• been part of a project that never felt complete—in which, somehow, things were left unsaid or tasks left undone?
• found yourself halfway into an initiative when you suddenly had a feeling of déjà-vu but couldn’t pinpoint what you had learned the last time around?
• felt you let an opportunity float by—an opportunity to capture meaningful learning for yourself, your group, or your organization as a whole?
• been part of an event or initiative and felt frustrated that the lessons experienced by the group could not be transferred and shared with the organization as a whole?
Critical Reflections will help you address all of these kinds of situations. Unlike away-from-work training or conferences, the learning that takes place from Critical Reflections happens on the job. The process embeds learning into doing the work itself, helping you simultaneously achieve organizational results and new learning and growth.
First Things First
Before you begin the Critical Reflections process with your group, you as the leader need to identify the key event, allocate time and space, and prepare to orient your group.
Identify the Key Event
You may find that this first step takes care of itself. Something strikingly good—or bad—may happen within your group that clearly holds lessons for the future. Be alert to such opportunities. Whether the key event was a great success or a wretched failure, your goal will be to affect future outcomes in similar situations. Key events could include any of the following:
• Crisis situation
• Important meeting
• Change in the group members
• Change in the leadership of a group
• Achieving an important milestone
• Completing a change initiative
• Hitting or missing a financial target
• End of a quarter
See the sidebar on the next page for a couple of examples.
Key Events: Positive and Negative
The senior management team of a regional hospital was working to create a more collaborative culture and to become a more customer-focused hospital. The hospital’s CEO, a classic type A manager, was trying to change in his relationship with his team to create more of an environment of shared leadership, shared ownership, shared accountability, and shared learning. Over a period of several quarters, the team made significant headway in trying to practice a more inclusive leadership model.
In the midst of that process, the hospital found itself in a crisis situation, dealing with a massive overflow of patients from a large explosion at a local construction site. The hospital responded with high levels of professionalism: communication flowed quickly and openly, hospital units coordinated activities to allow for a quick response to emerging needs, and the staff displayed selfless dedication and commitment. The staff’s performance and positive patient-confidence reports following the explosion seemed to show that the hospital was on the right track.
Then the team members were presented with data from the next quarterly survey and discovered that there had been a huge dip in patient confidence. They were stunned. One member asked, “Why haven’t we been able to create consistency in patient confidence?” Things fell apart, and the team members reverted to old behaviors. The CEO dominated the discussion, the directors of the various functional units pointed fingers at one another’s departments, and open communication collapsed.
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