Reflective leadership practice: 10 key points to consider

Is your reflective practice helping you to be a better leader? Is that a question you ask yourself?

High-quality, effective reflection is an essential and inherent component of successful leadership. Do you spend the right amount of time reflecting? And, is that time productive?

Could your reflective practice be enhanced, and if it was, what would be the benefits for you, your team, and your organisation?

Improve your reflective practice

Below is an outlined of a 10 layer framework that can help you to question your reflective practice:

🤔CONTENT: What do you focus your attention on? The content of a reflection is critical for it to be productive. Do you, for example reflect on goals, relationships, methods, self? Do you reflect on surprises, frustration, failure? Do you reflect on a leadership model or a set of good practice criteria? Have you ever analysed the content of your reflections? What would be typical for you to be reflecting about?

🤔SOLUTION: What is the outcome of your reflective practice? Does it help

you to resolve an issue, find a solution, improve practice, make a change? Does it create an upward spiral? Does it help you find the internal energy needed for an outside set of actions? Does it relieve doubt, hesitation, difficulties? Does it need to be more focused on results from reflection?

🤔STRUCTURES: What structures help you to achieve deep or broad reflection? How are you supporting cognition? How are you helping yourself to be playful or systematic, open or focused, sequenced or free flow?

🤔SPACE: Where do you carry out reflection? Space – temporal and physical has an impact on reflective practice. Do you have the self-discipline to set aside the right time? Do you consider your physical environment? When and where do you have most success in reflecting, and what does this make you think about? What benefits and drawbacks are there of your reflective space?

🤔TOOLS: What tools enable you to reflect from different perspectives? Do the tools you use create new insights, help to take your thinking to a new level, push you to be more creative or more analytical?

🤔HARNESS: What strategies help you to extract the most important aspects from your reflections? Are you in danger of reflection without impact? Does the reflection become too ethereal?

🤔MINDSET: How do you prepare for reflection to ensure you are open, creative, deep, broad, focused?

🤔TYPES: Are you utilising ‘reflecting-in-action’ and ‘reflection-on-action’? Reflecting-in-action is taking in the live, moment by moment reflective data so that you can make adjustments whilst action is taking place.

🤔POSITIVE: Do you engage in positive reflection, e.g. learning how to lean in and maximise your strengths? Do you consider what has gone well and what you can learn from this? Do you think about what to be grateful for? Do you reflect on what to celebrate?

🤔COLLABORATIVE: What percentage time is spent in collaborative reflection and does it produce the benefits that you seek? What tools and structures help you to ensure collaborative reflections are productive? How do you create the right culture that enables reflection to be honest and enable colleagues to mine for the most important information?

Find out more about how I can:

🚀 help you to reflect

🚀 support you to harness your reflections

🚀 enable you to improve your reflective practice beyond the coaching sessions themselves.

WHY REFLECTIVE LEADERSHIP MATTERS

In leadership literature that are many theories and books that can help a leader build their knowledge of leadership. However, in practice theories and models are hard to map onto the real world. In a complex, unique, fast-moving environment, you need something else, something that works alongside others types of professional development to help you succeed. Coaching can help you consider how to apply theories, reflect on good practice, decipher how to convert research into practical application, how to navigate the nuances of work and how to tackle real world problems.

Reflection can help you to:

✔️ Widen your perspective on a problem.

✔️ Develop strategies for dealing with the problem.

✔️ Tease out the variables at play.

✔️ Consider the interconnected nature of the components.

✔️ Acquire new insights into your own behaviours and that of others.

✔️ Harvest important data and intelligence.

✔️ Help you hypothesize, be more open to taking risks and exploring possibilities,

keep you open to new ways of operating, reduce failure to act on opportunities.

✔️ In a world which has adopted a 'bias for action', it can help to show down processes, creating space for better quality decision making, more effective action planning, more precise actions.

✔️ It can provide the impetus needed to pivot.

✔️ It can give you greater clarity about your concerns, helping you to articulate them to others.

✔️ It can help you to question assumptions.

✔️ It can aid you in thinking about the type of leader you want to be.

✔️ It can aid self-management

✔️ It can help you to consider self - thoughts, feelings, emotions, beliefs, knowledge, actions - helping you to identify helpful and unhelpful behaviours, help you to shift your thinking, help you to construct a new way of being. Change is incredibly difficult, and regular reflection or working with a coach can be very beneficial.

Group reflection can achieve all of the above, and help to:

✔️ Aid change - e.g. change in attitude, change in methods, change in behaviours.

✔️ It can help to move people from unhelpful positions, such as 'self-deception' and 'defensive reasoning' to 'effective' and 'rational'.

✔️ It can help you to build bridges between groups of colleagues, helping them to see the organisation / team they are working in serves to be a self-improving system and values contributions at all levels (and in fact demands it of them!). It helps to distribute power and prevents following blind authoritative leadership.

✔️ It leads to increased intellectual capacity through teamwork.

✔️ It can help reveal group concerns. It can reveal previously unsaid elements that need to be addressed. It can be cathartic.

✔️ It can be a transformative process, allowing you to proceed in a more connected way.

✔️ It can reduce conflict, and future conflicts, e.g. providing opportunities to nip things in the bud, providing a space to discuss concerns and ask questions, a processes that helps people see things from different perspectives, colleagues gaining a better understanding of each other.

To create the best conditions for team reflection, it is important to analyse the current culture and create a plan to take colleagues on a journey from where they are now to where you want reflective practice to be.

ONE MODEL OF REFLECTION

Taggart and Wilson (2005) suggested a model, from which I have adapted and identified 7 components.

1. The problem, dilemma or challenge is clearly identified and defined. One issue can be that in reflective practice insufficient time or analysis is conducted on really defining the problem.

2. Drawback from the problem to use an outside perspective and re-evaluate the problem.

3. Employ ways of observing, collecting data, gathering intelligence, mining for information, seek knowledge.

4. Obtain a cognitive picture about the way you think about the challenge, consider current thinking, beliefs, knowledge, motivates, feelings, emotions. Analyse the extent to which this is influencing how you see the issues and how you are approaching the problem.

5. Ask yourself: 'How have I dealt with similiar problems in the past?' 'What makes the present situation different from ones in the past?' 'What can I apply and what needs to be different?'

6. Review previous actions you have taken already and the consequences, and use this to identify new opportunities and reframe the situation. Ask if it is about a new approach or about building on from what has already taken place or about adapting what is already there.

7. Plan for an appropriate response - plan to act.

Using this model takes a variety of reflective approaches and applies them to one issue. Please the issue at the centre and consider different ways of reflecting on the same issue.

REFLECTIVE PRACTICE NEXT STEPS

There are some elements of reflection that will come naturally to you. Sometimes a thought will pop into your head without having to think about it too much. Your reflection-in-action might be strong, bringing together knowledge and experience, and indeed it might be difficult to explain to more junior employees exactly why you made a change to what you were doing. But some elements of reflection also need to be more deliberate, more cognitive, more structured to get the most benefit as a leader. What are your reflective practice strengths? How are you helping other colleagues to be reflective? How are you holding reflective space for them and what does this look like? What evidence and examples would you provide that your team is reflective and that you have a reflective workplace culture? How open are you to acting on the reflections of other people in your team or do all the answers come from your own reflections? How prepared are you to reflect on your reflective practice and be open to change?

"...reflection is a vital component of leaders' daily life, not a detached or disconnected action, but a primal, promoted by culture and structures of an organisation which affects choices, policies and decisions together with the emotions and politics related to them. Considered from this angle, to be reflective should not be considered as a method, which has been acquired and occasionally used, but an inherent component of what to manage of lead means." Süleyman and Bozkuş (2017).

Get in touch to discuss how I can help, other colleagues or your team to 'be reflective' and/or improve their reflective practice.

REFERENCES:

Süleyman, D.G. and Bozkuş, K. (2017) Reflective leadership: Learning to Manage and Lead Human Organisations. In: Alvinus, A (Ed) Contemporary Leadership Challenges. Intech pp 27-45.

Taggart, G and Wilson, A. (2005) Promoting reflective thinking in teachers. Thousand Oaks, California: Corwin Press.