In the age of globalization and hypercompetition, leaders are becoming increasingly aware of how much the health of their organisation impacts the bottom line of their business. There is a lot of focus on conceptualizing and measuring organisational health in order to guide improvements. Companies like McKinsey do great work in this space while Great Place to Work has become a well-known brand in many job markets. The trend, as befits the age of data, is to employ ample surveys to produce organisational health metrics and then to effect change from the top-down.

We would be mistaken to neglect, however, the complementary bottom-up perspective. Organisational health is shaped just as much at the grassroots, by each and every team. A culture of taking ownership from within and investing in the health of our own team is as important to overall organisational health as solid high-level strategy. And it just makes sense for our own well-being.

We would be equally mistaken to neglect the softer tools at our disposal, such as reflection. Data from well-designed surveys is a useful piece of input when we look at our team’s health, but it has an inevitable averaging effect on the wealth of personal and collective experiences that we live. In that space, outliers are sometimes more relevant than the average, the exceptions can be the pattern and details may hold important insight. Reflection is better at exploring this landscape meanwhile the survey method is good at revealing trends and hinting at the general direction.

Reflection

It’s not something about which we spend a lot of time thinking. That would be very meta. But if we did, most of us would realize that in the course of a day we barely have time to reflect about anything. We live at a gallop, our work day is as busy as ever, and we never seem to spend as much time as we’d like with our family and friends. Moreover, ubiquitous technology fills every idle moment we have with texts, tweets, podcasts and videos. The good news is that there is an opposing trend gaining momentum. Critical reflection is being recognized more and more as an important component in learning. Mindful reflection is becoming increasingly popular as a well-being practice. And I argue here that we should incorporate reflection in our toolbox at work to have healthier teams and healthier organisations.

Reflection is generally understood to mean the conscious examination of one’s own thoughts, emotions, feelings and actions. In learning, it’s defined as a reasoning process, whether collective or individual, that makes meaning from experiences. Both definitions are useful when we work on team health. Our team is only as healthy as ourselves, our relationships and the ways in which we work.

We should take time individually to reflect on our own working health - how does work affect our mental, emotional and physical well-being, how does it satisfy our needs and our goals? We should reflect as well on the interactions in which we take part - whether they have positive or negative effects on ourselves, on our colleagues and on the work we do. And of course we should reflect on how we work, whether we put to use our time, effort, qualities and skills in a meaningful, effective and rewarding way.

Similarly, we should take time as a team to share our individual reflections and to reflect collectively on shared experiences. This should be an exercise in candid, inclusive conversation and in understanding and empathizing with different viewpoints. But it should also be a constructive endeavour, the whole team working together to celebrate and reinforce that which is indeed healthy and works well, but also to identify what doesn’t work and why, and to agree on how to improve.

To be effective

All of this is a time investment, of course, so we have to make good use of our own and of our team’s time. Individual reflection is not mind wandering, and collective reflection is not rambling. Reflection implies a level of discipline and structure, it’s an exploratory yet focused reasoning process. For example, from the paragraph above you can get an intuition of one way in which I slice my mental model of team health: Me, Us and our Work.

So at the end of every work week I could perhaps reflect on each of those three areas in turn, “scanning” and “triaging” for meaningful emotions, interactions or events. I would then turn my focus on each of these and examine them. What are their effects, are they healthy or unhealthy? What caused them, are they part of a pattern? Is there any nuance that I’m missing? How would things appear through the eyes of the other actors involved? How do I/we improve or, in the case of something positive, do more of it? And finally, what’s the best way to share this reflection with my team?

Now, every one of us would find a thought process that works for him or her and with practice that would become natural. Similarly, each team would agree on a structure for sharing their reflections and reflecting together. The important thing is getting off auto-pilot and making the cognitive effort and the time investment to assess, monitor and improve the health of our team for the benefit of our organisation, of our colleagues and most importantly, our own.