Gaining Perspective – What to Ask the Person in the Mirror

As the leader of your organization, you don’t need to know all the answers. Robert Steven Kaplan intended to encourage leaders to reflect on and consider, What to Ask the Person in the Mirror.

A crucial leadership skill Kaplan recommends is routinely making a conscious effort to step back, reflect, identify, and frame the issues central to leading your organization effectively into the future.

Allocate Time and Resources to Address Big Questions

Leading an organization is demanding. You can get caught up reacting. As shared in Are Your Leadership Liabilities Canceling Your Strengths? Being reactive is the opposite of what effective leaders are. If you’re reacting in your business, not surprisingly, you’ll struggle to find time to reflect on important issues.

When the leader finally does respond, it’s often too late to anticipate competitive threats, seize attractive opportunities, or make critical changes that would help advance their organizations—and their careers.

Every person and organization is unique. Each industry, geographic, and cultural context has a profound impact on what approaches and strategies make sense in a particular situation.

Kaplan notes the key lies in making a conscious effort to regularly step back to reflect, and then identify and frame the issues that are central to leading your organization effectively into the future.

The Inquiry Habit - Create Space for Reflection in Your Life

You need to create windows of time in which you can get perspective and think about key issues from an emotional distance. Kaplan suggests these 4 steps

• Take a vacation at least once every three or four months. Kaplan suggests three to four vacations a year. (See Why Your First Time Block is Vacation – Your One Thing)
• Build identified slack time into your regular schedule. Kaplan encourages being home for dinner several nights a week. Block out time on the weekends for decompression, reflection, and catching up on your sleep.
• Make it a priority to take better care of yourself. Kaplan recommends scheduling exercises regularly. Watch your diet and see a doctor regularly.
• Find other ways to create balance in your life. Kaplan suggests engaging in activities that take your mind off your work for sustained periods. These include time with loved ones, nonprofit work, intellectual pursuits, service in your community, or other activities—activities that put your organization and job in some type of broader context.

Carve out space and room for creating focus and gaining perspective.

The Reflective Organization

Metronomics and Scaling Up agenda for Quarterly and Annual meetings set aside anywhere from a half to a full day to review strategy and key elements of your organization. These are times for reflection and self-assessment. Has business changed, the people, market dynamics, competition, customers, or the economy? Investing at least half a day each quarter to reflect with your team ensures you create this space for reflection with your team.

If you have scheduled time for a meeting, are you prepared sufficiently to make sure you are using that time wisely? Have you structured the meeting so important issues are framed, and key topics are actively debated?

Do you schedule time for reflection with your senior leaders?

Make this book a priority to improve your leadership. Kaplan’s Suggested Follow-up Step is to keep the appendix What to Ask the Person in the Mirror: Critical Questions for Becoming a More Effective Leader and Reaching Your Potential on your wall (or some other convenient spot) and look it over regularly.

Ask yourself whether you are taking sufficient time to consider these topics.

Are you asking critical questions to help you increase the effectiveness of your organization?

Watch Kaplan explain why so many successful leaders are unhappy in 4 Secrets of Great Critical Thinkers | Inc. Magazine

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