Reflection has many functions for leaders in organisations that support our Focus Group and I have described some of them above.
Because reflection assists imagination, we may use it to imagine a new direction for ourselves, for a person who seeks help, or for our organisation.
It also assists the growth of wisdom, which can propagate through a team the same as anything else. If we as leaders are guardians of the ethos – so to speak – we need reflection to ensure that we are more of what we should be and less of what we shouldn’t be.
Or in our team, we can imagine a new way of doing things, or looking at things – i.e. seeing the same things through different eyes. Reflection promotes vision, and promoting a vision requires confidence, the skills to argue for ideas to win people over to a particular way of thinking, and the moral courage to stand up for the vision.
Implementation of a vision involves taking a risk as well as bringing people on board. And it also involves honouring and making sense of the dissenting voices or the angry reactions.
I love idealism and its fellow traveller enthusiasm. I believe that idealism is using our imagination in action. I stated earlier that sometimes I have there must be a better way moments, and these moments – I have no doubt – come from the idealise – imagine process, with reflection assisting.
Now before I go on I would like to distinguish idealism from ideology and perfectionism. There is no ideal world really. I have referred elsewhere to how harmful the pursuit of perfectionism is, and that good enough is what we need to aim for in ventures involving humans. (And terrible harm has been done to people by leaders pursuing the perfect ideology).
If I am idealistic I have the ability and willingness to imagine something that, perhaps, might not be practically attainable now but nonetheless acts as inspiration for change for the better.
It is very sad that in some workplaces we have to leave our idealism at the door when we go to work, and it should not be so.
I believe that reflection assists in 1): keeping idealism and enthusiasm alive in teams, and, 2): (very important) ensuring that our own idealism and enthusiasm is based on reality – and doesn’t leave people behind.
Even if it sometimes needs to be reined in a little bit it is much easier to do that when it is there in abundance than to be constantly pressurising people to do things.
Also, allowing idealism to flourish is almost always a win-win situation because most people love idealism, common sense, and the passion that seems to bind them together. And, like, enthusiasm, it is infectious.
I believe that keeping sparks of idealism alive is an antidote to the cynicism that is so easy to default to when we come up against situations where big organisations seem to care more about image, size, status, efficiency etc. than they do about people who are very hurt.
Good enough community leadership involves affirming qualities that will help us manage, motivate, challenge, support, make good enough decisions, and include.
We cannot include if we don’t reflect on where we are or how we are with others, or what is going on inside ourselves as we make judgements on who is good or bad, successful or unsuccessful, worthy or unworthy, and above all who is progressing and who is not.
Perhaps (and I am only going on what I have observed here) many people with leadership ambition in the Pillars who like to follow the ‘reflect – symbolise – imagine – create’ path (some people might call this the road less travelled) have a low tolerance of frustration. They find it difficult to wait around for the system to change how it does its business.
Others either have more acceptance of how things are, afford reflection a lesser status than fast processing, or, indeed, are happy that everything is working well. So advancement involves perpetuating what is safe for the system, i.e. keeping the predictable going, [1] being risk averse, and, generally, rewarding conformity.
But we can all choose to be different, and
this is where reflection comes in.
[1]. As one writer put it once – I forget who – I read the expression and I thought it summed things up well.