How to Grow as a Leader Using Personal Reviews

If you want to know where you’re going, then you must know where you are and where you’ve been. But the pace and chaos of life distract us and divert our attention away from this critical understanding.

Regular reviews refocus our attention on what’s important. They help us grow as leaders.

Why hold reviews?

Reviews make things visible. If I don’t pause and review the day, the week, the month, or the year, I will likely miss critical observations. Without this reflection and observation, I can’t evaluate and course correct.

Holding regular and healthy reviews takes a middle road between two ditches I want to avoid.

1. On one side, I can err in not doing any reviews.
2. On the other side, I can err in holding legalistic reviews that leave me feeling judged or ashamed.

Judgment will not help me grow. Instead, I will likely quit or hide the areas I am struggling in. Hiding is the opposite of making something visible.

So, where is the middle road between these two? Reviews should focus on?two key outcomes:

1. Celebration
2. Growth

Celebration

It’s common to focus on what’s not working rather than what is going well. Healthy reviews can help to build a habit of celebration around the areas where you’re making progress. This celebration energizes you to continue and take the next step.

If you want to know where you’re going, then you must know where you are and where you’ve been.

Selecting the right questions is critical to cultivating a habit of celebration through your reviews. The most straightforward questions might be something like:

1. What went well yesterday?
2. How did I live out my values this week?
3. What was life-giving this past month?

Growth

Sometimes the answer to “How did I live out my values this week?” is “I didn’t.” If that’s the case, then I need to be honest with myself. When I'm open and bring both my success and failure visibly out into the light, I can deal with them honestly and grow.

First, you need to give yourself some grace in the area of failure and recognize you’re not always going to get it right.

Next, you need to ask the question, “Why?” Why did you not live out your values? Was there an external cause? Were you reverting to old habits?

This insight is critical to identifying what to do next.

How often to hold reviews?

You will benefit from holding reviews at multiple intervals. A daily review should be lightweight, helping you slow down enough to make what happened in the day visible. At the end of the week, you’ll want to dig a little deeper to into what happened and why.

Regular reviews refocus our attention on what’s important.

A monthly or annual review is different because you’re no longer drawing on short-term memory. You might even need to go back and look at notes from your more frequent reviews. You’re looking for more significant trends over time.

Long-term reviews also help you evaluate growth since your previous seasons in leadership. It’s like marking a child’s height on the wall. Day to day, they don’t seem to grow, but there is a measurable difference after a few months.

Holding reviews at multiple intervals helps you see the whole picture. It provides the space needed to celebrate and the awareness needed to grow.

Finding the right questions for your reviews

Asking the right questions is critical to doing good reviews. Your question should come from your priorities.

A value I’ve been reviewing is, “Did I say ‘yes’ when my kids asked to do something together?” When they ask to draw, swing, play legos, or shoot hoops, I want to say yes.

I’ve had some hectic seasons over the past few years, and I identified that I had developed a habit of saying, “give me a minute,” even when I didn’t need a minute. It was just a reflex, a habit I needed to break.

As you craft questions for your review, consider these questions (meta, I know)

1. What values do you want to see demonstrated in your life?
2. Where are you trying to grow?
3. What aspects of life need more visibility?

Understanding these will help you shape questions personalized to the areas you want to grow in.

Some questions fit better into different time frames. You need to ask yourself, “Can I make an observable difference in a day? A week?”

If your goal is to read more, then a daily question of, “How many books did I read?” will likely not be helpful. A better daily review question would be, “How did I make time today to read?”

Starter questions

I know it can feel overwhelming to get started with regular reviews. Here are a few questions to get you started and begin building the habit.

Daily

1. What did I focus on yesterday?
2. What is the priority for today?
3. Is anything standing in my way?

Weekly

1. What were my key priorities coming into the week?
2. Did I accomplish those priorities? Why or why not?
3. What was life-giving?
4. What was life-draining?
5. How did I manage my attention/focus this week?
6. What hindered me from managing my attention/focus this week?

Monthly

1. What went well?
2. What went poorly?
3. How did my leadership contribute to this?
4. What would I have done differently?
5. How would I describe the season of this month? What were the themes or priorities?
6. How did this season relate to what I was doing a year ago?
7. What do I expect the next month to look like?

Put your reviews on the calendar

It will take some discipline to build the habit, but once established; it can feel frictionless. I recommend setting a time in your calendar for your reviews. Place your questions in the event description and set them to repeat at the proper interval.

I recently changed my review from the beginning of the day to the end of the day. I found it helped me better wrap up my day and prepare for the next. When I do my daily review, I type my answers into the description of that day’s event so I can quickly go back and find it if needed.

Do you have a personal review process? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

This article on personal reviews was originally published on everyday.design as part of my cultivating leaders guide.