Emerging from the learning bubble - reflections of a reflexive leader

I am sitting at the airport having already faced three hours of delay on my first flight, and now a further 2 hours delay on my connecting flight. I am fighting my natural instincts to see this as an insult to injury - adding more unnecessary hours to an already eye-wateringly long trip from Boston to Sydney.

I don’t want the familiar feelings of fatigue, frustration or indignation to kick in. And I am fighting my insatiable urge to do what typically happens when I have a spare moment – create more lists of to-do items. Then kid myself about making progress when I cross off a couple of the easy tactical items, sigh about the ones that remain carried over to the new list, which then of course quickly get lost in the sea of new items added. Instead, I want to stay in the magnificent learning bubble that I have been in for the past 5 days where I completed a senior leadership program with Harvard Business School. 

So, as I sit at the airport, I am choosing to breathe – and use the time to reflect on the week that was…..

“It’s the best course you’ll ever do” said a number of colleagues, when I asked them about their experience with this course I was about to go on. “Life changing” said several people. “Clear your diary – you won’t want to miss any of this” said others.

All this about a 5 day leadership program??

I wasn’t sure whether to just smile wryly in the knowledge that they had romanticised and inflated their memories of the course over time, or to let my expectations stay sky-high and face the (almost certain in my mind) inevitability of not having them met. In truth, I probably went into the week with some combination of the two.

So, were my expectations met? Absolutely. And then some.  But probably not in the way I had expected.

Harvard uses a case study method to teach its lessons. Dutifully, I had read (most of) the case studies ahead of the course program. And I even had gone on and answered (some of) the pre-read questions. The case studies were interesting, and the questions didn’t seem too difficult to answer. But it was only as the professors breathed life into the case studies did I truly appreciate the complexity of the situations, the highs and lows of the individuals in the case studies, the range of actions and interventions that could have been taken, the implications of those, and the many lenses with which others looked at the case studies.

As I looked around the room over the course of the week – what I saw was over 50 senior partners across 26 different countries completely present. Not one of them on their phones, not one of them “excusing themselves” from the room. I was struck by how absolutely “in it” we all were. So many of us deeply identifying with any number of protagonists in the case studies, and any number of leadership dilemmas posed.

For the first time in a long time I found myself listening to these cases without my mind racing ahead to what I wanted to say or add to the discussion. I was captivated by the slow unveiling of the cases, enthralled by the ensuing dialogue. Along with others in the room, I was hungry to learn more about what then happened with the people in those cases. Our collective identification with these people now felt so strong that we were genuinely invested in them. We were truly walking in their shoes.

And so, in affording myself the capacity and willingness to “stay in the space”, I learned things. And I learned things on a much deeper level appreciating the situations from a variety of lenses. 

I have always been an instinctive leader – I always felt I could quickly fairly understand where people were coming from, empathise with them and balance that with the commercial realities of the business, and provide solutions or a way forward that I could generally get consensus around. But in my haste to solve, and in my bias towards action how much context was I missing? How often did I stop to examine my own thoughts and reactions?  How much more impactful could I be by shifting from being reflexive to being reflective.

Amongst a number of questions the professors left us to ponder were these two:

How do people experience me?

How do people experience themselves when they are with me?

I feel like I’ve been sitting in an optometrists chair, and they have just clicked the lenses over to the right prescription for me. I had thought my vision was pretty good, but with a few clicks on the lens wheel, everything has come sharply into focus.

As I fly home I will review all the notes I took, frameworks I learned about, and let’s be honest, I will have to get cracking on that to-do list which has certainly not shrunk over the week that I’ve been in my learning bubble. But with my new lenses on I will do so far more purposefully and with much more clarity.