The Role of Reflection

It can be enormously exciting to be promoted or assume the role of team leader in a new situation.?As leaders we must learn to pause, if even for a moment, so that we can digest the results of our previous leadership experience and then make a concerted effort to learn and assess what worked and what did not. Successes are easy to catalog, but if you want to be a better leader your ability to rebound from past missteps and failure becomes a critical asset to your professional development toolkit. As a student of this discipline, I have come to realize that I learn infinitely more from failure than success any day of the week. If you don’t take the time to learn the lessons of your experience, you are destined to live these failures again.??

Failure stings! There’s no easy way to put it.?The hope is that you work in a field where the failure results in simply missing deadlines or miscalculating how messaging may land or something even less lasting in terms of impact.?For the veteran and law enforcement communities they realize that failure can sometimes mean the loss of life, which can be an extreme result, but is a reality of their field or profession.?Following these experiences, the biggest mistake we can make is not taking the time to digest these mishaps and understanding our role in the outcomes.??

Sometimes these failures can be simple; maybe you responded the wrong way in a moment of stress; maybe you made a mistake in judgment that resulted in a project outcome missing the mark; maybe you were responsible for a series of compounding mistakes which resulted in you getting canned from a role or job.? The variety of possible outcomes is so diverse that it's impossible to capture all of the possible iterations of mistakes or failures and the outcomes they generate.

If you expect to grow you must take time to understand the role you played and figure out how to recognize the signs related to future engagements. There’s a reason why failure sticks to us and makes an imprint. I’m no expert when it comes to the human psyche, but it strikes me that mistakes stick to us so that we are less prone to make them again.?When you do make the same mistakes over and over you are essentially overriding a safety feature of your own mind.

One personal scenario that sticks out to me is failing to provide true and transparent feedback on a lack of fit and a poor work ethic for an employee.?I recall the overwhelming sense of expectations related to the work involved with documenting poor performance, compounded by the absence of a strong supervisor as the employee's direct leader. I passed on the hard work involved and later through a reorganization the employee was ultimately moved to a new team.?I later heard near horror stories of the employee's lack of performance and an unwillingness to be accountable for their poor work.? I knew then that I had whiffed on my central responsibility of doing the hard work necessary to ensure our larger team had the best of the best to do the very important work we were responsible for doing.? I have vowed to never make the same mistake.? Hard conversations and even more difficult work and writing should not be the obstacle to doing the hard work of leading.?In fact, they can be par for the course. I had a responsibility to the team this employee was assigned to and a responsibility to the organization and I missed on both counts.

Other than the sting of memory, how do we account for and reconcile these experiences? In a recent conversation for an upcoming episode of The Leadership Student Podcast, I had a small epiphany related to the act of journaling.?I was consistent in journaling?from my first year of college through my mid-30s.? In fact, if I really want to trace back my exposure to writing and reflection I have to go back to middle school.? During my 20’s I found the act of journaling immensely cathartic.? It was a form of necessary therapy for an active young leader's mind interested in capturing the salient points of a continuing journey. I drifted away from the practice and definitely feel like I may have lost some experiences to the ages. The lessons and their virtual marks represented an opportunity to grow.

Writing in a journal is not the only way one can grow their leadership chops. One of the other methods includes building a small group of advisors; a council of sorts who you can turn to in order to review scenarios for the important takeaways.?I hate to use such a cliched analogy, but the need to exorcise your demons is real.?

As students of this trade please understand there are continuous lessons to be learned. Sometimes you have to be your own teacher or learn to rely on the availability of advisors who can help you understand what you need to take away from those experiences.?Either way, without the exercise of review and reflection you are bound to make the same mistakes again and again.?

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MK Palmore is the host of The Leadership Student Podcast (coming soon to the ITSP Magazine Podcast Network), a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps and a retired Special Agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.