Blair Singer teaches leaders a three-question debrief: What happened? Why? What did we learn? Ask these after wins and setbacks to surface what your team already knows instead of telling them what to do.
Attention team leaders, facilitators, trainers. I'm going to give you three or four killer questions that will prove to you beyond a shadow of a doubt that the brilliance is sitting in front of you, not in your own head. That's right. If you want to be a great teacher, a great leader, a great facilitator of anything, your family, your team, your business, a class, whatever, is to understand that you, you got to take the burden off of you. The brilliance and the genius sits in the room. I'm in the middle of teaching a master facilitator program that I teach to only a few people every year to teach them how to be world class teachers, leaders and facilitators. But I'm going to give you a piece of that right now, that these three or four questions are game changers. Okay? So when something happens, let's say you have a set of sales goals and the numbers come in. Let's say you're in a teaching environment, you give people an exercise to execute and the results are in. Let's say that you have a big win. Could be a win or it could be a learning experience, whatever. What do you do? Do you analyze the numbers and tell them what's wrong and how to correct? That's what most normal people do. But why? And why does that not seem to work so well? Why do you seem to get resistance, but because it's coming from you and probably your good idea is not as good as their idea since they're the ones who are executing it. Understand, this technique has helped me over the last 25, 30 years worth with work with countless organizations, helping them build championship teams and massively increasing sales. So here it is. The results come in. The first question, it's not rocket science. It's not going to rock your world. You ready for this? First question, address your team. What happened? What happened? In other words, what were the results? What happened? And you listen and you acknowledge. Then the second question, watch this. This is even more difficult. Why? Why did that happen? Tell me about that. What happened? Listen to what they say, okay? And of course, then the third quintessential question to ask. Remember through all of this you have said nothing. You only ask and probe. The third question is so based on that, what did you or what did we learn? What did we learn? Now? Where does the responsibility go when you ask the question? The responsibility goes back over there, not over here. It's not on you to answer all the questions. It's not about you and your ego being able to drive the Day. It's about you and your facilitation skills and your love of the team and the project and getting better. That's going to educate a do, say, mean to draw out is going to draw the answers out of the group. Some of them be right, some of them be wrong. But together you'll figure it out. So what happened? Why and what did we learn? And at that point, let them think about what did we learn? And then if you want to add some other questions like, okay, so how do we correct? How do we get better? How do we leverage this? What worked? What didn't work? All questions. Listen to this. The quality of the question, the quality of your question will determine the quality of the response. I'll say it again. The quality of your questions will determine the quality of the response. Not school teacher leading questions, but true questions that pull the best out of people that are in the field that are actually doing the work. Okay. Or when you're in a classroom or when you're teaching any kind of a topic or a subject is to be able, once results come in and is to be able to debrief it. That's what this is called. It's called a debrief, not a post mortem. Postmortem means after death. Okay? After life, whatever. This is a debrief. You notice in a basketball game, if you ever get to watch those again in the NBA, how long does it take to play the last two or three minutes of an NBA game when the game is close? Not 2 minutes, 5, 10 minutes. Why? Because they're constantly calling a timeout to debrief what's working, what's not working, what's doing here. Yeah, the coach is going to jump in and say, do this, this, this and this because they're in a time crunch. But in your case, the debrief is critical. The timing is critical. When you get a win, when you have a setback, when people are confused, call a debrief and ask the questions. Try it. Let me know how it works for you if you have any specific questions. I'm sure it's going to bring up a lot of little voice issues for you if you're a leader. But just trust me on this, that your willingness to be patient and your willingness to draw the genius will show you that you can take the weight off of you, put the responsibility out there and reveal the fact that there is true genius in your team. There's true genius in front of you if you let it grow. Okay? So be an awesome leader.
