Despite your faith tradition, or none, the idea of reflecting upon your own behaviors is essential to being a mature  and maturing human being.  Allowing time for reflection on YOUR OWN behavior and then forgiving yourself and finding more effective strategies going forward is the heart and soul of every faith and the journey to being a good woman or a good man—–as well as a successful woman and a successful man.

We are in the Lenten season in the Christian Church—which is a time dedicated to self reflection and reminding our selves of the need to forgive and atone to others for what we have done to harm them or failed to do to help them (much more important).  But it dawned on me today while at church that this concept needs applying at work—and that when I was ‘pitching” business of performance improvement in organizations it is related to this same point.  If we all don’t self reflect and own our own part of the reasons for things going wrong, if we don’t share that responsibility by owning our mistakes, we can’t possibly be part of the effort to improve workplace performance.

One of my favorite stories of being a consultant happened in the pitch stage for a multi year consulting project aimed at improving the quality of workplace performance in a large insurance company.  The company had been spending time and money on a quality approach but just didn’t feel it was getting value and real performance improvement.  Someone from this company had seen me deliver a speech on quality and workplace improvement and gave my name to the senior leadership team—-I was asked if I could come for a day, talk to people, look at documents and the situation and then advise the senior leadership team what I thought needed to be done. 

At the end of the day, seated with the senior team in a small conference room I said essentially the following: ” I am not exactly sure what the problem is but I feel very certain—95% so—-that much of the problem is with you right in this room and something you are not doing right.”  There was silence—finally one VP said, “Pat, can I ask you something—-do you make any money?”.  It broke everyone up and I laughed along with them but said again—”hey what can I say?  It is true.”  Now this DOES NOT mean I don’t think everyone in companies need support and performance tools and more coaching—a lot more.  So don’t twist what I am saying.  But, what I am saying and meaning is that self reflection on your own actions or lack of actions, admitting them and modeling right from the top is essential to changes in performance. 

This is the message I was giving to that senior team (who I worked for many years after they decided if I had the courage to say what I did I had to be good!)—-that performance improvement starts with our own improvement.  Self reflection and self improvement sets the stage for all staff improvement—it models it.  The danger is of course stopping there—spending time and money to help the senior people reflect, “do penance” in the work sense of that word, and get support and training and coaching.  That support has to then be extended to the rest of the organization allowing people at every level to self reflect and self direct their own changes.  Performance improvement is for everyone.  In this season of lent I am reminded we need to apply this lesson to us all and find inexpensive and effective ways to make performance improvement through self reflection possible for everyone—-hey, we have a solution for that—it’s called coaching for everyone.