Profound Leadership Experience Reflection Activity

Authors:

Keywords: leadership development, reflection, organizational complexity, systems leadership, experiential learning

Abstract: The activity prompts students to reflect on their most profound leadership experience in an effort to uncover their individual and organizational strengths thorough a multi-staged, reflective, on-line exercise. With an appreciative approach, instructors meet students where they are, provide feedback, and pose a follow-on question. The follow-on question is intended to unveil a small piece of the complexity of leadership. The profound leadership experience assignments gives students an opportunity to think deeply about their personal and organizational strengths and how they want to align their goals and organizational systems to achieve desired outcomes. Finally, in the session debrief, we speculate that by understanding how crucible experiences shape leaders, the criteria can be proactively applied to anticipate support necessary for developing leaders to extract the most learning from experiences.