“What good is experience if you do not reflect?” ~ Frederick the Great
That’s one of my favorite quotes and it popped up in my head when I read Herminia Ibarra’s article, “How to Act and Think Like a Leader.” Here’s a money quote.
“To become a successful leader, you have to ditch the conventional ‘think before doing’ logic and instead start acting like a leader in order to start thinking like a leader.”
Leadership is a doing discipline
What you think is important, but your behavior, what you say and do, is what defines you as a leader. If what you think and what you believe doesn’t find its way into your behavior, it doesn’t count.
Leadership development is about learning to do
We develop leaders when we help them learn to act in ways that work. All too often, though, we try to teach leadership as a theoretical construct that will magically result in effective behavior. We tell leaders that they should believe a certain way and then act on that belief. But for most human beings most of the time, that process works better in reverse.
Learn by doing
For decades, I earned a lot of my daily bread by helping police sergeants do a better job of supervision. In almost every class there were a few sergeants who could come up and say, “I don’t that that will work.” I learned that the best response was: “Try it and see if it works.”
My advice didn’t work for every sergeant in every situation, but it worked most of them most of the time. When it did, the sergeants learned a new and more effective way to do their job. They tried it first and the results they got changed their thinking.
Go back to that line from Frederick the Great. “What good is experience, if you do not reflect?” Note the order. Experience first, then reflection.
Leadership Development Resource
Herminia Ibarra’s new book is Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader.
