660: How to Prevent a Team From Repeating Mistakes, with Robert “Cujo” Teschner

Dave Stachowiak [00:00:00]:
Many of us recognize we could get better at reflecting on our team’s work, but we rarely get beyond what went well and what didn’t. One of the best ways to stop making the same mistakes is to look at the truth of what’s happened and to learn from it. In this episode, the value of a debrief and how to bring that practice into your organization. This is Coaching for Leaders episode 660. Production Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential. Greetings to you from Orange County, California. This is Coaching for Leaders, and I’m your host, Dave Stachowiak.

Dave Stachowiak [00:00:43]:
Leaders aren’t born, they’re made. And this weekly show helps you discover leadership wisdom through insightful conversations. When I was in grad school, one of our professors said, if you wanna know what a learning organization is, a learning organization is one that doesn’t keep making the same mistake. As much as we all try to avoid continuing to make the same mistakes, it does come up a lot in organizations. How can we do a better job at being proactive so we become a learning organization? So we become a learning team. One key entry point for that is the debrief. Today, I’m gonna be, sharing with you a guest who’s just really done some incredible work on this, both in military and business context to help us to learn how we can use an effective debrief to keep from making the same mistake. I’m so pleased to welcome Robert “Cujo” Teschner.

Dave Stachowiak [00:01:37]:
He’s a retired F15 and F22 fighter pilot. He is also a former F15 weapons school instructor, F22 squadron commander, senior joint staff officer, and combat veteran. He holds advanced degrees in operational art and science and national security strategy and has extensive experience in tactical planning and execution and organizational leadership. From 2004 to 2,006, he served as the US Air Force’s expert in post mission debriefing. The methodology used by high performing military teams to self correct and improve continuously. Cujo retired immediately after his promotion to full colonel due to complications from cancer related care and started an international business consulting practice based in Saint Louis, Missouri. His company is called VMAX Group. VMAX Group’s mission is to teach, inspire, and nurture teams on how to really team, making work more fulfilling and making teams much more effective.

Dave Stachowiak [00:02:33]:
He is the author of the book Debrief to Win: How America’s Top Guns Practice Accountable Leadership and How You Can Too. Cujo, what a pleasure to get into your work. I’m so glad to have you here.

Robert “Cujo” Teschner [00:02:46]:
Dave, thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Thanks for caring enough about the subject to bring it to your audience. I am fired up to be here with you today and look forward to where our journey is gonna take us.

Dave Stachowiak [00:02:57]:
Me too. This is such an impressive book. I heard from one of our members about your work. I got into the book, and I was like, wow. So much here that we can learn from. And I think the place to start is perhaps one of your pet peeves, which I’ve uncovered in following your work now for a bit, is the message that a lot of folks say, especially in organizations, when they get done with a quote on quote debrief or talking about what happened, and they say, we learned a lot of important lessons today. What is it that makes that such a pet peeve for you?

Robert “Cujo” Teschner [00:03:32]:
Yeah. Because so it comes it comes down to this, like, prove it. Prove that you’ve learned something. And so often we say the words because we’ve spent some time we’ve spent some time talking about stuff. The question is, has that time really changed behaviors? And until we’ve changed behaviors, we haven’t learned a thing. And I would argue most of the time, all that we have on the heels of some sort of a debrief sounding event is a bunch of hot air and nothing more. And the sad thing there is that if we’re gonna go out and repeat the same mistake, then that was an epic waste of time. And and as I understand it, nobody’s got time to waste.

Robert “Cujo” Teschner [00:04:14]:
So I say prove that you’re learning by changing behaviors, and that takes a lot more intentionality than just sitting around talking.

Dave Stachowiak [00:04:22]:
You write in the book “while high performing military teams routinely use debriefs to improve team performance quickly. Civilian businesses tend to gloss over mistakes. Companies in general have a habit of saying, well, we won’t go there again without really analyzing why that strategy or business plan failed.” The thing that strikes me so significantly in getting into your work is that it would never occur to anyone in the military to skip a debrief. It’s just so critical to the culture of the organization, isn’t it?

Robert “Cujo” Teschner [00:04:52]:
That’s right, Dave. And it’s because we have a mission orientation to our work. So this was something that was bequeathed to us centuries ago. Somebody or some group of somebodies decided to distill one of the most complex undertakings in the world, war, into individual mission sets. And I think it’s a lot more complex than most people give it credit for, distilling war into mission sets. But to me, that was a tremendous gift that I inherited. When I came on active duty, I understood war as a series of missions, and tied to every mission is a life cycle that a team performs in order to prepare, to go out there and execute well, in order to be inspired to be able to execute well, to execute and then post execution, there’s a natural step that says we’re gonna learn from this iteration in order to make the next iteration to go better than this one, which is part resilience strategy. It’s part inspiration towards having hope and optimism and a better tomorrow.

Robert “Cujo” Teschner [00:06:00]:
And so it’s just organic to the way that we used to do work. I can’t fathom it not being that way in other in other enterprises and other disciplines. And I’ve been stunned to find that maybe we’re the exception, to the norm. The upside of that is is that things could be so much better for organizations if they adopted a mission-orientation to their work and tied to every mission is an opportunity to learn from this iteration to make the next one go better.

Dave Stachowiak [00:06:26]:
Yeah, indeed. And I suspect you run into this where to that point some people say, well, the military is a different world. The stakes are higher. It’s life and death. Working in an organization isn’t the same as combat. We don’t necessarily need to do this level of debriefing. When you hear that kind of thinking and that criticism, how do you respond to it?

Robert “Cujo” Teschner [00:06:51]:
Yeah. First of all, I believe that those are self limiting beliefs. It’s not life or I mean, I I remember at the outset of the pandemic, I had a dear friend who his golden parachute was an 8 figure check should he have been laid off in a time that wasn’t an emergency. But he was laid off in the midst of the declaration of a national emergency and got 2 weeks of paying benefits before it all went away. Tell me that’s not life or death with 3 kids at home, a mortgage, and all of the associated costs of raising a family. So I would dispute the notion that it’s not life or death in business. But I also think that that to say that all we do is x is limiting, is undervaluing what it is that we’re doing.

Robert “Cujo” Teschner [00:07:36]:
And if we value what it is that we’re doing, why wouldn’t we aim to do it the best that we could? And in order to do things the best that we can, it necessitates constant learning. Why wouldn’t we be in a learning posture? And then you run into organizations and say, well, we don’t have time to learn. To which the natural response is, okay. A, that’s a self limiting belief. I firmly dispute that you have not enough time to learn in your organization. But the second piece of that is you’re telling me that you have time to make the same mistake again and to have to recover from that same mistake again. I mean, surely, that’s not the case.

Robert “Cujo” Teschner [00:08:09]:
So why would we be in a constant learning posture? And, by the way, a constant learning posture allows us to have the freedom to lose key members of the team and bring new members of the team on and rapidly get them to the same level of expertise as the person that we lost. A learning operation positions us to be able to handle the expected disruption that is always going to be there, whether it’s market disruptions, whether it’s global challenges, whatever the case might be. If nothing else, hopefully, the pandemic taught us, we have to become learning organizations. And we’ve got to posture ourselves effectively. We’ve got adept processes that are organic to how we do the business that we do in order for this to really work for us.

Dave Stachowiak [00:08:53]:
There’s the old adage that the greatest enemy of communication is the illusion of it. And I think about the debrief as you discussed in the book and the practice of it. And I suspect we could substitute debrief into that adage that the greatest enemy of the debrief is the illusion that you’ve done it well. And one of the real points that you surface is that not all debriefs are good. Doing it the wrong way, in some ways, can almost make it worse. And you tell a story in the book about attending a debrief where a senior leader went around the room for, I think it was, like, 3 or 4 hours, and it wasn’t even clear on what was trying to be accomplished in the activity that you were debriefing. And I’m wondering if you could paint the picture of, like, where we tend to go wrong in doing debriefs and thinking we’ve done the work.

Robert “Cujo” Teschner [00:09:48]:
Yeah. Great. Oh my goodness. You said this is a 7 hour long podcast? Right. Just kidding. Listeners, do not fear. A couple of key things stand out. Number 1, measuring absent to standard.

Robert “Cujo” Teschner [00:10:04]:
Like where are we if we don’t know what the standard is, what the expectations are? We’re left with subjectivity. And measuring subjectively doesn’t necessarily advance the organization’s cause. But that’s ultimately what happens. And so when we have an event that we call a debrief, but we enter it absent to standard, then all we’re gonna get is a bunch of opinions on what was important to to the person being questioned, not necessarily whether or not we achieved mission success. And, arguably, if we haven’t defined what mission success is, it’s impossible for us to measure whether or not we’ve achieved it. So that’s a problem. Another problem is is that many organizations have adopted absent clarity of what right looks like, a Band Aid solution for accountability that sounds like this. After an event, after a project, get the team together and ask a team what went well and what didn’t, which references point a, measure to what standard.

Robert “Cujo” Teschner [00:11:00]:
So now we’re stuck with and what you talked about was one of the most disheartening debriefs that I’ve ever been a part of, 3 and a half hours of everybody just talking about whatever was top of mind in them. Like, hey, you know, I think breakfast options could have been better. Hey, I think we could have gotten some song recorded and sent to everybody that came to this. Whatever. Just whatever was top of mind to be. We just talked and talked and talked and talked and talked. It wasn’t until the very end of that thing that I asked the question, what was our objective here for these 3 days that we spent at this sales event? And if we don’t know what the objective was, it’s impossible for us to measure whether or not we’ve achieved it. But this whole notion of what went well and what didn’t then opens the door to all kinds of jawing.

Robert “Cujo” Teschner [00:11:41]:
After the end of jawing, we’re exhausted because we spend a lot of time talking, but we have just wasted everybody’s time. And too many organizations, as a Band Aid solution to the absence of real accountability, have morphed into what went well and what didn’t. And I’m a passionate advocate for removing that from the business lexicon as quickly as possible, and adopting the rigor, the discipline, of a structued debrief that allows us to learn measured against a known standard, which then puts us into the mode of let’s plan to achieve our expected outcome, and through the rigor of effective tactical planning, set ourselves up to win. That’s huge.

Dave Stachowiak [00:12:21]:
And you’re a fan of Annie Duke’s work who’s been on the show before talking about the thinking error a lot of us make on resulting and that this isn’t just a- to the those questions like what went well and what didn’t. Sometimes the objective wasn’t achieved, but the decisions leading up to it were sound, and the opposite’s true too. Sometimes you lock into something working out well, but, actually, the decisions made weren’t really good ones. And part of the debrief process is to surface that distinction. What were we doing well that are good decisions, that are good practices that we made operationally? Whether the objective was met or not, obviously, that’s important. But more important is what are the decisions we made along the way, and where did we potentially just luck out?

Robert “Cujo” Teschner [00:13:11]:
That’s right. So when we navigate a complex system, we can’t fall victim to so many different afflictions, which I would just summarize as the rush to judgment. Like, it’s so easy to criticize and to and to try to blame, find fault with, and to not actually take the time to investigate and understand that even in the midst of a failure, oftentimes, we’ve made the best decisions that we’re equipped to make. We may have even made the best decision possible. And sometimes in the midst of complexity, the best decisions, the best actions are still going to run up against bad luck. And the worst thing that we can do is to change strategy from one day to the next. Poker players know this. It’s called resulting.

Robert “Cujo” Teschner [00:13:56]:
We all need to understand this in business. We need to give credit when people are making high quality decisions, taking appropriate actions, and losing. Luck plays a role in complexity. We also cannot overvalue when people make bad decisions and take inappropriate actions, and say, nice job. We have to recognize that sometimes we get lucky, and luck isn’t a strategy that we can depend on to win again the next day. We’ve got to have a process oriented way to help the team to correctly learn, to give credit where it’s due, one that’s built on assuming positive intent from our teammates, by the way, along the way, one where even when the outcome is we didn’t achieve mission success, we can celebrate the good things that people did along the way. And we might even get to the point of framing our outcome, when appropriate, to say, don’t you realize, team, we were 1 or 2 decisions away from victory today? Any doubt in our minds about what decisions we’re gonna make differently tomorrow to better equip ourselves to win. I mean, this is how you get to engagement.

Robert “Cujo” Teschner [00:15:00]:
This is how you get to buy and trust in performance. This is what it takes to lead in a disruptive environment. And right now, we need to be able to lead more effectively in order to navigate the disruptions that we’re facing.

Dave Stachowiak [00:15:11]:
The two lines that I kept coming back to in the book are these “the debrief process both institutionalizes and regularizes the process that helps us have these challenging conversations in addition it provides a mechanism for open and honest exchanges that make our team stronger because leaders feel safe to share their failures while the rest of the team feels the necessary psychological safety to admit their errors.” As I read that, I was reflecting on inside the book, there’s some transcripts of, like, okay. How would a typical briefing sound like for pilots after completing a mission coming back and, like, kinda walking that through in detail? And as someone without a military background who’s worked in the civilian organizational world my whole life, I read through that and I thought, wow. It’s really stunning from a business perspective looking at it. How forthright, how much truth is surfaced so quickly, how people readily and enthusiastically call out their mistakes at every point along the way in a mission when you’re doing a tape review. It is really impressive, and it’s also equally, jarring in thinking about that of how we almost never do that in the context of any other organization. And the the idea here is getting to a place, I think, where you can do a debrief and that word regularized. It becomes just part of what we do.

Dave Stachowiak [00:16:46]:
We we surface what didn’t work, what did work, where we screwed up, what we celebrate, and it just becomes a regular daily practice.

Robert “Cujo” Teschner [00:16:54]:
That’s right. And so if it’s not a regular daily practice, we find ourselves living in a world where it costs us to be vulnerable. Borrowing from the lexicon of doctor Timothy Clark, author of the 4 stages of psychological safety. He says “when vulnerability is punished, it becomes costly to be ourselves, and so we retreat to a place of self censorship, which is a dangerous place for a team to live.” And what I’ve noticed is and this is something that was interesting to me. In fact, I one of my very first debrief to win workshops took place in your neck of the woods in Orange County.

Robert “Cujo” Teschner [00:17:27]:
I had a had a business leader who created a $500,000,000 business essentially from scratch tell me that he had never once, you know, all of his success, debriefed any of his successes. And he said, this is really intriguing. And I thought it was even more intriguing that he had been so successful absent having debriefed any of successes. So he promised, you know, he’s on his way to a client meeting where he was gonna try and win a deal. And he said, if I do, I’m gonna debrief it. I gave him my cell phone number. I said, let me know how it goes.

Robert “Cujo” Teschner [00:17:55]:
It was a mistake because all weekend, he kept on peppering me with text messages. This was awesome because we sat down as a team to figure out how can we won why did we win this deal? And the insights that we generated from that exploration helped us to institutionalize things that are now gonna help us to win more deals. And his his bottom line summary was, WTF what else have I been missing out on all of these years? Okay. So he recognized a deficiency. The bigger deficiency is if we only practice accountability the way that it typically works in a business setting, and I’m going to borrow now from good to great. Collins talks about postmortems. What does a postmortem suggest this happen? Something has died, needs to be autopsied. I passionately disagree with that terminology.

Robert “Cujo” Teschner [00:18:40]:
When does a postmortem happen in business after a failure? And so if accountability as a postmortem, or whatever we call it around here, only happens after a failure, what are the outcomes gonna be? Even though we say it’s not about the person, it’s about the process, you, as the process owner, when your process is identified as insufficient, are gonna be highlighted as the reason for its insufficiency. You’re gonna get a little bit of public blaming and shaming and you’re gonna run from it. Like, the next time that there’s a post mortem, you’re gonna be taking a sick day that day. Nobody wants to be on the receiving end of a “your process is the reason why we failed today.” When you institutionalize accountability, when it’s a regular learning process that happens after every single mission and we can define missions in business. Right. We ought to define missions in business, tactical missions, that is. Well, now it’s so normalized that it would be odd not to speak up and tell the truth.

Robert “Cujo” Teschner [00:19:34]:
And it’s so normalized and serves us so well because we’re uncovering areas for improvement. We’re also highlighting the great things that people are regularly doing in a way that makes them want to keep on doing them. You’ve got to ritualize it in order to be able to create the psychological safety necessary for people to feel free to be vulnerable, and how we behave as leaders really matters there.

Dave Stachowiak [00:19:59]:
You write “a debrief is not a gruesome sport or a place of blame or shame. Quite the opposite, in fact. The debrief is where we celebrate our victories as well as learn from our failures. We do this in order to build cohesive teams and improve moving forward. A debrief properly run is an affirming positive experience. It’s also where we build future leaders.” That last phrase, building future leaders, is so critical to this. And I think that’s the piece that I have not heard enough of on the language around as you point out, like, postmortem is the language that’s often used, but around debrief of, like, really utilizing this as a leadership development opportunity.

Dave Stachowiak [00:20:38]:
And it’s not just leadership development for the junior people in the room. It’s also leadership development for the senior folks too. Right?

Robert “Cujo” Teschner [00:20:45]:
Exactly. And I suspected this a 1000000 years ago when I was teaching it to the Air Force, and my suspicion was, as a young captain, living this approach every day that I came to work, I quickly came to the conclusion that if you could lead a debrief, you could literally lead anything. And that opinion has been reinforced and reaffirmed every decade since. Because if you think about it, the complexity of navigating failure in a way that’s positive demands a lot of somebody. And you’ve got to have emotional intelligence. You’ve got to be self aware so that you can manage the relationships of the team. You’ve got to learn to collaborate. You’ve got to elicit perspectives from people that typically don’t say anything, from people that might be contrary opinion to you on a number of subjects, you got to learn to be humble.

Robert “Cujo” Teschner [00:21:35]:
In a fighter squadron, humility is bred in the debrief because we spend so much time dissecting failure. And if you’re perfect, you can’t learn from your failures. So we have to divorce ourselves from pride and ego. That’s a tremendous skill set to have as a leader. As we talked about, we have to learn to be vulnerable. You have to be able to be honest when it’s uncomfortable in order to get to absolute ownership. We define at VMAGS Group accountability as taking absolute ownership for the outcomes that a team achieves, and every leader is ultimately gonna have to take ownership for the outcome that their team achieves. Accountability goes up the chain of command, which demands vulnerability.

Robert “Cujo” Teschner [00:22:16]:
And a huge dose of empathy, I might add, to give people credit for the decisions they made, even if they were the wrong ones, given the context that they were in. It’s really the skill set that allows one to lead anything on this planet, at home, in any domain, certainly at work. And, it’s in the debrief that you get to hone these skills. It’s in the debrief that you get feedback on how well you did these things. And it’s the debrief that equips us to be able to plan better, to communicate better, to be able to lead more effectively, and we can grow those skills at a very, very young age. I think back and reflect, you know, September 11, 2001, horrific day in our nation’s history. I remember where I was on that day, and it was downrange, and I was preparing in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to lead the mission over southern Iraq the next day as the overall mission commander for all U. S. forces.

Robert “Cujo” Teschner [00:23:12]:
And that’s Navy, Army, Air Force, anybody that’s got a role to play. I was 27 years old. Had a one star general reporting to me because, functionally, I was the mission commander. And that higher ranking officer was, from a functional standpoint, subordinate to to my command that day. What an interesting thing. What an amazing evolution that I take zero credit for. It’s just the way that it was and still is.

Robert “Cujo” Teschner [00:23:39]:
And so if we’re looking at how it is that we’re going to rapidly elevate leadership skills, my answer is learn how to debrief well and then share the responsibility for leading debriefs. I promise you, everybody’s gonna learn how to lead really quickly.

Dave Stachowiak [00:23:53]:
Yeah. I think a lot of times folks who haven’t had exposure to the military perspective and training assume that the military is very command and control, giving orders, people follow orders. That’s how it works. Yes. There are moments where that happens, of course, in the middle of combat and crisis. But by and large, I mean, I’m always so fascinated by how thoughtful the military is as far as leadership. And in some cases, doing things, I think, way better than we often do in the civilian world. And what you just described that dynamic of being a captain and debriefing a general and giving them feedback.

Dave Stachowiak [00:24:29]:
And not only is it good to do that, that’s the expectation that if you’re leading that debrief, you’re able to share that perspective that they are surfacing the things that they did that didn’t work and learnings. And I mean, one of the rules engagement you talk about is if you have a piece of data, share it. If you hold on to something that you don’t share with the rest of the room, like, that’s a huge no no culturally. And I think it’s a great reminder for all of us that if we can help our organizations and teams get to a place where that just becomes the norm, I think we bypass some of the normal human things that we tend to do when we don’t have that kind of psychological safety.

Robert “Cujo” Teschner [00:25:10]:
That’s right. And to understand how come a high performance military team is more flexible, less rigid than your typical business. You have to understand a little bit of military doctrine. And you got to realize another thing that I inherited when I joined the Armed Forces of the United States is that we spent a lot of time studying history in the military. And we studied the Prussian armed forces a lot. And the Prussians of the mid 1800s, we’re trying to understand how do we organize to be able to equip our teammates to be able to make decisions at their level so that we can reduce the decision making timeline and become more nimble, more agile in a battlefield where others are increasingly agile. And so they came up with a controversial approach they called Altragsdaktik, which I think is poorly and loosely translated into the English language as mission style orders or mission command. Something that was formally adopted by the Armed Forces of the United States.

Robert “Cujo” Teschner [00:26:08]:
But mission command is a really interesting organizational philosophy. And it says, in general, we need centralized command. Like, somebody needs to be calling the big picture shots. But we need decentralized execution. And decentralized execution, it means we gotta equip our teammates at the front lines to make decisions their level to advance our cause so that we can be agile. And they strove for agility centuries before it became a buzzword in business. And so I think back to my experience as a fighter pilot. I was equipped with the decision making authority to choose when I needed to launch a missile off of my airplane at a blip that I’m seeing on my radar scope that I assess to be in violation of whatever no fly zone, whatever the rules of engagement were for that for that event.

Robert “Cujo” Teschner [00:26:55]:
And there’s no necessity, no need to ask mother may I to anybody. It’s that authority has been delegated to me. You think about Patrick Lencioni and probably his most read work, the 5 dysfunctions of a team. And you recognize at the top of the pyramid is the absence of trust. How do we build trust? Well, one of the key ways to do so is to say to our teammates, I trust you to make a decision at your level to advance the cause. We do that incredibly well in the high performance team world, the fighter aviation, across all of the different high performance teams. And so, I think it’s a great model that we can learn from and try to emulate. And who does this really well? Ritz Carlton, Chick Fil A.

Robert “Cujo” Teschner [00:27:38]:
In business, Ritz Carlton and Chick Fil A, I think, execute mission command exceptionally well. Flat organizations, especially Ritz Carlton, everybody’s equipped with the ability to make decisions at their level to advance the cause, and it results in incredible customer satisfaction. And so when we’re looking for case studies of who it is that applies military arts and science well in order to advance the cause of business. Ritz Carlton and Chick Fil A would be 2 case studies worthy of analysis to prove that there’s something to this as we strive to to create an environment where people are engaged and we’re we have very happy customers.

Dave Stachowiak [00:28:16]:
When an organization or team thinks about starting to do this and tries to get really intentional about doing a debrief, one of the tactical things that folks will tend to do is they’ll say, okay. Well, this isn’t my expertise as a leader, or as a team. Let’s bring in an outside facilitator to actually help us to go through the process of debrief. A well intended action, I think many of us have been involved in those in the past. You caution us against that. What’s the caution?

Robert “Cujo” Teschner [00:28:43]:
Yeah. It comes down to if you’re not on the team that executed whatever it was that happened, you’re ill equipped to be able to judge how it went down. And I think a perfect illustration of this is in the one debrief that Paramount Pictures gave the world from the original Top Gun movie. You’ve got a bunch of students in the Top Gun program, Maverick being one of them. The character Maverick played by Tom Cruise. And in the one debrief that we watched, the person who leads it is the outsourced facilitator that didn’t actually fly the thing. Contract employee not even wearing a flight suit coming in and coming off the tightrope, destroying vulnerability, psychological safety, attacking from the very get go, and creating a scenario where the students are now aligned against the instructor and whatever learning should have taken place doesn’t. I think it’s okay for an organization to bring somebody in to teach the concepts, the principles, the methodology, but then it’s up to the organization to go out there and put that into practice in order for everything to work the way that it’s designed and engineered to do so.

Robert “Cujo” Teschner [00:29:53]:
And when the team organically learns together, it works so much better. And in fact, what I really advocate for is for teams to share the responsibility for leading. So if we put some pieces together here, Dave, if we identify what the tactical missions are that we accomplish in our businesses and we build a team life cycle around that that says we need a plan in order to be able to execute mission success. We’ve got to communicate the plan in a way that inspires our teammates. At some point, we’ve got to go execute. And then we, at the end of execution, ought to learn from this iteration to make the next one go better. Why wouldn’t we then also share responsibility for leading one of these things? And when you have multiple people organic inside the team at different levels, leading the planning, the briefing, the execution, and debrief of the mission, not only are we rapidly elevating everybody’s leadership skills, but we’re also building empathy, understanding what we’re up against when we’re the leader, which then helps team members to support one another through all of these phases. And we build a much tighter organization that also tends to win a lot.

Robert “Cujo” Teschner [00:31:01]:
External facilitators can’t be part of that because at some point, they’re going to go away. And so why ever get involved with that from the very get go? Let’s do it organically.

Dave Stachowiak [00:31:12]:
I know some people are listening to this and thinking, okay. I get it. Debriefing key to do act how do I actually do it and go through the process? And we’re intentionally sidestepping that question in this conversation because it’s more complicated than we can get into in just this interview as far as going through the depth in the detail that I think is really necessary to do this well. And so my invitation for everyone who’s listening and thinking, okay, I need to do this is to get the book, chapter 6 in particular, step by step exactly how to think about this exactly where to go the the the setup, the process, the and it’s really brilliantly done, and we won’t do justice to it trying to hit it hit it all here. That said, Cujo, I’m curious for someone who’s hearing this and thinking, okay. We’ve never done this really. Or if we have, we’ve kind of done the alright. What worked? What didn’t? But we didn’t necessarily come to a place of really getting to the root cause and really looking at this from a leadership development framework.

Dave Stachowiak [00:32:19]:
When you run into someone who’s running an organization and says that to you, in addition to getting the book and just starting to get into it, what’s a first step that often gets that leader the traction to begin to move on this?

Robert “Cujo” Teschner [00:32:34]:
Yeah. Okay. 1st, I would say is that before we ever debrief anything, we have to learn how to plan effectively. And the first step of planning effectively is to set expectations. And what we advocate for is develop a mission orientation to the work that you do. And a mission is something with a measurable outcome that’s defined by an objective. And an objective, in order to serve us, has to be 3 things at a minimum. It has to be measurable, it has to be achievable, and it has to be time constrained.

Robert “Cujo” Teschner [00:33:05]:
And if we can put the rigor into the development of objectives that’s required to make sure that they’re measurable, that they’re achievable, and that they’re time constrained, then we’ve set ourselves up to practice accountability well. And it stuns me how poorly we define objectives in the business space. Too often, they’re just fuzzy. They’re probably kind of goals. I’ve had people say things like, hey, our objective is to be the best team ever. That’s literally impossible to measure. And when we’re confronted with that, we can’t practice any sort of usable, worthwhile accountability practice because we don’t know what we’re measuring against. So I would say we have to set ourselves up for success.

Robert “Cujo” Teschner [00:33:49]:
That involves planning well. Every first step of a plan that I’ve ever come across that’s worth its weight and anything is started with an objective that’s measurable, achievable, time constrained. That and knowing what we’re aiming for, a big time improvement, says this is not only worth doing. Let’s get started yesterday.

Dave Stachowiak [00:34:09]:
Cujo Teschner is the author of Debrief to Win: How America’s Top Guns Practice Accountable Leadership and How You Can Too. Cujo, thank you so much for your work.

Robert “Cujo” Teschner [00:34:18]:
Dave, thank you for running such an epic podcast and for the quality of your questions. I appreciate you and the work that you’re doing in the world. My pleasure.

Dave Stachowiak [00:34:33]:
If this conversation was helpful for you, a few related episodes I’d recommend. One of them is episode 404, how to build psychological safety. Amy Edmonson was my guest on that episode. Psychological safety is mentioned a ton in Cujo’s work and comes up, of course, in this process of debrief. The importance of it. Also, an opportunity to build it in your organization by having a regular practice of sharing what’s working and what’s not working and doing that in a way that is safe and affirming. A huge part of this and a great compliment to this conversation is to listen to that conversation with Amy on episode 404.

Dave Stachowiak [00:35:12]:
We also mentioned the work of Annie Duke who’s been on the show a few times before, specifically episode 499, I’m thinking about the way to make better decisions. Annie makes the point in that conversation about the dangers of resulting. Cujo talks about this in his work as well of assuming that just because we got to a good outcome means we made good decisions. Of course, that is not always the case Just because a outcome worked doesn’t necessarily mean the decisions were sound and vice versa is sometimes true as well. In episode 499, Annie and I talked about how do you actually separate those things, begin to look at actually the decision making process. Cujo talks a lot about that in the debrief process. In fact, points out that sometimes in the air force, they would advance someone for the next promotion or the next opportunity when the outcome didn’t necessarily happen the way it should have, but the decisions were sound. And also the opposite was sometimes true. Sometimes even if someone technically completed the mission, if the decisions they made weren’t sound and they just locked into it, they would sometimes hold someone back. All examples of the importance of making better decisions episode 499.

Dave Stachowiak [00:36:20]:
And then, of course, I’m also thinking about Jonathan Raymond’s work, the accountability dial. A big reason for doing a debrief is for creating accountability in an organization. And on episode 306, we talked about the 5 steps to hold people accountable. One of the messages that Jonathan has been saying for years is the importance of the first step on the accountability dial is making regular mentions. Not just sitting down and having big difficult conversations once every 3 or 4 months or 6 months or whatever the review period is, But actually having regular mentions daily, both the good things, but also the things that aren’t working very much the same spirit of this process of debrief having those conversations regularly so they become part of the culture. They become part of the daily how we do things around here to help each other to learn and to grow and, yes, to stay accountable to each other as well. Episode 306 for more on that.

Dave Stachowiak [00:37:12]:
All of those episodes, of course, you can find on the coachingforleaders.com website. If you haven’t set up your free membership, I’m inviting you to do that because you can search the entire library by topic. Three key topic areas we’re gonna be filing this episode under team leadership, facilitating meetings, and organizational change. We’ve had many conversations about all three of those topics over the years. If you set up your free membership, you’ll be able to search the entire library by topic to be able to find what’s most important for you right now. It is one of the many benefits inside of the free membership. And if you’ve been utilizing the free membership for a bit and you’re looking for a bit more, I’ve gone the next step inside of Coaching for Leaders Plus and put together guides of 3 or 4 episodes to listen to in succession on a very specific question. So for example, if you’re looking to drive more innovation in your organization, what are the 3 or 4 episodes you should listen to? In order, who are the top thinkers I think you should be paying attention to? What are the key points from those episodes? What are key questions? A video for me highlighting all of those.

Dave Stachowiak [00:38:17]:
We have a whole bunch of those topic guides inside of Coaching for Leaders Plus. It is one of the many benefits inside of Coaching for Leaders Plus. For more, go over to coachingforleaders.plus. Coaching for Leaders is edited by Andrew Kroeger. Production support is provided by Sierra Priest. I will be back with you next week for our next conversation. Have a great week, and see you back on Monday.