Reflective practice

One of the things I often say to people who ask how I like graduate school is how much I appreciate the time to think, especially the time to reflect on past experiences and understand what I can learn from them. In my first semester, one of the things that struck me about my classes was how relevant they were to both my current and previous nonprofit management experience. One of my first classes even triggered a PTSD-like emotional response to an exchange with a professor that felt a little too much like certain unhappy conversations with my old board of directors; and while that doesn't sound like a good thing, it actually gave me a chance very early on to recognize feelings and defensive strategies that I was still carrying from my past position and to make a conscious decision to adopt some new ways of responding. (The class ultimately turned out just fine, BTW.)

As the year went on, it seemed like reflection on my past job moved into the background, and the focus shifted to my current organizational involvements in the real-world challenges I would bring to my class discussions and assignments. It was a shift that made sense, of course, and allowed me to become a reflective practitioner in real time as well as after the fact. The trend seemed like it would continue into this year; but as I realized that in planning some of my topics for course projects and papers, I noticed an unexpected sense of regret that I wouldn't be able to process more of that past experience through my current work.

Turns out, I'm not quite done with studying my past job, and I'm very glad for it. I'm taking a course on adaptive leadership this semester; and as I tried to figure out which organization to use as a basis for the papers I have to write, I realized that none of the present situations fit so well as the situation I found myself in just before I left my old job. There are some difficulties in trying to use that position and organization as the basis for my work: both I and the organization have moved on since then, and I've deliberately limited my contact with my past colleagues to provide some emotional space for all of us. I'm not at the point where I want to discuss the events surrounding my departure with most of the people directly involved in the conflict, because even a year and a half later there are still things that make me upset when I think about them.

But that is one of the advantages to studying the situation as a school project: I think it will help me to move past the old tensions and hurts and make the experience as productive as possible for my future development (as a person as well as a manager/leader). The reading material raises probing questions not only about what I thought was going on with other actors in the organization, but also about my own assumptions, values and behaviors. I need to be able to take a closer look at what I did as the situation progressed, because the fact of the matter is that many of my own strategies were just as maladaptive and unfruitful as those applied by my colleagues. In order to become a better colleague, manager and leader in my current and future roles, I have to recognize my own weaknesses as well as strengths and try to develop new ways of addressing change and conflict.

I'm hopeful about what will emerge from my writing, because I feel like I have many opportunities in the present to test out new methods for handling organizational situations. In particular, my challenge areas are dealing with politics, with personality conflicts, with my own tendency to inflexibility in how I want things done and a lack of openness to the suggestions of others, and with trying out new skills or activities that I haven't already mastered. I'd like my work to give me some additional layers of analytical process that can provide a buffer between what's happening around me and a my very sensitive emotional core; I don't want to become emotionless, but I want to get better at managing how my emotions are expressed and how I can use them to better advantage in my dealings with other people.

I think there's a lot of this that will be fun as well as deep and difficult. Case in point, the following excerpt from today's reading (The Practice of Adaptive Leadership, p. 94):

One way to understand the challenges raised by external loyalties is to use the metaphor of a vegetable stew. To make a good vegetable stew, you have to cook the ingredients just enough that they give up some of their original color and taste; otherwise, you'd have a pot of crunchy vegetables, not a stew. But if you cook the vegetables too much, each of them will lose so much of its distinctive qualities that you will end up with a pot of undifferentiated mush.

Imagine these vegetables as stakeholders, and suppose you get the stew just right. When those carrots and onions go back to carrot-land and onion-land, having sacrificed some of their distinctiveness in the interests of contributing to the stew, their old friends and family at home will noticed they have changed. "You ... smell like an onion," the carrots will say. "You're not one of us anymore. You've sold out. We sent you there to represent us and champion our views to the others, not to come back contaminated with their juices on you. What did they do to you there?"

Note to everybody: in no professional conversation anywhere does anyone want to hear about who did what with their juices. It's like my professor who said on the first day of class that he "gets off" on people writing down what he says when he lectures. Even if he didn't mean it literally, it is still just so gross.

But also, very funny!