Every time the new year starts, I hear a lot of people start planning things to do and discuss goals to accomplish.
There is nothing wrong with activity, but we tend to jump into it without a good time reflection with our team members.
Without reflection, we might be making similar mistakes time again and not progress as fast as we wish. Worst, we could get into a rut and continue the year ahead with a lack of drive.
Just think about it, even high-performance cars need a pit stop so that it can be effective for the rest of the race. What about you?
Why is reflection important?
- Creates self-awareness, especially how you have acted in a particular situation. You start noticing how your decisions affect others.
- Creates patterns of success – you start reflecting on what worked for you in certain situations and recreate the conditions for it to happen more often.
- Creates a sense of progression – you start noticing that you or your team has progressed in certain things and are better compared to a couple of months ago.
- Helps you calibrate your actions – We all make mistakes at work, the question is how fast we forward when it happens. You will start noticing things or habits that do not support your success and decide how to calibrate it.
Even the great management guru, Peter Drucker said:
“Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection, will come even more effective action.”
What can we do to lead to “effective action”?
Here are some reflection questions that we could ask our team members to get them on a reflective mode:
- What is something that you are grateful for in the past few months? Who do you want to acknowledge?
- What is working well for yourself/your team?
- What do you feel that you should focus more on this year?
- How can we make a better positive impact to our stakeholders?
- How can we create more joy at work?
- If you could sum up in one word a direction that you want to take for yourself, what will it be?
Let me know how it was for you once you have reflected with your team members.
