With every experience we have in life our brains are changing and adapting.
I believe that Leadership as a skillset and capacity is one that is never actually “achieved”.
We continuously learn and improve as leaders; around every corner lies the next leadership challenge that pushes us differently, stretches different skills and challenges our assumptions in different ways.
With every quality piece of leadership development work we do – a great course, a great conference, a great book – we can feel engaged, invigorated, ready to apply our learning and leap in to the next leadership challenge.
We can also quickly lose ourselves again to habit and busyness within a remarkably short time frame of those magical insights!
But no piece of learning is itself our answer to everything.
Leadership is too messy, complex and ambiguous.
So how do we continually develop ourselves as leaders, building on that explicit learning whilst grounding it in our lived challenges and experiences?
I work with my clients to develop a habit of ongoing Reflection to support their development as leaders. From mid-level to senior leaders, we rarely get the feedback that we need to improve, in the ways that we did when we were in the earlier stages of our careers.
Consistently stopping in the day, week or even month, to give ourselves that feedback is a key skill in our leadership arsenal.
Reflecting on our own leadership behaviours – what did we do, what worked, and what didn’t -
helps us to build on our strengths as leaders to tackle more of our challenges effectively, and also brings real awareness to where we might need to experiment with other ways of working. Our ongoing learning becomes grounded in the actual leadership challenges that we are facing, deepening our application or even rejection of the models we have learned!
As you turn your thoughts to the development opportunities you might need this year – consider how you might establish a practise of reflection that will support you as a Work in Progress.
A coach? Give me a call ?? 😊
With every experience we have in life our brains are changing and adapting.
I believe that Leadership as a skillset and capacity is one that is never actually “achieved”.
We continuously learn and improve as leaders; around every corner lies the next leadership challenge that pushes us differently, stretches different skills and challenges our assumptions in different ways.
With every quality piece of leadership development work we do – a great course, a great conference, a great book – we can feel engaged, invigorated, ready to apply our learning and leap in to the next leadership challenge.
We can also quickly lose ourselves again to habit and busyness within a remarkably short time frame of those magical insights!
But no piece of learning is itself our answer to everything.
Leadership is too messy, complex and ambiguous.
So how do we continually develop ourselves as leaders, building on that explicit learning whilst grounding it in our lived challenges and experiences?
I work with my clients to develop a habit of ongoing Reflection to support their development as leaders. From mid-level to senior leaders, we rarely get the feedback that we need to improve, in the ways that we did when we were in the earlier stages of our careers.
Consistently stopping in the day, week or even month, to give ourselves that feedback is a key skill in our leadership arsenal.
Reflecting on our own leadership behaviours – what did we do, what worked, and what didn’t -
helps us to build on our strengths as leaders to tackle more of our challenges effectively, and also brings real awareness to where we might need to experiment with other ways of working. Our ongoing learning becomes grounded in the actual leadership challenges that we are facing, deepening our application or even rejection of the models we have learned!
As you turn your thoughts to the development opportunities you might need this year – consider how you might establish a practise of reflection that will support you as a Work in Progress.
A coach? Give me a call ?? 😊
