of honesty, which is where the breakthroughs come from. It is too easy to skip the reflection altogether or to gloss over the parts that did not go well. That is where I add value. I take away the blame and self-flagellation and focus on the learning, much as I wrote about last week in my blog about learning quickly.

I had the chance to attend a leadership development programme myself this week, as a participant. It was the first time in a fortnight I had had a sustained opportunity to consider what I was trying to achieve and how I was getting in my own way. One lightbulb moment was the question of how I create more opportunity for self-reflection, because when I do it, the results are significant. Blogs come more easily and the content lands at a more human level, which is more authentically me. Whether more frequent reflection would produce the same scale of breakthrough remains to be seen.

Harvard Business School ran a research project in Bangladesh asking workers to reflect on actions they had taken. Over time, a ten to fifteen minute reflection period increased productivity by 23% for those people. When they shared that reflection with another person, productivity rose to 25%.

The evidence is clear. The harder question is how you carve out reflection time when the diary is already full. Here are some ideas, and I would be interested to hear yours.

Habit pairing – Do you commute? Walk the dog? Go for a run? Use that time to reflect on one specific action from the day and work through the four questions above.

Have a place to capture when it happens – A notebook or recording device by your bed or in the bathroom means that when a breakthrough arrives you can capture it before the day takes over again. Writing it down cements the reflection by 10 to 12% and makes it more likely to improve your performance.

Block out time to tackle your biggest challenge right now – If you have been wrestling with something for a while, schedule one hour to reflect on it and on what might be holding you back. Resolving the biggest challenge often clears several others at the same time.

Know that reflecting is like CrossFit – At the start, you might not be able to lift the heavy stuff or go for long, and it can leave you feeling mentally sore, particularly when you have to admit things to yourself you would rather not face. Keep training, though, and your brain gets stronger and better at it, so you can step into that space whenever you need to.

If this sounds like your week

Your managers are not the problem. They are where the problem is stuck.

When your last leadership spend was signed off, did anyone go back to those managers' bosses and ask what changed? That question is the JBL Outcome Standard, and it is how I work.

• Find the friction. A short diagnostic that shows which decisions are stalling, and at what level.
• Am I the bottleneck? Ten questions on where your week is actually going.
• How I work with GMs. Six weeks, one hour a week, up to twelve of your managers, scored by their own bosses.
• Beat Burnout, Boost Performance. The book.
• The High Performance Leader podcast.

Managers I work with reclaim around four hours a week, and their bosses score the change 8.75 out of 10. Would it be a crazy idea to find out how we did this? Book a scoping call.

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