Setting aside 15 minutes a day can help you prioritize, prepare and build a stronger team.

Leaders must regularly turn off the noise and ask themselves what they stand for and what kind of an example they want to set.

By Kellogg Insight – Industry Week republished

Photo: Robertax | Dreamstime.com

Your company’s new product launch is on hold indefinitely. Your entire team is under shelter-in-place orders. And your own makeshift “home office” resembles a second-grade science experiment run amok.

As you frantically react to the global COVID-19 pandemic, are you in the mood to reflect on your larger goals? To consider what’s working, what isn’t, and what you might do in the future?

Probably not.

“The usual reaction is, ‘Well, I’ll just go faster,’” says Harry Kraemer, clinical professor of strategy at the Kellogg School and former CEO of multibillion-dollar healthcare company Baxter International. But that’s mistaking activity for productivity. And productivity demands self-reflection.

Kraemer would know. For thirty-seven years—ever since he was unexpectedly duped into attending a spiritual retreat with his future father-in-law—he has made a nightly ritual of self-reflection. “Every day,” he emphasizes. Stepping back from the fray is how Kraemer, once the manager of 52,000 employees, avoided “running around like a chicken with his head cut off.”

Instead of constant acceleration, Kraemer says, leadership demands periods of restraint and consideration, even—perhaps especially—during a crisis. Leaders must regularly turn off the noise and ask themselves what they stand for and what kind of an example they want to set.

“Self-reflection is not spending hours contemplating your navel,” Kraemer says. “No! It’s: What are my values, and what am I going to do about it? This is not some intellectual exercise. It’s all about self-improvement, being self-aware, knowing myself, and getting better.”

Kraemer offers three ways that periodic self-reflection can strengthen leadership, as well as some of his favorite prompts.

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