Forging a Reflective Organization

Management Associates Collective reflection, Culture, Human systems, Reflective Leadership

Leadership development is, at one level, an individual pursuit, focusing on leaders’ own strengths and challenges, successes and failures. The discipline of reflective leadership itself is grounded in individual attitudes and beliefs, and the personal choices they give rise to.   

At another level, however, leadership development is concerned with collective patterns of association and interaction. To build effective human systems, leaders must attend not only to their own personal interactions with others, but also to the way the people they oversee view, value, and treat one another.

This means that we, as leaders, must be mindful of the way we relate to persons A and B. But we must also take responsibility for the way person A treats person B, how person B treats his coworkers and contacts, and so forth.

Steps in this direction help expand the scope and range of reflection. And just as the most effective leader is a reflective leader, the most effective organization is a reflective organization – one in which leaders and non-leaders alike regularly assess personal beliefs and actions in light of their organization’s fundamental purpose.

To build such a workplace environment leaders must:

  • Strive to forge unity of thought and vision around the contribution the organization is designed to make in the world.
  • Help the organization define the culture by which it will pursue its vision.
  • Vigorously involve people, both individually and collectively, in vision- and culture-building.

Describing such steps is of course far easier than putting them into practice, particularly among the many challenges, setbacks, and limitations of any real-world organization. But every move in this direction will strengthen the capacity of the system to identify paths to further progress.