When your team fails

The 2-Minute Tip has recently been discussing ways to build a team culture focused on collective, rather than personal results. We’ve discussed announcing group rewards and recognized personal sacrifices. Today, let’s talk about how to communicate about a team’s failure to achieve a goal.

Good leaders debrief after a project’s completion, but most fail to actually dig into the real reasons why a project may have failed.

We often don’t want to embarrass team members who didn’t contribute what they needed to. We also don’t want to look bad ourselves.

But if you’re honest, this only causes resentment in yourself and the rest of your team.

In our workshops we teach how to use the project debrief as an opportunity to refocus the team on supporting each other.

We have teams go back to a recent goal they didn’t achieve and conduct a Personal Responsibility Debrief. Each team member should say what they learned and what they would do differently next time to ensure the project meets its goals.

This isn’t an opportunity to point fingers or place blame on others. If done in the spirit of helping the team improve, this will be a time of vulnerability and honest reflection – with the intent of improving, not blaming (including blaming oneself).

And by the way, the leader must take full responsibility for their own actions or inactions. If the leader isn’t honest, why should the team be?

When everyone explains how they can improve, you’re enforcing a culture of personal responsibility…to each other and the collective results of the team.