Will Kelly runs Military Lawn Cuts and uses a four-step feedback loop to fix recurring mistakes: capture failures immediately, find the root cause, build the fix into your process, and talk it through with the person involved. He says it's not punishment but a way to shift your team toward solving problems before they happen.
So what does a real feedback loop system look like? Here are the 4 components I use at Military Lawn Cuts. The first one is capture the failure immediately, not at the end of the week, not at the end of the day, not at Monday meeting. The moment the mistake happens, it gets documented. What happened, when, who was involved, and what was the impact on the operational side of the business? Identify the root cause, not the symptom, which is number 2. This is where most owners stop. They fix the symptom, tell them not to do it again, don't leave the gate open. But the root cause might be that there's no end of job checklist. The third thing is build the fix into the process, not just the conversation. If you fix the problem with a conversation, you didn't fix it. The fix has to live somewhere where the next person could find it. Number 4, close the loop with the team member. This is not the punishment. This is development. Which is what we're doing. We're building people. So sit down for even 2, 3, 5 minutes and say, here, here's what happened. Here's what we need to change. Here's what I expect going forward. Fix the system and watch the culture shift.
