OK, so it wasn’t so much mine but more ours. I sat down recently to review Saffron’s achievements with our independent accreditor and it was two hours of reflection on probably 2000 hours of my effort. That’s quite something to review, relive, and almost certainly a time to renew. Renew my commitment to improvement, acknowledge achievements and reassign priorities.
In my time-poor, workload-rich life this moment of reflection was something in itself.
So it got me thinking. How best can I encourage more of this in our people without feeling like I’ve added not only to my own, but to their workloads?
Smart objectives not withstanding, how do senior leadership actively embrace reflection? We espouse that our people should do it but it’s only at enforced times that we actively participate.
Clearly, more frequency of these moments are better than longer reflection times, but how do I possibly plan such time? I’ve come to the conclusion that I need to enforce it. To make full use of it. However, that requires me to be continuously, self-assessing, challenging and measuring my own performance.
I think one way I might change my behaviour is by committing to 15 minutes of ‘me’ time every day. Go away with your storyboards, resolve your own development dilemmas, and calculate the pricing on your own with clear logical workings. This is ‘me’ time and every day I will journal one achievement, one opportunity to improve, and one way to grow and develop the business. If next year I’ve increased turnover, inspired a member of my team to excel and truly created another transformational step change for my clients changing learning experience then will I have achieved something?
I hope so.
How do you do it?
