The Book
Just as dieters don’t need another book about exercise and vegetables, leaders don’t need another book on management practices. What’s missing is an exploration of the relationship between knowledge of principles and the personal values and attitudes required to implement them.
Hanging the Mirror: The Discipline of Reflective Leadership embarks on such an exploration. Viewing leadership growth as a profoundly transformative process, Hanging the Mirror challenges leaders to unfreeze current thinking, reconsider operating assumptions, and make different personal choices.
Drawing on behavioral research as well as decades of management consulting experience, Hanging the Mirror challenges leaders to take an honest look at their behavior and the many ways it shapes the human systems they head. It suggests that a searching reexamination of fundamental convictions and beliefs is key to bridging the divide between knowledge and action.
Hanging the Mirror lays out a reflective discipline any leader can adopt, prompting them to:
- Candidly identify the values and beliefs that shape their behavior
- Objectively compare those values to what is known, through research, about leading people effectively
- Look at their moment-by-moment leadership choices to determine whether they truly believe what they think they believe
- Rethink beliefs that run counter to knowledge and make different knowledge-based leadership choices
Eschewing quick fix solutions, Hanging the Mirror does not aim to be an “easy” read. But herein lies its value. As one of our clients once told another, “This isn’t for everyone. They push and push and then push some more. But if you’re ready for it, it’s like nothing you’ve seen before.”