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

Open-ended plenary discussion then follows, primed by the table discussions. This can run long--well over schedule. But we are all there to learn, not to "cover ground," and much of the best learning happens during these morning reflections.

Frank McCauley, when he headed up executive development at the Royal Bank of Canada, visited our class in the module we run in India. In November 2002, he told a Fast Company journalist about the morning reflection session he saw: "That was the most fascinating conversation in an academic setting that I have ever seen. We zoomed around the room discussing everything from political to economic issues and then got into ethics and business."

As this suggests, anything can come up in these morning reflections--thoughts about issues discussed the previous day, happenings in each person's companies, items in the news and concerns from earlier days. So this morning reflection becomes a running commentary--a main thread--across our entire program, to blend all the learning.

Try it in your team, and maybe it can become the thread that blends all the activities of your company.

Reflecting in A New and Confusing Job

"What happened the day you became a manager?" We have asked that question of many groups of managers, and the answers are usually the same--puzzled looks, a few shrugs and the response, "Nothing." Here we have a job that is so different from everything else--and so different from what the incumbent did the day before--and rarely is anything done to ease the transition. "Did they at least give you an article to read on managing?" we ask, and get the same response: "No." Managing is treated like your first kiss--you are supposed to figure it out, usually with about the same embarrassing consequences.

So when the manager of a high-technology group in Montreal came to one of us recently, concerned about what to do with all his young, confused new managers, we had a ready answer. Why not just get them together to share and reflect on their experiences? He loved the idea--so much better than the usual suggestion, he said, of coaching them one by one. Reflection: so simple, so obvious, so powerful--and yet so rarely done.

During the goodbyes at the end of the first module of our master's program, in response to classmates who said, "It was great meeting you," a sales manager with British Telecom in England retorted: "It was great meeting myself!"

JONATHAN GOSLING IS DIRECTOR OF THE CENTRE FOR LEADERSHIP STUDIES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF EXETER IN ENGLAND. HENRY MINTZBERG IS CLEGHORN PROFESSOR OF MANAGEMENT STUDIES AT MCGILL UNIVERSITY IN MONTREAL AND AUTHOR OF MANAGERS NOT MBAs (BERRETT-KOEHLER, 2004). GOSLING AND MINTZBERG CO-CREATED THE INTERNATIONAL MASTERS IN PRACTICING MANAGEMENT, A COOPERATIVE GLOBAL LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM AMONG SEVEN BUSINESS SCHOOLS IN SIX COUNTRIES FOR EXPERIENCED MANAGERS IN MULTINATIONAL COMPANIES.