Leadership Insights
In Monday’s Leadership Insights, we focused on how reflective practice serves to build your leadership effectiveness. We offered some suggestions on how to build in daily reflection time—a real challenge for higher ed leaders!
Today, we’ll share about how to take a step back and focus more at the weekly level. There’s actually a strategic difference between daily and weekly habit rhythms that can make or break your consistency as a leader.
Weekly habits capture the bigger picture: While daily habits focus on immediate actions (like a morning routine or end-of-day reflection), weekly habits allow you to step back and assess patterns, relationships, and strategic alignment. They’re perfect for things like reviewing team dynamics, evaluating progress on longer-term goals, or planning ahead for upcoming challenges.
Weekly rhythms match leadership cycles: Much of leadership work operates on weekly cycles—like team meetings, project check-ins, or planning sessions. Weekly habits can anchor to these existing rhythms rather than fighting against your natural workflow.
Sustainability through flexibility: Daily habits can feel rigid and create guilt when missed. Weekly habits offer more flexibility—you can do your weekly reflection on Sunday morning, Wednesday evening, or Friday afternoon depending on what the week demands. This adaptability is crucial for leaders whose schedules are unpredictable.
Deeper processing time: Weekly habits allow for more substantial work—like analyzing what leadership approaches worked well this week, identifying relationship patterns that need attention, or connecting daily experiences to longer-term development goals. This deeper processing matches the complexity of leadership challenges.
Build in Weekly Reflection Time
So what are some ways you can build in reflective practice each week? Take some time to read through the following and choose one practice to try this week.
Seek Feedback Regularly
Ask one person you trust each week: “What’s one thing I could have done differently as a leader this week?” This takes courage, but it reveals gaps between your intentions and the impact you’re having. You can write these pieces of feedback down to start to look at patterns.
Expand Your Perspective
Take time to learn about something outside your direct area of work in higher education. For instance, if you’re faculty, learn more about how student success or retention functions. If you’re staff, read the faculty council minutes to hear about concerns from that side of the institution. Spending 15 minutes weekly reading or learning something unrelated to your focus expands your perspective.
Talk to Someone Who Disagrees with You
Engage with colleagues who you know have different viewpoints on a work issue. You may not come to an agreement, but it’s still valuable to think about what you may learn from these conversations.
If none of these practices sound authentic to you, go to Sophia to ask for help.
Whatever you choose, head to the Academic Impressions LinkedIn page and share with us what you did using the hashtag #DailyLeadershipPractice.