Small, But Mighty Reflection Practices
When it comes to reflection, I think a lot of us fall into the “great intentions” camp. We know there is value in looking back at what went and not-so-well upon completing a project, but the truth is - another project awaits!
And that project is already behind deadline, so…
“Let’s just skip it this time and we’ll do one after the next project!”
Unfortunately, when the next project ends you start the cycle all over again.
You’re not alone. I know I’ve fallen into that pattern more times than I’d like to admit. The reality is that most of us are stretched beyond capacity and things like project reflections become a “nice to do” in a world overflowing with “need to do” tasks.
Like all great backburnered intentions though, it eventually catches up to us.
That mistake that cost you three weeks of work two projects ago - yeah, it just happened again. The issue that originally was caused by too many cooks in the kitchen? You guessed it, they're all still in the kitchen. And it’s once again burnt you.
Suddenly, the thing you skipped to save yourself time is actually costing you that exact resource. And that’s only if you’re lucky and it doesn’t spill into revenue lost or employee resignations.
The great news is that little actions can help your team reflect without requiring you to put a cumbersome new process into place!
Here are four ways you can slowly build more reflection into your workflow:
1. Designate the first 5-10 minutes of team meetings for open reflection. Use some of the questions from the reflection section above if you don’t know where to start. Be sure to define some ground rules and have a hard cutoff time or this can easily take over the rest of the meeting.
2. Incorporate reflection-focused questions into your 1:1s. Of course, you’ll only want to incorporate these once you’ve built psychological safety with the team member you’re managing. One that exists, some of my favorite questions include:
-
If you had a magic wand, what one thing would you change about how we approached our last project?
-
If you were leading the project, what would you do differently?
-
What is a potential risk you see that could impact our next project if we don't address it?
-
What's a mistake you've make recently? What did you learn from it?
3. Start a weekly reflection-focused Slack thread. This allows everyone to respond when they have time. Make sure leadership understands why you’re kicking off this initiative and goes out of their way to include their own learnings, making it safer for everyone else to chime in.
4. Build reflection into your All-Hands meeting. Reiterate the importance of regular reflection to the whole company by instituting a “Reflection Section” in your regular All-Hands agenda. Invite different teammates to share what they’ve learned in the last few weeks on their own team, then celebrate the willingness to reflect and share, whether learnings were positive and exciting or uncomfortable and difficult.
Hungry for more? For all of you reflection-aficionados, we’ve laid out a more robust reflection activity in the next section. Use it to reflect on the first half of the year or a project you’ve recently completed as a team. We promise, the learnings that emerge will be invaluable to you over the coming six months!
|
