BUS603: Managing People

The leaders reported that reflection had served to support their personal development, growth and transformation as a person who is also a leader, which also had delivered material business benefits and outcomes.

The leaders reported that they saw that learning to lead was actually first and foremost a radical act of learning to know and lead themselves. They realized that by first learning how to connect with themselves, they could better connect with others and the world and discover what was needed from them in their roles. This was experienced as a deep and profound alignment between "WHO you are" and "HOW you lead": an awareness of how a leader's inner world is expressed in their acts of leadership. This is because leadership is relational – it is all about the relationships that a leader creates – and means that leadership is fundamentally when the masks and trappings have been stripped away mentally – when a creative expression of self. This interrelationship is shown below Figure 2:

Figure 2. Relationships with self, other and the world.

As Bennis writes:

"Leadership is first being, then doing. Everything the leader does reflects what he or she is".

Technical knowledge and expertise are important but not enough. As Murdoch writes:

"My experience is that operating alongside all of our professional trainings, our thinking, tools and models, is the personhood of the practitioner – our humanity matters, as does our maturity, our open‐heartedness and our generosity of spirit".

Owen reinforces this point when he writes:

"People cannot be molded to be the same. Becoming a leader (or people professional) is an individual process and fundamental to the process is ‘learning’. However, the learning is not through ‘training’ alone, but through personal experience and learning from that experience. When learning from experience occurs, it involves looking inwards at who we are. It means a deep awareness of who we are and the sort of human being we want to become. Once we know this, it can be expressed in our relationships and actions at work".

Thinking of the quality offered leaders a potential challenge this assumptions, mindsets and pre‐existing frames of reference, which were no longer serving.

Six high‐level categories of benefits emerged for these leaders, which supported the deepening development of new capacities, capabilities and insights across a range of leadership competencies.

What appeared new was that the reported benefits included not only building self‐awareness and authenticity, which might be typically associated with reflection, but also how reflection helped the leaders to develop new capacities for working more creatively with emergence, possibility and the unknown. These were, as shown in Figure 3, to:

• think differently (25%)
• create differently (20%)
• be different (16%); relate differently (15%)
• act differently (15%); and
• feel differently (9%)

Figure 3. Transformational benefits of reflection.

As I reported leaders

"used stories of their successes to help illustrate how reflection had helped them restructure their businesses. For example: how their reflection had helped one leader set a new strategic direction for their organization in response to negative press; how two leaders had used reflection to steer a way through a merger and a change in company ownership. All of them had used reflection to develop a more powerfully authentic leadership presence, manage career moves, or to rebrand. Each of them attributed improvements in their wellbeing, resilience and work success to their reflective practices".

The degree of benefit from each act of reflection was

"contextual depending on where each leader was in their own journey, their degree of engagement with the process, the depth of their exploration and the relative importance of the issue. But the benefits did appear to be cumulative and mutually reinforcing, creating a new body of personal knowledge or narrative about themselves and their place in the world over time".

As one leader said:

"reflection hashelped me to grow all of who I am".

Another said:

"it has helped me to develop as a human being who is also a leader to do more, be more and contribute more".

The leaders had all arrived at a point where they all felt a personal need and a corporate responsibility to continually challenge and develop themselves, from the inside out. In this way, they explored their gifts and their blocks (where they also had the greatest leverage for change) and expanded their self‐awareness and consciousness. This enabled each of them to develop the new insights and new capacities to lead well, because as Brown states transformational leaders:

"take the time to see into their own processes, to disclose their feelings and thinking, to be honest about themselves, their train of thought, their thinking, their reservations, their struggles…. With that courage the transformational leader invites all of the human talents of us all and the result is a new and necessary richness in our world of work, as sense of being at home, ourselves in the workplace…. And that starting point is their own reflection".

Reflection had become a foundational way of being and relating. As one leader said from the research:

"Reflection is foundational and fundamental to me living and working deliberately".