My husband, Ian, and I have spent decades leading teams, coaching leaders, and guiding organizations through change. Yet it took us years to see that something was fundamentally wrong with leadership development. And we only noticed after one particular leadership training—not a bad one, but an excellent one. The facilitator was engaging. The content was relevant. The conversations were rich. People laughed. People reflected. People made commitments. By the end of the session, you could almost feel the energy in the room. Everyone believed they were leaving as better leaders.
A month later, we spoke with several participants. Many remembered how much they enjoyed the experience. Very few remembered what they had committed to change.
That wasn’t their fault. Emails replaced inspiration. Deadlines replaced reflection. Meetings replaced learning. The experience was real, but the learning never had a chance to take hold, because no one paused long enough to reflect on it. And that pattern doesn’t just show up after training events. It shows up in the everyday work of leading. As John Maxwell teaches in his Law of Process, leadership develops daily, not in a day.
Why Years on the Job Don’t Automatically Make Us Better Leaders
One of the most repeated statements in leadership is this: “Experience is the best teacher.” It sounds wise. It’s memorable. It’s quoted in books, leadership programs, and conference keynotes.
John Maxwell has long challenged that idea: experience isn’t the best teacher; evaluated experience is. And after years in the leadership development space, we’ve seen just how right he is.
Without reflection, experience simply becomes repetition. And repetition doesn’t always create excellence. Sometimes it reinforces poor habits. Sometimes it strengthens limiting beliefs. Sometimes it convinces us that because we’ve always done something a certain way, it must be the right way. Experience alone can make us older. Reflection makes us wiser.
Twenty Years of Experience…or One Year Repeated Twenty Times?
Early in our careers, we met leaders who had decades of experience. Some were extraordinary. Others weren’t. What fascinated us was that the difference wasn’t the number of years they had worked. It was how intentionally they had learned from those years.
Some leaders repeated the same mistakes for decades. Others treated every challenge as an opportunity to grow. Both accumulated experience. Only one accumulated wisdom.
That realization changed the question we ask. We stopped asking, “How many years has this person been leading?” Instead, we began asking, “How intentional have they been about learning from those years?” Those are very different questions, and the second one applies to every leader, whether you’ve been leading for two years or twenty.
Reflect After Everything, Not Just After Failure
Imagine finishing a difficult meeting. Most leaders immediately move to the next meeting. The next email. The next deadline. The meeting ends, and the learning ends with it.
Now imagine something different. Before opening the next email, you pause for three minutes. You ask yourself: What went well? What didn’t? When was I at my best? When did I stop listening? Did everyone feel heard? What would I do differently next time? In three minutes, you’ve transformed an ordinary meeting into a leadership development session. Nothing about the meeting changed. You changed.
The fastest-growing leaders we’ve worked with aren’t necessarily the smartest or the most experienced. They’re the ones who remain teachable. After presentations, they ask, “What could I have done better?” After difficult conversations, they wonder, “What did I miss?” After successful projects, they ask, “What made this work?” Many leaders only reflect after failure. Exceptional leaders reflect after everything.
That matters because outcomes can be misleading. A good decision can produce a bad result because circumstances changed; a poor decision can occasionally produce a good result because circumstances were favorable. So look beyond the result to the process: What information did I have? What assumptions did I make? Whose perspective was missing? What would I do differently with the same information today?
Reflection isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it reminds us that we spoke too quickly, listened too little, or reacted emotionally. But reflection isn’t about self-criticism. It’s about self-awareness. Consider a leader who finishes a difficult conversation feeling frustrated. Instead of moving on, she reflects and realizes she spent most of the meeting defending her position instead of asking questions. The next day, she schedules a follow-up conversation. This time she listens first, and the relationship begins to heal. The first conversation created tension. Reflection created growth.
Make Reflection a Habit, Not an Accident
Some of the best advice we ever received from a mentor was to set aside time at the end of every week to reflect on that week. Reflection should become your norm, not something that happens only when a crisis forces it. Maxwell calls this the Law of Reflection: learning to pause allows growth to catch up with you. Or, as he also puts it, reflection turns experience into insight.
It doesn’t have to be complicated. One of the simplest leadership practices we’ve adopted is ending each day with three questions. Not ten. Not twenty. Just three: What did I do well today? What challenged me today? What will I intentionally improve tomorrow?
For most of history, reflection depended on memory. We replayed the conversation and tried to remember exactly what happened. Today, leaders can also use AI as a thought partner, asking it to walk them through a structured debrief: What emotions were present? What assumptions influenced my response? What might my team have experienced differently than I did? Used this way, the tool doesn’t tell us who we are. It helps us discover who we’re becoming.
Because tomorrow doesn’t begin tomorrow morning. It begins with tonight’s reflection. Small insights become better decisions. Better decisions become stronger habits. Stronger habits become trusted leadership. That’s how transformation happens. Not all at once. One reflection at a time.
Ready to turn everyday experience into lasting leadership growth?
In Leadership Development Reimagined: A Guide for Everyday Leaders in the AI Era, Ian and Sherwanna Clarke show you how to stop waiting for the next training and start growing through the moments already on your calendar. Each chapter includes a practical challenge, reflection questions, a journal prompt, and an AI prompt to help you build a daily habit of leadership growth. Get your copy here today.
About the authors
Ian and Sherwanna Clarke are seasoned leaders, strategists, and change advocates with decades of combined experience across leadership, business, negotiation, healthcare, and organizational transformation. Dr. Sherwanna Clarke is CEO and Principal Consultant of Katalýtis For Change, LLC. A Doctor of Pharmacy with more than 25 years in the pharmaceutical industry, she is a certified leadership coach, trainer, speaker, and True Colors International facilitator. Ian Clarke, Esq. brings a legal, negotiation, and business perspective to leadership and decision-making, with work spanning contract negotiation, mediation, and arbitration. Together, they connect practical leadership experience with a forward-looking approach to developing leaders for the AI era.
