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Why Reflection Is Crucial To Leadership, Future Planning And Success

Forbes Coaches Council

Founder, Incito Executive and Leadership Development. Helping reactive leaders become strategic and inspiring leaders.

Whether it’s the previous year ending or thinking about the year ahead, this time always seems to bring about a natural urge to reflect. You might have just come back from vacation, or a slowdown over the holidays, and enjoyed some quality time with your family (even if virtually this year). Now that you are back in the swing of things, you might be working on budget-setting or conducting interviews to determine bonuses.

A new year provides a time for some self-reflection, and I believe that reflection is just as important and beneficial for leaders to do themselves and with their teams.

Looking Back To Look Ahead

Reflection isn’t just about reminiscing — it’s also about taking stock of where you are now and where you want to be. It's difficult to project how you want to grow and develop without considering where you have come from. Reflecting on past performance gives you a foundation to plan for your future development. When planning for the future, individual and team reflection helps leadership teams integrate qualitative performance into their annual and long-term assessments, not just quantitative benchmarks.

Create a process for reflection. Leaders can reflect on their own and then share their findings with others in a strategy meeting, or you can set aside time during a planning meeting for each person to reflect. You can ask questions like, “Did we meet our goals, tangible and intangible?” Take some time to actually review your strategy documents and see how you’re tracking progress. Boards, when conducting CEO performance reviews, should also look back on the past year to anticipate the year ahead. 

Individual self-reflection is also important, giving leaders a chance to think back on the broader aspects of their leadership. As an executive or senior manager, look back on the relationships that you have cultivated at work, internally and externally. What part have you played in bringing people along? So many leaders focus on the growth and development of the people who report to them but forget about their own personal learning and development. What are your proactive learning goals? What do you want to learn and how do you want to learn it?

Envisioning The Future Through Storytelling

I’ve worked with leaders, leadership teams and boards on strategy planning and vision setting. The latter process always seems to be the most intimidating.

In these sessions, we do an exercise where they write a postcard from the future. Imagine you get to the end of the year and you report back to yourself today that it's been the best year. What is different about a year from now? What impact are you having? What has become easier? How will you know if you’ve been successful? Resist the urge to analyze and just tell the story of how you got there. This exercise takes the word “vision” away and helps to remove the intimidation factor.

You can do the same with a postcard from the past. Imagine you are sending yourself a postcard from a year ago. What was different about then? What was the impact you were making? What were you hoping would happen in the year ahead? Break it into quarters, months or any other “chapters” to help you tell the story in chunks. Look back on the vision that you set last year. Is this where you wanted to be a year ago? Any successes? How far have you progressed in a year? Storytelling is a fabulous way to engage in reflection.

The Value Of Reflecting On Success

Recently one of my clients, an executive from the construction industry, told me that his company just won a massive bid and is about to take on the actual construction work. The bid process had taken them 14 months from start to finish, so they had been working toward this point for a long time. Around 70-80 people were directly involved in the bid, but he later said that, when adding in contractors and tradespeople, the process involved close to 300 people.

This might be a normal occurrence in construction or similar industries, but it does not make the feat any less amazing. After reflecting on the process, my client realized that yes, it was worth celebrating and that it was important to reflect on what a great achievement it was for everyone involved. Think about it this way: Entire buildings could be constructed within 14 months. Where were they at when they submitted the bid? Where are they now? 

Celebrating the win is great for morale and by acknowledging their role in helping to win this contract, he has provided serious motivation for his employees and contractors to get started. Now they have a ton of work to do, but it’s worth looking at the finish line they just crossed before they look forward to the next one. Their next celebration will be recognizing the achievement of the first shovel in the ground.

Reflecting On Lessons Learned

When we don’t take the time to reflect, we skip past the learning. We miss out on opportunities to find wisdom in future planning and can impair our own strategic planning. This past year holds especially significant learnings. For example, what did we learn about dealing with uncertainty? How will this year be better? Where are you at now? Where do you hope to be a year from now? What’s changed?

We have to reflect on past performance to think about future development because it’s otherwise hard to see the evolution in our story. Reflection doesn’t have to take a long time. As a leader, you can devote as little as an hour of your time to the process. You can spend 10 minutes discussing your learnings at your next meeting with your team. Dedicating time and effort toward reflection only strengthens your future planning.


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