Self-Reflection Can Make You A Better Leader At Work

By Emily Reynolds What does being a good leader mean to you? Having tonnes of charisma? Being intelligent? Encouraging fairness and participation in the workplace? Whatever combination of qualities you value, it’s likely that your vision of good leadership is different from your colleague’s or your manager’s, who themselves will have a highly personal vision of who they want to be at work. A new study from Remy E. Jennings at the University of Florida and colleagues, published in Personnel Psychology, looks closely at this individualised idea of leadership — our “best possible leader self”. If we focus and reflect on this best possible self every morning, they find, it could help us behave more like a leader in the here and now. Participants were 54 students (mainly White men) enrolled on a weekend MBA course in the United States, chosen because they were likely to aspire to leadership. All participants were in the intervention condition for five days and the control condition for five days. In the intervention condition, participants were asked to write expressively every morning in response to the prompt “think about your best possible self in a leadership role sometime in the future. Imagine everything has gone as well as it possibly could for you. Think of this as the realisation of the best possible leader you could ever hope to be”. During this period, participants were also asked to reflect on positive traits, useful skills and achievem...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: leadership Occupational Source Type: blogs