The Leadership Habit No One Teaches: How Reflection Drives Better Decisions

By Steve Mostyn, who is the author of Why Great Leaders Ask Great Questions, and one of the world’s leading designers and directors of senior executive leadership programs. He is Associate Fellow at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford and creates and leads the Oxford University Executive Leadership Program

Leadership insights, ask great questions

The best leaders ask the best questions. The best questions unlock value in others and organisations.

How do these leaders ask the best questions? They create a practice of reflection. They build a reflective practice that allows them to develop the muscle of reflection in the midst of action- the time you most need it.

Let’s start to help you reflect better, with a question. Take some time to answer the question, and perhaps use a journal to note your response.

How do I reflect?

Set the timer of your phone to ten minutes and spend some time on this question as it is foundational in how you start to build a reflective practice

Now let’s evaluate your words. Have you answered a different question that is  ‘Where do I reflect?’  For example – Out-doors, running, cycling, in the shower?

Or perhaps you did answer the question – How do I reflect?

Answers I often hear focus on for example – writing a journal, discussing a specific issue with a confidant, writing a gratitude list each day, or through structured (or unstructured) meditation. These are all examples of what you can experiment with.

Building a reflective practice will ground you in a way that releases a new sense of agency and possibility. It will develop better observation skills and prepare you for greater generation of multiple interpretations for the one constant question we should always be asking ourselves at our workplace – What’s going on here? What’s really going on?

By building a reflective practice you prepare yourself even in a microsecond of frustration to pause in the midst of action and the resultant you will be more helpful not only to yourself but to your team.

Reflective practice then invites you to experiment and try out new ways of acting or behaving. The skill to masterfully develop is to reflect amid action and if you reflect on unexpected experiences and conduct mini experiments which will in turn create novel understanding of the experience and most significantly a change in the situation.

As Warren Bennis comments,

“There are lessons in everything, and if you are fully deployed, you will learn most of them. Experiences aren’t truly yours until you think about them, analyze them, examine them, question them, reflect on them, and finally understand them. The point … is to use your experiences rather than being used by them, to be the designer, not the design, so that experiences empower rather than imprison”

Armed with your answer of how you reflect let’s build on that insight and add this micro tool.

The key to habit building is to repeat a simple exercise for up to eight weeks.  A simple one I share is as follows.

The 1 minute daily reflection.

In your journal (or phone notes)

Ask yourself

When did I lead today?

When could I have led?

What was I most pleased with?

Spend only one minute a day asking this question and then over time look at your trends and then you become more and more aware of opportunities to lead, develop others and generally be more aware of your own sense of agency. This will lead you to generate better questions that have less to do with your ego needs and more focussed on the needs of your team to be challenged, supported and engaged. Become that better reflective leader!

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