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Learning
through Reflection
Chapter 1.4 (Acceleration)
Draft 04.01.09
“What is the good of
experience if you do not reflect.” – Frederick the Great
When I was completing my Ph.D.
dissertation in psychology, I took a detour from the academic track to work for
a year in the U.S. Senate and discovered one of the hidden, underused treasures
of the U.S. Capitol Building.
Tucked away behind the “Documents Room” is the Senators’ Library. It is located adjacent to the famous
Capitol Dome and has windows that look out over the Mall towards the Washington
Monument and Lincoln Memorial, roughly the view the President has on
Inauguration Day. It has
traditional library tables and lamps, comfortable leather armchairs, and an
elaborately illustrated, domed ceiling.
The Senate, then as now, was a high pressure, high urgency institution;
not many people spent time reading and reflecting in the library.
My job was different from most,
however. I was hired not just to
respond to immediate legislative issues and constituent concerns. I also had
the responsibility and opportunity to study a handful of core issues in depth
and advise the Senator on longer-term initiatives that he could introduce over
the course of the following year.
Therefore, as I planned my days and weeks, I built in time out of the
office, away from my inbox and telephone.
The Senators’ Library was a perfect choice. It was accessible, but isolated. The setting was awesome and put me in mind to think deeply
and carefully. I was still quite young and inexperienced, and my analytic and
integrative skills not as advanced as they would become, but I did produce good
forward looking proposals while I reflected on the issues and alternatives away
from the pressures of the moment.
This experience in Washington
reinforced lessons I had been learning through my earlier work experiences and
graduate studies. My best
contributions resulted from a blend of action and reflection. I discovered that
as even a relatively junior staff member in a variety of settings, I was able
to influence the course taken by my organizational superiors when I provided
them with observations, insights, and recommendations that helped them achieve
their goals more easily or effectively.
The key was time I spent in reflection on the issues that would require
future action.
Years later, when I was a senior
manager myself and was also teaching a graduate course in Organizational
Behavior in the local university, I read a great analysis by Harry Wilkinson
(Influencing People in Organizations).
Wilkinson actually focused on what he called spontaneous and reflective
behaviors: “a person may respond to any situation with one of two general types
of behavior: spontaneous, which implies instinctive or instantaneous behavior,
or reflective, which occurs after taking time to think before taking action.
… Individuals tend to be
spontaneous when under time pressure or stress and reflective when they have
the time and inclination to think before acting.” (Wilkinson, 1993, 29-30)
According to Wilkinson, you as a
manager can become more aware of when you act in one mode or another and when
the others around you do as well.
This enables you to understand, predict, and influence behaviors and
performance more effectively. By
paying attention, you can come to learn, for example, about the issues, words,
or “hot buttons” that may elicit spontaneous, instinctive reactions on your
part or others. Through planning
and anticipation, you can set conditions that promote reflective thinking when
desirable.
Working with my senior staff when I
was CEO, I learned that I could encourage effective reflective behavior, but
the methods were different according to the individual. Our CFO, for example, responded well to
prompting with specific questions and the opportunity to spend a few hours over
the next day or two in thought before he would come back with insightful plans
and proposals on a given problem.
Our Chief Counsel valued help reallocating priorities to ensure that the
urgent wouldn’t overwhelm the important, and then he created systems and
processes to ensure time to think about some of our bigger issues. The Executive Director, of our
Foundation, on the other hand, enjoyed opportunities to think together with me,
using the white board to identify issues, suggest courses of action, apply
evaluation criteria, and establish priorities. Each of these executives had a different personal style of
reflection, and used it well in addition to their actions to improve their
long-term performance and the results achieved by the organization. We accomplished much more than we would
have if they had only been doers.
Application: Assess yourself on the doing/reflecting
spectrum. What blend would work
best for your position and job responsibilities? Typically, there need to be both at each level, but the
proportion of reflecting increases as the breadth of job responsibilities
increases and as time horizons lengthen.
Identify times and places that work best for you for reflection and develop
sufficient discipline to follow-through.
If you have an assistant, enlist your assistant’s support to make and
hold this as one of your priorities.
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