Hone Your Debriefing Skills
Bauback Yeganeh, Ph.D.
Debriefing is a structured process used to continuously improve planning toward a common objective. It originated in the military in order to quickly make effective changes. Strong leaders have a systemic way to reflect with their teams upon what happened, what should be changed or stay the same, and the reasons why.
Since I cover debriefing best practices in our Everidian programs, I won’t cover that here. Instead, I’ll discuss some of the debriefing habits that leaders fall into based on their conflict management styles.
In 1945, influential psychotherapist Karen Horney identified the following three basic attitudes when in conflict:
1. Compliant – moving toward people (imagine passively folding to the playground bully to avoid being targeted yourself)
2. Aggressive – moving against people (being aggressive with someone we are in conflict with)
3. Detached – moving away from people (avoidance)
Over the last two decades in leader development consulting, I’ve noticed that the way leaders debrief events with their teams coincides with their basic attitudes toward conflict. I’ll outline this below with the hope of illuminating blind spots and encouraging new behaviors.
1. Compliant debriefers: you are likely to celebrate and at times over-celebrate strengths and wins, sometimes at the cost of true learning opportunities. Strengths are important to reflect upon, but not at the cost of improvement opportunities. Leaders in this category should reflect upon their motivations. Are you being strategic or making sure you feel safe and comfortable with your team? What questions can you ask about improvement to ensure conversations are balanced between strengths and developmental areas?
2. Aggressive debriefers: you are likely to drill people on what they did wrong, call people out in front of others, and leave people in a state of fight/flight. Balance your direct style of challenging people with thoughtful questions that encourage your team to gather their own data to reflect upon and then share their results. Rather than jump to recommended action steps on your own, ask related open-ended questions and paraphrase others to make sure they are heard. If you do this in a respectful manner, then by the time you add your thoughts, the team should be more receptive to suggestions. Further, your suggestions will be grounded in better data.
3. Detached debriefers: you are likely to avoid debriefing conversations, particularly if you don’t feel safe with people on your team. My suggestion for leaders in this category is to desensitize themselves to the awkwardness of behaviors that they don’t enjoy. Prepare by researching best debriefing practices ahead of time, then track the new behaviors that you want to implement. Finally, find an accountability partner to check in with so that you can’t avoid progress.
I hope this has been a helpful way to think about how to improve debriefing processes. Remember, the job is not to make yourself as comfortable as possible, it is to be effective.
Click here to read about an ideal communication style for facilitating debriefing conversations.
