The Sage Leader Reflects, Connects, Invests
Shaner on Leadership Tagged conscious leadership, perspective, resiliency, sage lead February 15th, 2010The sage leader is one who rides the turbulent wave of uncertainty and changing business paradigms. In order to do this and keep yourself grounded you need to engage in certain practices: Reflect, Connect, Invest.
Reflect to gain clarity on what you want and to gain insight on what is working and not working in terms of your own leadership getting you to where you want to go or where your organization needs you to go.
Connect with your colleagues to support and help each other grow and develop.
Invest in your and other’s development. This takes time and effort to build relationships that support your goals. I suggest thinking about not only ways in which you can be mentored or receive safe feedback and support but always ways you can mentor others, regardless of where you are at in your career.
© Copyright 2010 Sage Leadership Strategies, LLC
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March 18th, 2010 at 8:33 am
Couldn’t agree with you more Susan. We learn a lot from experience but we learn a lot more by reflecting on those experiences. Things happen to us continually and we may or may not learn from them—and even if we do learn something we may not be aware of it and be able to articulate it. By being able to articulate your experience you can not only share lessons learned with others but you can accelerate your own development. Otherwise our learning is haphazard and incremental at best. It’s sort of like being a rat in a Skinner Box. At first the rat inadvertently hits the lever and gets a pellet. But that has to go on by accident for awhile before the rat does it with any consistently. And, I suspect the rat never does know what it is doing. We humans can conceptualize. So, if we hit the bar and a pellet comes out we have to the ability to make hypotheses about what links the events. We can say to ourselves, ‘Hmmm…I hit the bar and got a pellet. I wonder if it will happen again? Let me see.’ We can then try it again, and if it works we get the quick ‘aha’ insight rather than a more protracted learning sequence. The truth is, however, when it comes to leadership most people are like the rat in the Skinner Box. So, even if we are successful, we think it’s because we are “natural” leaders rather than the more likely explanation that we unwittingly acquired behaviors that worked. Reflection helps make these processes more known and therefore we can make our behavior more intentional.