Great Leaders Make Time to Think

Leadership is often associated with action.

Leaders are expected to make decisions, solve problems, motivate teams and move organisations forward. In a busy working environment, taking time to stop and think can therefore feel almost counterproductive.

But Harvard Business School suggests the opposite: reflection is an essential part of effective leadership.

Harvard Business School Professor Nien-hê Hsieh describes reflective leadership as a continuous process in which leaders examine and re-evaluate their decisions, responsibilities and experiences. The purpose is not simply to look backwards. Reflection should help leaders make better decisions in the future.

Experience alone is not enough

There is a common assumption that people automatically become better leaders as they gain experience.

But experience and learning are not the same thing.

A leader can make hundreds of decisions without ever seriously examining why some worked and others failed. Without reflection, experience can even reinforce bad habits. We repeat familiar approaches because they worked once, because everybody else uses them or simply because we have stopped questioning them.

Reflective leadership introduces a deliberate interruption into that process.

What happened?

Why did I make that decision?

Which assumptions influenced me?

What effect did my decision have on other people?

And what should I do differently next time?

These are deceptively simple questions. But regularly asking them turns experience into an opportunity for learning.

Awareness, judgment and action

Hsieh’s reflective leadership model identifies several interconnected elements.

The first is awareness. Leaders need to understand the legal, economic and ethical responsibilities they have towards different stakeholders.

The second is judgment. Decisions are influenced by assumptions, biases and established ways of thinking. Leaders need to recognise those influences rather than assume their judgment is automatically objective.

Then comes action. Leadership ultimately requires decisions to be translated into behaviour, and leaders need to act consistently and accountably.

Reflection surrounds all of these stages. Leaders examine what they noticed, how they judged a situation and what happened when they acted.

The result is not a final answer to leadership.

It is a cycle of continuous learning.

What kind of leader do you want to be?

Reflection also goes deeper than evaluating business decisions.

Harvard’s model asks leaders to examine their own beliefs, goals and commitments because these inevitably influence the decisions they make.

That produces questions which rarely appear on a balance sheet:

What is important to me?

Which boundaries am I unwilling to cross?

What kind of life do I want to lead?

And perhaps most importantly:

What kind of leader do I want to be?

These questions become particularly important when leaders encounter situations in which there is no obvious correct decision.

Leadership frequently involves competing interests. What benefits shareholders may disadvantage employees. What is legally permissible may not necessarily be ethically desirable. What produces excellent short-term results may create serious long-term problems.

A reflective leader does not pretend these tensions do not exist.

The leader examines them.

Reflection requires accountability

Thinking alone is not leadership.

Reflection becomes valuable when it changes behaviour.

That is why accountability is an important element of the Harvard approach. Instead of asking only “How are we going to do this?”, a reflective leader also considers how a decision can be implemented responsibly.

This distinction is important for future leaders.

Leadership education can provide theories, frameworks and case studies. Experience can provide thousands of real-world situations. But neither automatically produces wisdom.

That requires something from the individual leader: the willingness to examine one’s own actions.

A lesson for future leaders

The modern workplace rewards speed.

Emails demand immediate answers. Meetings follow meetings. Dashboards provide information continuously. Leaders are encouraged to decide quickly and move on to the next problem.

Reflection asks them to do something that can feel surprisingly difficult:

Stop.

Not indefinitely. Not to avoid making a decision.

Stop long enough to understand what previous decisions can teach you before making the next one.

The future leader may therefore need to develop an unusual discipline: protecting time not just for doing, but also for thinking.

Because having twenty years of leadership experience does not necessarily mean that someone has spent twenty years becoming a better leader.

It could simply mean that they have repeated the same year twenty times.

Experience gives leaders lessons. Reflection allows them to learn from them.

Leadership field: Personal Leadership
Subfield: Reflective Leadership / Self-Awareness

Source: Esther Han, Harvard Business School Online, The Importance of Reflective Leadership in Business, 5 September 2023, drawing on the work of Harvard Business School Professor Nien-hê Hsieh.