Speaker 1: Helping leaders motivate their people to a higher level of
Speaker 1: performance through strong human relations, team building, and golajiving. This
Speaker 1: is the seven Minute Leadership Podcast with your host Paul
Speaker 1: fella Aledo. Hello everyone, and welcome to the seven Minute
Speaker 1: Leadership Podcast. It's episode six sixty five. Today we're talking
Speaker 1: about after action reviews, post incident debriefs, hot watches, call
Speaker 1: them whatever you want. Most of them are a waste
Speaker 1: of time. They turn into finger pointing, vague observations, or
Speaker 1: a checklist exercise so someone can say we reviewed it,
Speaker 1: and then what happens. Nothing changes, same mistakes, same gaps,
Speaker 1: same outcomes. So today I want to walk you through
Speaker 1: how to conduct crisis after action reviews that actually matter,
Speaker 1: the kind that improve performance, protect your people, and build
Speaker 1: credibility as a leader. Because if your review process doesn't
Speaker 1: lead to change, it's not leadership, it's paperwork. So let's
Speaker 1: start with the first mistake leaders make. They wait too long.
Speaker 1: If you're conducting an after action review two weeks after
Speaker 1: the incident, you're already behind memory fades, details get distorted,
Speaker 1: people start rewriting the story in their head to make
Speaker 1: themselves look better. So you need two reviews. A quick
Speaker 1: one right after the event while it's still fresh, and
Speaker 1: a deeper one later when emotions settle and you can
Speaker 1: think clearly. The first one captures reality, the second one
Speaker 1: builds strategy. If you skip the first, you lose truth.
Speaker 1: If you skip the second, you lose growth. Now let's
Speaker 1: talk about the biggest problem in most after action reviews. Fear.
Speaker 1: If your team is afraid to speak honestly, your review
Speaker 1: is worthless. People will protect themselves, they will downplay mistakes,
Speaker 1: They will say what sounds good instead of what actually happened,
Speaker 1: and that kills your ability to learn. So here's your
Speaker 1: job as the leader. You set the tone immediately you
Speaker 1: open the review with something like this, this is not
Speaker 1: about blame. This is about getting better. We're going to
Speaker 1: talk about what happened, not who we can pin it on.
Speaker 1: And then you prove it with your behavior. If someone
Speaker 1: admits a mistake and you jump on them, you just
Speaker 1: shut down the entire room. Game over. No more honesty.
Speaker 1: If someone owns a mistake, you thank them. You protect
Speaker 1: that moment because that is where growth lives. Now let's
Speaker 1: get tactical. A real after action review answers four questions.
Speaker 1: What did we expect to happen, What actually happened? Why
Speaker 1: was there a gap? What are we going to do
Speaker 1: differently next time? That's it. No corporate buzzwords, no over
Speaker 1: complicated framework. Those four questions will expose everything you need
Speaker 1: to know. But here's where most leaders drop the ball.
Speaker 1: They stop at discussion. Talking is easy, change is hard.
Speaker 1: If your review ends with good conversation, everyone you failed.
Speaker 1: Every after action review must end with action items specific, assigned, measurable,
Speaker 1: not we need better communication. That's garbage. Instead, shift officers
Speaker 1: will implement a verb hand off checklist starting tomorrow at
Speaker 1: zero seven hundred. Now we have something real. Now we
Speaker 1: can hold people accountable, and that brings us to the
Speaker 1: next critical piece, ownership. Every action item needs a name
Speaker 1: next to it. If it belongs to everyone, it belongs
Speaker 1: to no one. You assign it, you follow up on it,
Speaker 1: and you track it because if you don't, your team
Speaker 1: will learn something dangerous. They will learn that nothing actually
Speaker 1: changes after a crisis, and once that belief sets in,
Speaker 1: you lose momentum. Now let's talk about something leaders don't
Speaker 1: like to hear. You go first. If you are leading
Speaker 1: the review, you need to identify something you could have
Speaker 1: done better. Even if you performed well, even if the
Speaker 1: incident went smoothly, you still go first. Why Because it
Speaker 1: signals to your team that no one is above In
Speaker 1: PROOFD movement, it removes the pressure, It creates psychological safety
Speaker 1: without using that term, and it sets the standard. Leaders
Speaker 1: who refuse to critique themselves create teams that hide mistakes.
Speaker 1: Leaders who own their gaps create teams that fix them.
Speaker 1: Now here's another mistake. Trying to fix everything. You don't
Speaker 1: need twenty action items. You just need a few that matter.
Speaker 1: Pick the ones that would have changed the outcome, the
Speaker 1: one that reduce risk, the one that makes the biggest impact.
Speaker 1: If everything is a priority, nothing is focus wins here.
Speaker 1: Now let's talk about documentation. This is where a lot
Speaker 1: of leaders either overdo it or ignore it completely. You
Speaker 1: don't need a thirty page report that no one reads,
Speaker 1: but you do need a clear record of what was
Speaker 1: learned in what will change? Keep it simple, bullet points,
Speaker 1: action items, responsible parties, timeline, and then here's the part
Speaker 1: that separates average leaders from great ones. You revisit it
Speaker 1: a week later, a month later, you asked, did we
Speaker 1: actually do what we said we were going to do?
Speaker 1: Because Accountability doesn't happen in the meeting. It happens after
Speaker 1: the meeting, and this is where your credibility is built
Speaker 1: or destroyed. If your team sees change being implemented, they
Speaker 1: buy in. If they see nothing happen, they disengage. And
Speaker 1: once they disengage, your next crisis becomes harder to manage
Speaker 1: because now you're leading people who don't believe the system works.
Speaker 1: Let me give you one more angle here. After action
Speaker 1: reviews are not only about fixing problems. They are also
Speaker 1: about capturing what went right, what worked, what decisions helped,
Speaker 1: What actions should we repeat? Because success leaves clues, and
Speaker 1: if you don't identify them, you leave performance on the table.
Speaker 1: Great leaders build playbooks from both failure and success, not
Speaker 1: one or the other, both. So now let's bring this home.
Speaker 1: Every crisis is expensive in time, energy, money, and sometimes reputation.
Speaker 1: The only way to get a return on that cost
Speaker 1: is to learn from it. That's what an after action
Speaker 1: review is. It's your opportunity to turn chaos into clarity,
Speaker 1: to turn mistakes into systems, to turn one bad day
Speaker 1: into long term improvement. If you skip it, you waste
Speaker 1: the crisis. If you rush it, you miss the lesson.
Speaker 1: If you do it right, you get stronger every single time.
Speaker 1: And that's what leadership is about, not avoiding problems, getting
Speaker 1: better because of them. So the next time your team
Speaker 1: comes out of a tough situation, don't rush back to normal. Pause,
Speaker 1: gather your people, ask the right questions, assign real actions,
Speaker 1: and then follow through. Because the leaders who win long
Speaker 1: term are not the ones who never face problems. They
Speaker 1: are the ones who learn faster than everyone else. This
Speaker 1: has been the seven minute Leadership Podcast and I thank
Speaker 1: you for listening. For more, Paul Fell of Alito Podcasts,
Speaker 1: visit paulfellowalito dot com