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Conduct After-Action Reviews

AFTER IMPORTANT EVENTS, failures, or deadlines, the most successful leaders spend time reviewing what occurred as a team. By doing so, you will create an environment of continuous improvement and feedback. As previously mentioned, this approach will assist you and your team in reflecting on what occurred.

In the military, this is called an After-Action Review. According to leadership scholar Bruce Avolio, the process has several phases and begins with a discussion of the event so that a shared meaning of what happened can be developed.¹⁹ After this step, participants engage in a discussion of why events unfolded in the manner they did, followed by the development of alternative courses of action. Leaders who have the ability to reflect upon and chart alternative courses of action (and their consequences) are thinking at a higher level. They are more aware of the context within which they are working. This is important because, all too often, leaders do not effectively “read” the context within which they work.

Individuals can be extremely successful in one context but fail miserably as leaders in another—simply because they could not adapt their styles to new contexts. Perhaps this has even happened to you along the way. In the end, leaders, parents, teachers, sales representatives, and even fund-raisers who can accurately read the context go further in their careers. Helping your team members think through these complexities will aid in their development, and yours.

In their book Emotionally Intelligent Leadership: A Guide for College Students, the authors provide the following example:

Think about a sports team. You have a coach (the leader), a group of players (the followers), and the context (the league rules, the other teams, the location, the season, and so forth). The coach may use a certain style one year and experience great success given the players and the context. As team members and competing teams change, however, the coach will likely need to change her motivational style, the workouts, and her approach to the game to remain successful. If the coach is unable to understand and adapt to the needs of her players (followers) and the overall environment (the context), she may find herself in trouble.²⁰

So, how do you help your team develop this capacity to debrief with the goal of parlaying the results into other contexts? One executive director of a large community-based health center encourages all his project managers first to debrief with their team with a retrospective eye—what could they have done differently to improve the project’s success? Then, once these are considered, the project managers are encouraged to ask their team how these perspectives can translate into other contexts. This is the important consideration in debriefs—the application to other environments.