How to Handle a Team Failure
Posted March 2nd, 2015
We all experience failure. And this is true for teams as well as individuals. And, just as with individuals, teams need to have resilience when confronted with setbacks. Only with a group, the situation is a little more complicated because you have several individuals to contend with, some more resilient than others.
So, if you are a team leader and your team has experienced a failure, how do you best deal with it? Here are a few suggestions.
1. First, the team leader needs to get his or her own attitude right.
The team leader sets the tone for the whole group, so if the leader is knocked off balance by the setback, his attitude could infect the entire group. The team leader needs to get his or her emotions under control before he can tend to his group.
2. Give your team some breathing room.
As a leader, you need to give them time to grieve, so to speak, to experience the pain. It will take a little time before the team members are ready and receptive to a pep talk and to moving on. You need to give them that time, rather than coming right at them with a “Shrug it off” speech, which, under the circumstances might come off as unfeeling.
3. Confront what went wrong.
If you are going to improve, you need to make adjustments, and to do that, you need to be clear about what went wrong. And you need to get specific – without assigning blame, which is completely counterproductive. Stick to the facts, but don’t gloss over inconvenient details. In other words, face the music about what the team did wrong.
4. Look to the future.
Once you have done your post mortem, readjust and look toward the future. Think about what you can do to avoid the mistakes down the road. It is important that this be a group effort, everyone working together to plan for the future, to consider what changes to make to avoid falling into the same trap.
5. Share a similar experience
It helps to move ahead if the leader of the group can share with the group a failure that he or she had, what he learned from it, and how it helped him to become a better leader or professional. If the leader doesn’t have anything to share, he can ask if someone in the group has had such an experience, and how it helped him or her.
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