Making Time for Reflection

 However rewarding it can be to lead a team, there will always be one difficulty: what worked yesterday might not work today, or ever again.

If one of the definitions of leadership is "to achieve a common goal by enlisting other people" you can immediately see how you need to continuously revisit your practice, as people change.

Your team members will be affected by changes in your organisation, in your industry and the world around them. Their aspirations might change, their personal lives might change, even their relationship with you can change.

That is why those in leadership and management positions (and those aspiring to them) need to revisit their practice continuously. And the easiest way to do this, is by taking time to reflect.

Reflection should form part of every leader's schedule.

Especially during busy times, we have to find time to stop, reflect and make sure we are operating at our best.

This is why taking time off to train is so satisfying: because you can focus on your own development unapologetically. But, while learning doesn't need to be formalised, it might help if we formalise the time to reflect. And if we can spread this to our team members and create a culture of reflecting together, then you can kill both individual and team development birds with one stone. (But that is a thought for another post.)

So, here are some suggestions on how to formalise your time to reflect .

- Block time off.

Mark a one-hour slot every fortnight in your diary and the office diary. Give it a formal sounding name like "Strategy Review" or "Professional Development".

- Leave your desk space.

If possible, use a meeting room, change your surroundings. If you can, have a coffee outside your building. A change of surroundings can do wonders for your creativity.

- Define your communications policy during your time off.

Can you be unavailable to everyone during that time? Can you turn your phone off? Can you delegate your phone calls during that time to someone in your team? This time off is important, treat it as such.

And once you have formalised your time to reflect:

- Dig out your notes from your last leadership course and see where you are at now.

- Meet up with a colleague or peer to have a "how's it going" chat.

- Think over the last two weeks: what did you wish you had done differently and what achievements are you proud of? How can you learn from your mistakes and build on your successes?

- Think of whether there is anything you would like to do differently but you don’t' quite know how. And what you can do to fill that skills/knowledge gap.

Make reflection a habit and you will always have the time for it. It's a simple way of taking charge of your own professional development.  

Pilar Orti will be delivering The Creative Leader open course which has been designed to give participants time to reflect between sessions and apply the learning back at work. Next course begins 15 April 2011. 

Leading by example

We often talk about building a culture of collaboration, of creativity, at work. We like to feel like our team members are free to raise their concerns, share problems they have spotted and seek help. It is not enough to think this or even to say that this is what we strive for in our team. Leaders have to lead by example. And so do team members, if they want to become collaborators par excellence.

So I wanted to thank strategy+business for their recent interview with Edgar Schein, where he points out some of the pitfalls organisation fall into when trying to change their culture. I have taken the liberty to reproduce a few lines below, as they illustrate my point, but I urge you to read the full article on the s+b website. (You will need to register.) You can follow this link or look for the article "A Corporate Climate of Mutual Help" by Art Kleiner and Rutger von Post.

"Better teamwork requires perpetual mutual helping, within and across hierarchical boundaries. I don’t see how we’re going to get there unless we create cultural “islands” — situations in which people can go outside the organization’s norms and practices and explicitly create this mutual helping relationship. In the cardiac unit, this means the surgeon saying to the nurse, “First of all, let’s get on a first-name basis, and then I’m going to try very hard to listen to you.” The people with the most authority and established knowledge must make the others feel psychologically safe, so that when they’re back in the heat of operations, everyone will speak up freely when something is wrong. The surgeon must know what questions to ask in order to be more helpful. In any helping situation, “humble inquiry” is a key intervention to equilibrate the relationship between the vulnerable person asking for help and the powerful helper."

Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov

My first book by Andrey Kurkov and certainly not my last.

A Ukraininan writer, Kurkov plunges us with irony and humour into a world full of invisible manipulation. Death and the Penguin is not a thriller as such, but as you read it, you know there is an underlying threat somewhere, somehow, for the protagonist.

The lovely, simple Viktor just wants to lead a normal life, with his penguin Misha by his side, of course. A writer with not much success, he is employed by a newspaper to write the obituaries of Kiev's V.I.Ps. That is, before they die.

Characters come and go in this novel, but Misha remains by Viktor's side and they both welcome into their lives the endearing Sonya, daughter of a the editor's Associate, who needs to "leave town for a while".

This was certainly an enjoyable read - a satire about Kiev's current system.

For Kurkov's view on Ukraine's current political situation, visit the BBC's website archive www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-12171740

And if you would like to recommend any other Kurkov novels or point us in the direction of similar works, please do so below.

Pausing to Reflect

I am a huge advocate for taking time off to think. Teams NEED to take time-off together to plan and take stock. And the busier they are, the greater the need.

Last week I received a tweet about an article by Richard Branson, where he suggested that To Succeed, Take Some Time-Off. This week, I rejoiced at the post that came in through my inbox from the leadershipnow blog.

The post conveys the main ideas in the book Consider, by Daniel Patrick Forrester, about the need to take time to re-visit our ways of working and instigate change if needed. (And this on the day when booking opens for the Unusual Connections The Creative Leader programme, which has been structured precisely to give leaders the time to reflect.)  I invite you to read the Leadershipnow post by clicking here, especially as I haven't read the book myself yet.

I'm just happy that the universe seems to be sending my way material to continue advocating for the need to reflect.

Do leaders need to lead?

Never mind whether leaders are born or made - the important thing for me is whether they want to do something about it.

If someone is finding it difficult to be in a leadership or management position, then they have two options: to become better at it or to step down. Whether they have a talent for it or not seems less important than whether they really, really, deep down, WANT to do it.

I'm not talking about wanting to be in a management or leadership position where you earn such and such and it helps you take a step up the career ladder. No, I mean: do you want to be in a position of responsibility?

In a position where you are accountable to others because they trust your judgment?
In a place where delegating also means giving up control?
In a unique position from which you can facilitate collaboration?

We can see signs of leadership everywhere around us - in our groups of friends, our clubs and societies, during projects and collaborations... Leadership emerges from a need to get things done and, hopefully, from the need to get things done through collaboration.

The best teams have formal leaders who understand that they sometimes have to take a step back themselves, in order for hidden talents to emerge and quiet voices to be heard.

So, for me the question is not whether leaders are born or made. The question is whether they want to or need to or both.

Tension and Personal Space

I love my Monday evening dance classes - the atmosphere is playful and relaxed and even when I can't get one step right, I still manage to leave buzzing. Something happened yesterday that I wanted to share with you - it's not very dramatic, but it was unusual. And it made me think. A little bit.

At the end of the dance class, we always revisit a routine, a simple sequence on which we build every week. For some reason, the movement stayed in my body and I was able to dance (instead of finding myself thinking "What's next, what's next?" all the time). The class was split into two and both groups took turns to dance in the space.

Maybe we should do as these ladies do.

I loved it and yet... by the end of the session my chest was more tense than at the beginning of the class. From the title of this post, you will probably guess that it wasn't a small group and I felt like other people were crowding in, or, to take some responsibility for the overcrowding, I didn't feel like I could take as much space as I wanted to without smacking someone. (Yes, I love flinging my arms around!)

No wonder everyone in the city ends up with shoulder and neck problems. It's not just all that time spent at a desk but also the difficulty of not taking up as much space as we would like. Public transport, the pavements, even the physical workspace is not designed for us to expaaaaand. And unless we consciously relax in our confined space, if we don't expand, we tend to contract.

At the beginning of the dance routine, I felt perfectly relaxed, in control of the space around me, comfortable that I had enough room to move. But I realised that as I became more confident and wanted to take more space, my body didn't let me.

Because I was self- aware, I managed to do something about it (as simple as making sure that when I walked home I didn't let my shoulders cave in) - but how many times a day does this happen without us realising it? I would encourage everyone (and make sure that I remind myself too) to expand once a week, if only to remind the body of its most "expansive potential".

Stand in an empty room, however big or small - think of your head floating up, up, up. Stretch your arms to the side and think of an elastic which starts at the tip of one of your middle fingers and goes through the arm, chest, other arm, right to the other middle finger. And see how much you can stretch that elastic. And relax, remember to relax.

How does it feel?

[photograph by Haags Uitburo]