ADAD9312 Chap.5 Reflective Leadership in Practice
Reflective Leadership in Practice
Reflective leadership uses experience as evidence while refusing to treat memory or feeling as a complete explanation. This chapter separates reflection-in-action from later reflection-on-action and builds a repeatable arc from event to assumption, impact, concept and changed practice.
It also shows how to preserve uncertainty about other people's experience and design a coherent reflective essay around development across time. Reflection-in-action notices and adjusts while a situation is unfolding; reflection-on-action reconstructs the event afterwards and can compare it with concepts and later evidence. Both require more than description.
The writer identifies an assumption, traces how it shaped behaviour, examines observable effects and considers how power or context changes the interpretation. Feelings matter as data about attention and response, but they do not prove another person's experience or establish causation. A strong reflective account marks those limits openly.
Development becomes visible when incidents are selected around a recurring leadership question and placed in relation to one another. The later action should test a revised practice, not simply announce greater awareness. This creates an evidence trail from experience through interpretation to change while protecting confidential detail and resisting a polished story of uninterrupted improvement.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Learning from experience without treating memory as proof
- 02
Reflection-in-action while a leadership situation unfolds
- 03
Reflection-on-action through later evidence and interpretation
- 04
Theories in use beneath ordinary choices and habits
- 05
Power and privilege shaping attention, voice and consequence
- 06
Intention and impact separated through observable evidence
- 07
Changed practice tested through a specific future action
- 08
Essay continuity built around development across bounded incidents
Worked example · free
Reconsider a meeting interruption
- 1This practice mark allocation is not an official University scheme. Reconstruct the bounded event without defending it.
- 1Name the assumption linking efficiency with agenda control.
- 1Distinguish intention from effect and locate positional power.
- 1Change the meeting structure and define a review cue.
Key terms
- Changed action
- A specific future practice derived from reflection and open to later review.
- Critical reflection
- Examination of assumptions, power, position and consequences rather than description alone.
- Impact
- The effect an action has on people or conditions, which may differ from the actor's intention.
- Positionality
- How a person's social and institutional position shapes perception, authority and available action.
- Reflection-in-action
- Noticing, interpreting and adjusting while an event continues to unfold.
- Reflection-on-action
- Later reconstruction and analysis of why an encounter developed as it did.
Reflective Leadership in Practice FAQ
What is the difference between reflection and description?
Description reconstructs what happened. Reflection examines the assumption guiding your response, the effects on other people, the influence of power and context, and how a course concept changes your interpretation. It concludes with a specific future practice.
Can a reflective essay include uncertainty?
Yes. Uncertainty is necessary when you cannot know another person's feelings or when evidence supports more than one reading. State what you observed, explain the limit, identify what you would ask or examine, and keep your claim proportionate.
How do I choose incidents for a reflective essay?
Select bounded experiences that develop one leadership question across time. Repeated difficulty can be valuable when you explain why an earlier strategy failed and how later action changed. Avoid assembling unrelated anecdotes simply because they occurred during the course.
Assessment move
Keep a short reflection record after tutorials and group decisions. Use five prompts: what happened, what assumption guided me, what effect did I observe, which concept reframes the event, and what will I test next? Before drafting, sort entries by a recurring leadership question rather than date. During revision, label sentences as description, interpretation, concept, impact or action.
Expand thin categories and remove confidential or identifying detail about other people. Write records soon enough to preserve concrete detail, but separate observation from interpretation. Note exact actions, sequence and available feedback in one column; place feelings, assumptions and tentative explanations in another. Add at least one plausible alternative reading.
When applying a concept, explain what it changes in your interpretation rather than attaching a label to the event. Select incidents that show a recurring tension, an attempted adjustment and later evidence about whether that adjustment helped. A coherent essay does not need a perfect ending; it needs a defensible account of development.
Practise writing uncertainty with precision: distinguish what you observed, what someone explicitly told you and what you infer. Replace claims about another person's feelings with the behavioural or verbal evidence available, then state the limit. Convert each lesson into a future practice with a context, action and feedback signal. Finally, read for retrospective certainty.
If the narrative makes every earlier event appear to point neatly toward the conclusion, restore the competing interpretations and unresolved questions that shaped the actual learning process.
