Episode #339 Reflecting On Your Leadership Journey

We all tend to live in the moment as leaders. We swing from meeting to meeting like a great ape moving across the jungle canopy. We descend to indulge in some mindless email time and then we are off again, up into the meeting morass. We are constantly pushing, always vigilant for trouble and permanently insecure about making our KPIs.

We struggle through the year to get the results, month by month. We collapse in a heap at the end and see if we made it or not. Even if we did, the relief is short lived because now we have to chase this next year’s numbers. We have to rally the troops, exhausted and beaten by the last year’s efforts, to poke their heads above the parapet and go over the top into battle again.

The time for reflection on our leadership journey is slight to nothing. I have been interviewing CEOs here for a project called “Japan’s Top Business Interviews” and there is a significant similarity between the leaders so far. They have all grown as leaders and they have been on a journey of discovery as leaders about what works here in Japan and what doesn’t. No one said they were brilliant straight out of the gate and were a leader legend from the get go. All of them mentioned the mistakes they had learnt from and the slow progress they had made.

This makes sense, but what are we doing to maximize our leader learnings? Are we scheduling time for reflection about how we are doing as a leader? Probably not because we are all too busy working in our businesses, instead of working on our businesses. And that means working on ourselves as well. Instead of trying to imagine what we did over the course of a busy year, wouldn’t it be better if we consulted our notes we had made along the way. What notes you ask?

Probably there are no notes, but why don’t we change that. How much time would it take at the end of each month to write down some reflections on what happened to you as a leader. Not much, so why don’t we start from now. Make this monthly record the resource from which to evaluate your leader performance over the whole year.

Imagine your were a third party looking at you. What you would you say went well and what would you do to improve that leader’s performance for the next month. At the end of the year you look at all the monthly records and then try to identify trends and patterns. There may be some consistent inadequacies or areas where sufficient attention was not paid, that need to be worked on in the new year.

Did you spend too much time in meetings? Could the meetings have been run more professionally, so that valuable time could be shaved off each meeting length, adding up to substantial time savings over time. Were there things missed like coaching your team members. Or did you fail to spend enough one on one time with certain people. Did you allocate enough time in Quadrant Two – Not Urgent But Important? That means was there enough importance attached to planning rather than simply doing? Did you delegate enough of the tasks so that you could allow yourself to concentrate on those higher levels tasks, that only you can do?

What was missing that either wasn’t done at all, because you just missed it or was done poorly, because there wasn’t the attention devoted to it? What were the things that had been planned, which just never got off the ground, because you were to stretched on other tasks? What were you procrastinating on and is that task an annual exercise and what can you do next time to get it done?

The point is the time we spend analyzing our time usage monthly, building up to an annual view is very revealing. Okay, it is often actually pretty depressing when you add it all up, but we have another year in front of us to get it right this time. If we don't go through this exercise, then how can we make meaningful progress?