Getting Reflective
- Justin Varney
- 5 days ago
- 5 min read
In today's fast-paced world, the demand for effective leadership is greater than ever and a key skill to developing your leadership practice is taking time to reflect. By engaging with a professional coach, you can build on these reflections and enhance your personal leadership skills, gain valuable insights, and develop a clear path toward becoming a more effective leader.
So let's get reflective
How often do you take time to sit down and write down reflections on your own leadership? Taking specific and intentional time out to consider and reflect on things that have happened and considering what we have learnt and how we might change for the future often feels like a luxury in this time pressured world, but reflective practice is a fundamental and foundational skill for leadership in an ever evolving world.
So what is reflection? A word we use a lot, but in this context what does it mean? In this context, starting with the noun meaning 'deep and serious thought' to build further to develop reflective practice which can be defined as "A process of looking back on what has been done and pondering on it and learning lessons from what did or did not work…. The act of deliberation, when the practitioner consciously stops and thinks what shall I do now?" (Conway 1994)
Reflective practice is common in several registered professions, such as medicine, nursing and social work, but less commonly part of leadership practice and isn't always taught as part of MBA and other leadership programmes.
There are several different models that can be used for reflective practice although they have common core elements, here are a few that can be useful:
The 5 R Model (Bain et al, 2002)
This model, developed in more academic settings, uses 5 core stages summarised using 'R' words to guide the reflection and is the model I use in my own practice.
Reporting of the context of the experience
Responding to the experience (observations, feelings, thoughts, etc.)
Relating the experience to knowledge and skills you already have
Reasoning about the significant factors/theory to explain the experience
Reconstructing your practice by planning future actions for a similar experience
This model is useful as covers the breadth of reflection, it can be limited in terms of the depth of the exploration unless you commit intentionally to digging a bit more into each one of the 'R' domains of reflection.
The What Model (Driscoll, 1994)
This is one of the simplest models which focuses on three core questions:
What?
So what?
Now what?
This is useful for quick reflection but it is important to really spend time explore the questions in a deeper way to make this useful in reflection and for me it's a bit too much of a short-hand version to guide my thinking.
The Weather Model (Maclean, 2016)
This model, developed in the context of social work, uses different types of weather to frame the four questions to guide your reflection:
Sunshine: what went well with the event/experience? What was successful?
Rain: What didn’t go well? What was challenging?
Lightening: What came as a surprise?
Fog: What didn’t you understand? what weren’t you sure of?
Wind: Did anything throw you off course during event/experience?
Storm: Was there any conflict during the event/experience? What caused it? How did you respond?
Thunder: Did the noise (other peoples views) impact on your practice? How?
The Weather model misses out a bit on the 'so what' element of reflective practice but is useful to dig a bit deeper into the experience and reflect on the personal interactions.
There are other models and it is important to explore these and see what works for you personally as we all have different learning styles and approaches.
Without reflection, we go blindly on our way, creating more unintended consequences, and failing to achieve anything useful. - Margaret J. Wheatley
As someone who is a trained physician I have to undertake regular reflective practice as part of my professional continuing professional development annual submission for my professional registration. I use a standard template provided by the Faculty of Public Health which is based on the 5 R's model of reflection which is commonly used in medicine.
Although at times this sometimes feels like a chore, spending time to reflect on specific events and interactions and thinking about how I felt, reacted and what I learnt through the experience and what I would do differently for the future, including any specific learning needs, has been really useful.
In general I spend about 30-45minutes on each reflective practice template, I set aside quiet protected time and usually lock myself away in a quiet place with some peaceful music in the background and really switch off and focus on the reflection.
I tend to choose a range of different events and experience to reflect upon each year. In general I tend to do a reflective practice template on the following things:
Face to face or virtual training (outside of mandatory training)
Difficult conversations at work
New roles and responsibilities at work
Professional reading that has inspired or challenges me
Each year I try to have a range of different things in my reflections as this allows me to compare and contrast a bit as I'm reflecting and also it helps me ensure I don't go down a specific rabbit hole thought pattern.
At the end of the reflection time I save these reflective practice notes in a file and use them as part of my annual professional appraisal and continuing professional development.
Through reflective practice I have learnt a lot about myself and I think I have evolved and developed my personal leadership and management practice. I have identified learning gaps and also it has helped me step back from situations which are sometimes emotive and become more compassionate in my approach to challenging situations and colleagues who are exhibiting stress behaviours.
I really encourage leaders to consider how to use reflective practice as a core foundation of their leadership and all MBA and leadership programmes to build this practice as an explicit part of training and education for future leaders.
By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest. - Confucius
Here are a few more links on reflective practice that may help you explore this topic a bit more:
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