Chapter 6: Reflection at work
Another big theme throughout the interviews has been reflection. Reflection is a way to look back at experiences and to understand and learn from in order to develop something, it could be yourself, a team, or an organization. Here I connect the concept to the startup reality and how accelerators tries to foster this trait in their entrepreneurs.
The speedy life of startups
As every founder would tell you, running a startup isn’t quite the most laid back job you could have. It involves great risk and a lot of effort to make a business take off. The culture of hustling is one the strongest narratives when it comes to startup life. You’ve got to show up everyday and work your butt off. But, as Sanjay mentions, this could lead to bad decision making, including doing things like hiring in a conventional way when you’re not a conventional company. It’s what we get taught at in school and through life. Because of this there is no innovation being made by the founders/entrepreneurs because there is no time to innovate how you actually organize.
Giving yourself a break is required, because if you don’t you run the risk of burning out and your whole business goes to shreds says Sanjay. It’s also about needing to step back and look at what you’ve done throughout the past months, weeks or days and being able to celebrate the moments in which you’ve grown your sales, acquired a new key customer or whatever it might be says Deborah. Besides the risk of burning out, Deborah says that one of the things the entrepreneurs appreciate in their accelerator program is the quarterly reflections which enables them to think more strategically. For her own role as managing director for the program she states that it also helps the accelerator team to know where and how to support the entrepreneurs.
According to Kazemi and Ziaaddini (2014) one thing organizations can do to prevent burnout is to manage expectations, both when it comes to one’s self and others, and especially if you tend to be a perfectionist. Burnout also leads to job related tension and decreased levels of job commitment (Beheshtifar and Omidvar, 2013). This can be tied to a lack of feedback and communication, which is needed to develop aspirations and values through honest, constructive and cathartic conversations (Cedoline, 1982). Through reflection we can prevent burnout by learning how to identify thought patterns and setting time aside for checking in with ourselves, something that Schippers (2015) does as a habit. To cope with the stressful startup life it’s therefore essential to make reflection a habit, both on a personal and an organizational level.
Both Dara and Collin mention the importance of feedback loops and that they need to be reflective and satisfying. Dara says that it’s part of the developmental process and without it you can get stuck in a cycle where it’s just you and your inner monologue. By involving others in the feedback and making it reflective you open up more possibilities to become a better human being. As a gamer Collin see the feedback loop as going through a challenge and then receiving a reward or a confirmation that what they did was the right thing to do.
Our brains work in local feedback loops at each operational stage of generating an output, which can offer flexibility and fine-tuning to the overall capacity and accuracy (Person and Khodakhah, 2016). These are considered especially beneficial when you work in non-linear processes or when new inputs are incorporated at different stages. Working in feedback loops in a local aspect, such as in teams, would therefore be beneficial, especially when it comes to development since you learn and grow in a non-linear way, as it mirrors how our brains work. As Baker et al. (2013) mentions organizations can also create and maintain high performing individuals by focusing on feedback and meaning.
For some people, like Joe, the reward could be feeling appreciated in the team, which is how he feels after their team reflections. A sense of belonging has been established to increase motivation (Fernandez and Rajan, 2015). Mahar, Cobigo and Stuart (2013) states that the concept of connectedness can be promoted by complex interactions between environmental and personal factors and is built on shared experiences and beliefs. Having a protected time slot for reflection and learning and it being structurally supported by the management is valued and promotes self-regulated learning (Chou et al., 2011). This suggests that by building a habit of reflection in a group/team setting it might be possible to further establish a sense of belonging while adding also building a shared foundation of experiences and expectations.
Insight 8: Open reflection enables the team members to help each other and create a sense of belonging
Insight 9: Giving each other constructive feedback and communicating better is important to manage expectations
Building a picture of yourself
By reflecting, not only on the business and the organization itself but on yourself as well you can start creating and building a self awareness. Sarah, Marianne and Joe mention this as key to growing, both as an individual and as a team member. It also leads to good business since it’s perceived to enable you to more easily align with the organization’s purpose and vision, which according to Schein (2010) is a level deeper on the cultural scale.
Walumbwa et al. (2008) sees seeking feedback to improve one’s interactions with others and accurately describing your own capabilities through relational transparency as two signs of self-awareness. The concept of self-awareness has also been shown to impact organizational behavior positively since you become more aware of your own behavior and therefore able to adjust it in order to role model wanted organizational behavior (Zamahani and Rezaei, 2014). Earlier in this project I’ve made the argument for behaviors being a primary part of culture (see Balthazard, Cooke and Potter, 2006; Han and Ma, 2015; Sam Spurlin; Sarah Juhl Gregersen; Webber, Ser and Goussak, 2015; Yang, 2012). Using reflection as a tool to gain self-awareness it’s possible to further develop behavioral aspects of the organizations that tie into the culture.
By creating an awareness around yourself you can also practice self leadership since you become aware of your needs, wants and drivers, says Marianne. According to Laloux’s (2014) theory on teal organizations, the ability to self manage is something that’s going to be part of the organization’s DNA in the future. Sam and Allison agrees with this when they say we have to train people to be self-leaders and being able facilitate themselves. Hollenbeck and McCall’s (2003) supports this and suggests that leaders need to develop their understanding of themselves so they can compensate for their limitations and develop new skills or improve weaknesses. Practicing the skills of self leadership through reflection could be seen as a key piece in shaping culture since it’s about uncovering underlying assumptions and behavior on an individual level and could possibly feed back into the organizational culture.
Insight 10: Creating self-awareness through reflection will enable the organization to manage and develop behaviors
Goal setting
Another downside to the hustling culture of startups is that you don’t have the time to sit down and look over the horizon. Life is a constant to do list with things that needs to get ticked off. “There’s never enough hours in the day” is something you hear quite often in the startup world. But by pausing and reflecting you’re able to take that look over the horizon and ask yourself if what you do makes sense says Deborah. You might be so busy doing things that it’s actually hurting your business because you’re not focusing your time on what really matters to you and the purpose of the organization. Joe mentions this as well and stresses the importance of reflecting on the goals you set for the business and ask yourself why you did or didn’t reach them.
Having a sustainable approach on effective goals comes with the assumption that people have desired outcomes that go beyond the short-term task goal (Neubert and Dyck, 2016). Because of this Neubert and Dyck argue that it’s in your interest to set moderated goals that also doesn’t diminish the quality of your relationship with your team members or possibly leads to unethical behavior, which correlates to what the respondents has said about hurting their business by not focusing on the right thing. It’s therefore indicated that setting goals is a factor in being able to drive the business forward and be used as a reason for reflection.
Insight 11: Setting goals can be used in reflective setting to propel the organization’s business goals
Next: Chapter 7: The human side of organizations
Previous: Chapter 5: The importance of practice
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Hyper Island — MA Digital Media Management
Industry Research Project
