The Reflection Gap: What separates good leaders from great ones
February 2026 Blog
Most managers accumulate years of leadership experience without ever mastering leadership. The reason isn't effort or intelligence — it's that experience, on its own, teaches very little. What actually accelerates development is what happens after the experience ends.
I was reminded of this recently while debriefing with a client. At week's end, he sat down to reflect, journal open and time blocked, and his first thought was: "I didn't do anything this week that yielded new leadership insights."
Sound familiar? This is exactly where most leaders stop. He didn't.
Experience Isn't Enough
Psychologist K. Anders Ericsson's landmark research on expertise found that top performers across all domains don't simply accumulate experience — they engage in deliberate practice: purposeful repetition combined with structured feedback and reflection. Leadership follows the same pattern.
Organizational psychologist David Kolb mapped this as a four-stage cycle: concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualization, and active experimentation. Most leaders complete only the first step. They do, then move on. The learning never gets processed.
A 2014 Harvard Business School study by professor Francesca Gino found that employees who spent just 15 minutes at day's end reflecting on lessons learned performed 23% better than those who didn't. The time investment is small. The discipline is the hard part.
What Reflection Actually Looks Like
When my client pushed past that initial "nothing happened" resistance, forgotten moments began to surface: a difficult conversation, a team interaction that felt different, a moment where he chose a new approach instead of his default.
He chose one situation and unpacked it deliberately — reconstructing his words, his silence, his emotional state, the other person's responses. What emerged was a meaningful shift he hadn't consciously registered: he had led with his own expectations rather than deferring, modeled ownership, and in doing so changed the entire energy of the exchange. A relationship he'd seen as hierarchical started to feel more like a peer dynamic.
In under thirty minutes, he extracted insight that would otherwise have evaporated.
This is also how the brain works. Neuroscience research shows that reflection activates the default mode network, which integrates experience into longer-term understanding and skill. Without it, experiences pass through without sticking.
Building the Practice
The leaders I've seen develop fastest treat reflection as non-negotiable, not aspirational. Here's a simple weekly protocol to start:
Schedule it. Twenty minutes at week's end, blocked on your calendar like any other commitment.
Start with a scan. Ask yourself: What leadership situations did I navigate this week? Push past the first answer.
Unpack one moment fully. What did you do? What did you say? What were you feeling? What happened as a result?
Extract the lesson. What would you do differently — or the same — next time?
Research from the Center for Creative Leadership identifies learning agility — the ability to extract lessons from experience and apply them forward — as the single strongest predictor of leadership potential. This protocol builds that muscle directly.
The Role of Coaching
Structure helps, but so does an outside perspective. A skilled coach asks the questions you won't think to ask yourself, surfaces patterns invisible from inside your own experience, and provides the accountability that keeps the practice alive when life gets busy. The International Coach Federation's 2020 research found that 86% of companies report a positive return on their coaching investment — largely through improved leadership performance.
The Question Worth Sitting With
You will have leadership experiences this week. The question is whether you'll learn from them.
Twenty minutes and a willingness to push past "nothing happened" might be all it takes to find out.
If you're ready to build a more systematic approach to your own development, we'd welcome a conversation about what that could look like for you.