How to Become a Reflective and Successful Leader
Reflective leadership is a way of approaching the work of being a leader by leading one’s life with presence and personal mastery. Learning to be present, to be aware and attentive to your experience with people throughout the day is the focus of reflective leadership.
Sara Horton-Deutsch.
Reflective leadership is the key to building a relationship-based organization. It is characterized by three abilities: self-awareness, careful observation, and flexible response.
Self-awareness
Self-awareness refers to the ability of the leader to know himself/herself, his/her strengths, and limitations. It implies that a leader is interested and committed to examining his/her reactions, thoughts, and feelings about his/her work.
Careful observation
Reflective leaders wonder about the meaning of their own and others’ behaviour, tones of voice, body language, or reactions. Thus soliciting more information to solve the dilemma.
Flexible response
Flexible responses require that leaders know those around them, their styles, how they work best and what motivates them. Leaders can then approach each professional in a way that reflects their need, strengths, and areas for development.
Flexible responses are the most basic and sometimes complex expressions of mutual respect in everyday communication.
How does reflective leadership enhance success?
Being aware of one’s thinking is essential for making informed and logical decisions while working with others. In other words, taking other people’s feelings, thoughts and behaviors to heart also facilitates improvement in the achievement of professional objectives.
Reflective leaders see learning as a lifelong process, so they prefer to combine the ‘telling’ activity with ‘asking’. So they often rely on the mutual intellectual capacity of the teams established in their organizations. Rather than being ‘in judgment,’ these leaders ‘use judgment’ to make important decisions.
They prefer to frequently step out of their routine and habituated settings to think, explore, and know. Leaders are increasingly able to adopt a ‘bias for action’ due to the increasingly dynamic, unpredictable and fast-paced nature of the business world. Therefore, successful leaders are those who reflect on their past experiences, find new and specific perspectives before making decisions.
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