When it comes to leadership growth, reflection is the one skill that consistently separates those who evolve and those who repeat old patterns.
I recently wrote about being aligned in leadership, and how our values can direct us when the pressure is on to make a decision or we feel uncertain.
It’s not an easy situation for leaders to navigate because staying authentic in difficult situations can seem like an uphill struggle. How exactly do leaders stay true to their beliefs? In my work with leaders and teams, one skill consistently separates those who evolve from those who repeat old patterns: reflection.
Leaders are required to adapt constantly, whether that is shifting strategies, rapidly evolving technology, the move towards more hybrid and flexible working, or fast-changing markets. Whilst qualities such as agility and adaptability are rightly celebrated, people mistakenly think the essential ingredient shaping your leadership style – the approach you take to guide, motivate and manage a team – is experience.
But studies* show that experience alone doesn’t guarantee development or automatically translate to possessing wisdom and therefore leadership skills. Instead, it’s the quality and depth with which individuals reflect on past events. The ability to pause, make sense of experiences, reflect, and consciously adjust behaviour is the most critical leadership competency of all. It allows people to not just assess what they feel or how they behave, but they also understand the ‘why’. It’s the process of transforming what happens to us into insight we can act on.
Leaders with strong reflective learning ask:
- What worked, and why?
- What didn’t, and what might I do differently next time?
- What was driving my reactions?
- How did my emotions influence others?
At Mind Values Leadership, we use a tool called Talogy Emotional Intelligence Profile 3 (EIP3). We are able to measure and develop an individual’s emotional intelligence, and one of the key developmental factors we look at is reflective learning. It straddles two main areas:
- Personal Intelligence: understanding and managing yourself.
- Interpersonal Intelligence: understanding and managing relationships.
It strengthens your capacity to notice patterns in your own behaviour and understand how those patterns impact others. It can take different forms, perhaps journaling, peer discussions, coaching, or team debriefs. Leaders who reflect well – regardless of the method they choose – are more likely to strengthen their building blocks of great leadership, such as self-awareness, empathy, authenticity, and emotional resilience.
In practice, reflective leaders invite feedback, share what they’ve learned, and create spaces for others to do the same. When reflection becomes a collective practice, teams start to learn together. They talk about what worked, what didn’t, and what they’ll try next time. It’s the natural continuation of what we explored in my previous blog, Where is your leadership compass pointing – growth thrives where there is psychological safety, and psychological safety grows where leaders reflect and respond with intention.
There is a phrase that always sticks with me, that reflection is the pause that powers progress. That’s why at Mind Values Leadership we build structured reflection into every aspect of our work. Through coaching, emotional intelligence profiling, and facilitated conversations, we help leaders turn experience into insight, and insight into action.
Source
Weststrate, N. M., & Glück, J. (2017). Hard-earned wisdom: Exploratory processing of difficult life experience is positively associated with wisdom. Developmental Psychology, 53(4), 800–814.