Building Blocks of Reflective Leadership – Patience and Perseverance

Management Associates Qualities of reflective leadership, Reflective Leadership, Values

Easy solutions and quick fixes are commonplace in contemporary society. Results are promised within days and progress guaranteed through a few simple steps. Time and again we are assured that not only can we eat more and still lose weight, but that we should.

Swimming in these waters day after day, we all come to expect some degree of immediacy in our endeavors. We want the computer fixed now, not tomorrow. We feel that the paperwork should have been completed yesterday, not today.

But while such promises might hold a degree of allure, most of us know that very few things worth our time happen overnight and without effort. Change might sometimes come suddenly or without warning, but development, solid and sustainable over the long term, is achieved only over months and years of consistent effort.

Determination is a key component of any reflective discipline, but patience and perseverance are its indispensable twin sisters – related in operation and complimentary in outcome.

In this respect, reflective leadership is less about progressing by leaps and bounds, and more about advancing along a steady process of incremental growth. It is about building new patterns of thought and action, little-by-little, day-by-day.

Leaders who are looking for one-and-done answers would find little satisfaction in such an approach. Nor would they likely find success with it.

But even leaders who are committed to the rigors of a reflective path should not underestimate the task before them – the patience they will need to have with themselves and others, and the perseverance they will need to exercise in daily efforts.

Walking a path of development focused less on immediate results than long-term transformation is not easy. Nor, frankly, does it find a great deal support in a world so often driven by quarterly earnings reports and year-over-year performance metrics.

But improvement, if it is to be sustainable and lasting, must spring from ongoing effort, and that is invariably grounded in resolute patience and unshakable perseverance.