What went wrong?

How many times have you sat back and wondered at work - what did the team do wrong? Once you are done with collecting your thoughts you think it is time to get together with the team and have a "Lessons Learned Session". That is when things start to get messy.

So how do you go about telling someone that they made a mistake? There are multiple ways - the obvious ones are to tell the individual / team on their face. But what does that get you? In my opinion, this is the worst way to communicate and highlight a mistake.

I have seen this happening again and again, in various companies across the world - the Lessons Learned sessions are usually held after the project has gone live. The issue does not end there - the lessons are just documented and not learnt or implemented in the next project. But that is another topic all together.

So back to the fundamental question - how do you communicate hard-facts?

I have seen this work - Take the complete team offsite. Before the team lands offsite, set the agenda and the expectations on the objective of the offsite session so that the individuals can be prepared to have constructive discussion and are focused. Also, set the ground-rules that NEVER criticize the individual. Also, NEVER use the word "ALWAYS" !

Once the ground rules are set, lead the team in identifying the project items in 3 categories -
- What went good and should be repeated everytime
- What can be done better
- Never do this ever again

As a leader I see that quite a number of times, team-leads acknowledge the "Never do this ever again" however they do not celebrate the "What went good and should be repeated everytime" part of their deliverable.

Also, I see this happening everywhere - we do not communicate the good and the bad learning's at regular intervals. We usually save this activity to the end of the project. I feel that doing this as a regular activity specifically for long term projects is beneficial because it gives time to the team to learn and act therefore the leader is able to harvest the learning's on the current project itself.

So, the next time around, you tell someone "I always need to massage the data that you give me", are you criticizing the data or the individual - think about it !