Depending where you are in the world your views on the status of the pandemic may well differ. Is it ending or is it ramping up again?
There’s never a great time to pause and reflect, but with us close to hitting the two year mark since the first European cases, now is as good a time as any to debrief your covid response so far.
For military leaders, debriefs are a critical component of their operations. They know the power of stepping back and reflecting on performance; good or bad. It underpins everything that they do.
Yet look beyond project management, debriefs are much less likely to be embedded into core business operations. Given that they can improve team performance by up 25%, there’s value in making the time.
So why don’t we debrief more often?
The reality, like it or not, is that after a major event, we often seek to put the experience behind us and move on quickly. After transformation or crisis, the collective sigh of breath and “thank f**k that’s over" is almost audible. Our focus shifts quickly to the future to recovery, stability or growth. We want to move forward, not look back.
But every successful or unsuccessful new experience creates an opportunity for learning, if we take it. As the former banker Walter Wriston stated:
‘Failure is not a crime, failure to learn from failure is’.
Becoming a learning organisation doesn’t happen by accident, and leadership debriefs are an essential tool to start leading the charge.
So why now?
Nearly two years in from the pandemic beginning, last March is likely already feeling like a distant memory.
And it’s likely too that now might not feel like the right time to hit pause. The time, however, will never be perfect. The challenge is that debriefs commonly fall into the ‘nice to do’ box; important but always trumped by the urgent. So when will be a good time?
None of us know when the next big crisis will happen again or what it will look like. But the chances are that justifications such as:
“we’ve never been through anything like this before”
won’t wash as a reason for getting things wrong. Your leadership team can’t afford to make the same mistakes again, for your business, team and yourself.
It’s also clear that when we look back two years, any business continuity plans we did have were insufficient to prepare us for prolonged business disruption on this scale. Maybe we didn’t have the foresight, the experience of a major global catastrophe, or the insight into what we’d really need to do to navigate something when it happened, what ever ‘it’ may be.
Now it’s different.
Some things will have worked well for your business. Perhaps you were able to take quick decisions and put them into play quickly. But maybe some things didn’t go as you’d set out. Maybe your communications were misinterpreted or perhaps in hindsight you didn’t communicate enough. Some things that you planned didn’t work, and other things that you didn’t plan, unexpectedly proved successful.
You will each have different perspectives and experiences so pool your insights and agree what you will and won’t do in future to act in the best interest of the business and it’s stakeholders.
Here is one tool that you can use.
Do this exercise now, before memories fade, or your leadership team changes.
What will it really give us?
The pandemic has tested our strength, tenacity and adaptability and many leaders and businesses have not survived.
That you’re here reading this means that you did many things right. Identify what those things were and capture them.
Post-debrief, you will have clear principles to guide your leadership and will be able to draw quickly on what really worked the last time, significantly reducing the risk of error, improving your performance and removing unnecessary stress. Meaning you can focus your effort where it’s really needed, rather than trying to recall what worked last time.
The pandemic is not over, that’s clear and it’s unlikely to have a hard end date. And it will never be the ‘perfect’ time to take stock and debrief. However as we approach the start of 2022, and the two year point since the pandemic began, there may not be a better time.
Rebecca is a leadership expert who helps new & experienced leaders take on new challenges and become more sophisticated leaders of people. If you liked the ideas in this note, why not share it?