Reflect yourself: take time out of your busy day to reflect on yourself and where your team is headed

HR Magazine, Sept, 2004 by Jonathan Gosling, Henry Mintzberg

The following suggestions were made by a group of vice presidents of large North American companies:

"Stop all this 'do, do, do' and put in time to reflect."

"Good conversations always have space for reflection. It's part of listening and taking seriously what someone else says."

"A team can call a 'time-out' with a manager to halt a process that might be lacking reflection."

"Take a moment at the end of meetings to reflect."

The executives were partway through the first week on the "Reflective Mindset" portion of our three-week advanced leadership program. These managers had become aware of the need for reflection. But how many managers these days are aware of this need? Why is reflection necessary? And how do they build reflection into everyday business life?

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Why Reflect?

Managerial work has become unrelenting boot camp. Keep marching, keep driving, and don't slow down. Some management development programs even promise more boot camp--you won't get a chance to be lazy here, they claim.

No company needs lazy managers. But neither does any company need to be an unrelenting boot camp. Boot camps train soldiers to march and obey, not to stop and think. Managers today desperately need to stop and think. They need to step back from the action and reflect thoughtfully on the experience.

T.S. Eliot in Four Quartets wrote, "We had the experience but missed the meaning." Reflection is about getting the meaning from everyday experiences. In fact, social activist Saul Alinsky wrote in his book Rules for Radicals (Dimensions, 1989) that something becomes an experience only after its meaning has been understood.

Experts espouse a great deal these days about the importance of action in managerial work--managers must be doers. Absolutely. But they also must be thinkers. All effective managing has to be sandwiched between acting on the ground and reflecting in the abstract. Acting alone is thoughtless--we have seen enough of the consequences of that--just as reflecting alone is passive. Both are critical. But today, one--reflection--gets lost.

On the Nature of Reflection

The Latin origin of the word reflection lends a nice image; flect is a "fold," so to reflect is to re-fold. When you fold something, the surface comes face-to-face with itself. A reflective mind turns its attention to its own activity. Then when an item is re-folded, the outside turns inwards, and the inner part becomes out-ward-facing. Reflection is a conversation between yourself as the actor and as an observer of the actions you take. By considering your actions, you get an outsider's view of yourself. So a person who is reflecting is both the subject and the object of reflection, and both the giver and the receiver of attention.

Reflecting does not mean musing, and it is not casual. It means wondering, probing, analyzing, synthesizing and connecting. And not just about what happened, but why it happened and how it differs from other happenings.

Every manager today is forced to carry around a great deal of conceptual baggage. There are many theories and models about managing that are heavily promoted. In addition, every industry has its own practices--accepted beliefs and procedures about how things are supposed to work. Put all this and a great deal more together, and you can appreciate why thoughtful reflection is so important in management development.

Reflecting Alone And Together

For some, reflection is a private, meditative practice. Many people value the drive to and from work because the time alone in a car offers them the opportunity to mull over the events of the day. Others walk the dog, listen to music or exercise while reflecting. None of these activities are distractions from work--they are work. Mulling things over is an important way of distancing oneself from immediate emotional reactions, seeing a situation in a wider perspective, considering various interpretations about what was going on, and wondering about underlying motives and long-term objectives.

Personal reflection also recharges the batteries. This is an easy exercise. Sit quietly for three minutes and ponder the events of the past couple of hours.

If you've done that, we bet that these few moments have made you feel calmer, more focused and energized. That is the power of personal reflection.

But reflection has to be collective, too. Anyone who has worked on an effective team knows just how important it is for a team to be able to reflect on and modify its own processes. It has to be aware of how it has responded to awkward facts and unwelcome opinions, and how it gives and takes feedback. All are aspects of reflection.

Lessons From The Reflective Classroom

Over the nine years that we have been running degree and development programs for practicing managers, we have experimented with all kinds of ideas for personal and collective reflecting. Much that we have learned can be applied by managers on the job.

Managers often come back from development programs energized, not from what they learned in the classes--all those lectures and case studies--but from what they learned from their colleagues at coffee breaks and after hours. What an awful waste of opportunity. Why can't the class time be as energizing as the time out of class, we asked ourselves, and we found the answer--significantly--in reflection.