In today’s dynamic and ever-evolving workplace, the concept of leadership is undergoing a significant transformation. Gone are the days when leadership was solely about the title or position one held within an organizational hierarchy. Modern leadership is fundamentally about actions, behaviors, and the ability to inspire and influence others, regardless of one’s official role or status. This episode delves into the crucial idea that you don’t need a formal title to be a leader. By focusing on core leadership qualities—such as vision, empathy, influence, and integrity—anyone can take the initiative and drive positive change within their team or organization. Understanding and embracing this broader, more inclusive perspective on leadership is vital for personal growth, team cohesion, and organizational success. This exploration provides practical strategies for demonstrating leadership and influence, reinforcing that everyone has the potential to lead, inspire, and make a significant impact, irrespective of their official position.
In today’s complex and rapidly changing organizational environments, continuous improvement isn’t just a luxury—it’s a necessity. One invaluable tool for driving this improvement is the After Action Review (AAR). Originally developed and refined within military contexts, the AAR is a structured and straightforward method for reflecting on events, identifying successes and shortcomings, and pinpointing actionable steps for future enhancement. Through the lens of the AAR, leaders can foster a culture of transparency, accountability, and continuous learning within their teams. By systematically addressing What happened?, What went right?, and What went wrong?, leaders derive insights that empower their teams to replicate successes and mitigate failures. Ultimately, effective use of AARs can transform isolated experiences into collective knowledge, driving sustained organizational growth and peak performance.
Timestamped Overview
- 00:00:50 – Introduction
- Scott introduces the topic of organizational improvement using the After Action Review (AAR) tool.
- 00:01:19 – What Is an AAR?
- A concise explanation of what an AAR is and its primary purpose in assessing and improving performance after major events or training exercises.
- 00:02:12 – When to Use an AAR
- Scott shares practical scenarios of when to carry out an AAR, from training events to business sales pitches.
- 00:02:43 – How to Use an AAR
- Scott breaks down the three primary questions that form the backbone of an AAR:
What happened?
What went right?
What went wrong?
- Scott breaks down the three primary questions that form the backbone of an AAR:
- 00:03:57 – Importance of Double Downing on Successes
- The critical need to focus on what went right to replicate success in future endeavors.
- 00:04:32 – Addressing What Went Wrong
- The importance of understanding faults but focusing on solutions to improve rather than blame.
- 00:06:01 – Psychological Safety
- Why establishing a psychologically safe environment is critical for the success of an AAR.
- 00:06:59 – Timeliness in Conducting an AAR
- The necessity of performing an AAR soon after the event to ensure accurate recollections and effective improvements.
- 00:07:35 – Keeping it Concise
- Scott stresses the importance of keeping the AAR process brief and to the point to maintain engagement and effectiveness.
- 00:08:25 – Implementing AAR Findings
- Steps to turn AAR insights into actionable changes for continuous improvement.
- 00:08:58 – Real-Life Example
- Scott shares a personal anecdote from his time as an operations officer, illustrating the practicality and impact of conducting an AAR.
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Scott McCarthy
Transcript
The following is an AI generated transcript which should be used for reference purposes only. It has not been verified or edited to reflect what was actually said in the podcast episode.
Scott McCarthy:
Yes. Welcome, 1. Welcome, all. It is your chief leadership officer, Scott McCarthy. Welcome to today’s Monday, military leadership insight, where I talk about my true experience as a military leader and bring it to you, the audience, because you guys asked for it. So I’m gonna deliver it for you. And today, we’re talking about organizational improvement. And what do we in the military use for this improvement? And I tell you, we got a simple tool.
Scott McCarthy:
It’s gotta be simple for us military folks. Right? But it’s also effective when it’s employed properly. Alright? I’ve talked about this tool in the podcast before. So if you’re a long time listener, this probably won’t be something super new to you, but at the same time, we’re just gonna focus right in on this. And that is the AAR, the after action review. K? So what is it? How do we use it? When do we use it? And what do we do after we’ve done using it? Let’s dive in. So what is an AAR or after action review? Basically, it’s where we get together and we discuss each other’s perspectives on what transpired during usually a training event. We often do these after training.
Scott McCarthy:
I’ve employed them after major events. Maybe we had a mistake, pretty big mistake. And I’ll give you a example near the end where I use this for everyone’s benefit after one of my team members made a mistake. All good. Okay? Or after, you know, a major event. So if you’re in business, maybe after a big sales pitch, you can go ahead and AAR, right, after you’ve landed a client at AAR. Maybe you didn’t land a client, AAR. K.
Scott McCarthy:
Just think about it. Alright? So how do you use it? It’s really simple, and AR has 3 questions. Question 1, what happened? And this may sound weird why we ask what happened, but the thing to think about is is that everyone’s perspective on what happened is totally different. So me as a military leader in my command post or, you know, my basically area where I’m leading, is totally different than my troops who are like really on the ground, on the flanks, what have you. So they see it in a different context than what I see it. So it’s important to understand from everybody’s perspective to hear about what happened because they’ll say things that you didn’t see, and you will have seen things that they didn’t see. And when we talk about what happened in this manner, we actually get a true holistic picture of what happened. Alright? Question number 2, what went right? And we ask people what went right.
Scott McCarthy:
Why? Because we want to double down on those things. We do something right. We wanna make sure we’ve doubled down on it to do that again in the future. You always wanna double down. It’s like, you know, stocks. If you’re in stocks and picking stocks, and you got a big time winner stock that’s, you know, plus 20% constantly, and you got a big time loser stock that’s big constantly, you know, negative 20%, you don’t take your money and dump it into your negative 20% stock in the hopes that, you know, oh, maybe they’ll come back. No. You wanna put your money into the winner.
Scott McCarthy:
And this is exact same principle. You want to know what went right so that you can go ahead and do those things again in the future. And finally, the third question is what went wrong? And this is normally the question that everyone wants to jump to. Right? But you have to understand the first two first. It’s important to understand what went wrong or sorry. What transpired first before you get into what went wrong, and it’s important to talk about the things that went right because you want to have that positive mindset. We as humans, our brains are wired towards the negative. So that’s why it’s so easy for us to talk about what went wrong, but we need to wait till the end.
Scott McCarthy:
Okay? So talk about those things. What went wrong? So how might we improve? And that’s what you’re going after. What isn’t about actually what went wrong, it’s about what can we do to improve what went wrong. That’s what you’re going after with the AR. So here you’re looking for solutions focus. You’re not looking at blame. Playing the blame game helps no one. Okay? So what you’re doing is is you’re going after the solution focus.
Scott McCarthy:
So what went wrong and how might we improve it? Emphasis on the improvement part. So whether that you mitigate it so that it doesn’t happen again or you mitigate its impact of what happens again. Now a couple things to note about an AR process, it requires psychological safety, ladies and gentlemen. If you do not have psychologically safe environment or, you know, haven’t established that with your team, they will not open up to you. Guarantee. Okay? They’ll go, man, I don’t really have anything, or they’ll give you very, very just generic things, answers, responses, what have you. So it has to be psychologically safe. Second thing to keep in mind is you can’t wait forever to AR something.
Scott McCarthy:
Okay? It has to be relatively speaking close to whatever event you’re AR ing. It can’t be, you know, 30 days later. Doesn’t work. People have long gone past that. Okay? And their memory just of the incident or the event just won’t be there. And the third thing you have to keep in mind when you AR something is it cannot be dragged out forever. These things can’t spend hours. Why? Because people lose interest.
Scott McCarthy:
They lose patience. And when that happens, when it gets to, like, you know, person number 12 speaking, who actually might have good points to say, they are less likely to bring them up because they just want to get it done and over with. So what do you do once you’ve completed the error? You take all these notes down. Okay? And you go back and you start looking at, okay, how do we implement change from those things? How do we implement to make sure that the things we did right occurs again, and then the things we do wrong, how do we mitigate them down the future? And that is the whole goal. You want to find ways to mitigate and improve. Add that to your action list, go after, and get it done. So I told you I’ll give you a real life example. I will give it to you now.
Scott McCarthy:
When I was operations officer for one of our training centers, I had a team of, it was 9 of us total, and, one of my members made a mistake. And he basically made something through the you know, not a huge amount of money, but it was a financial issue. Did something wrong in the system. Lo and behold, lot of money was sent to where it shouldn’t have gone. Now we were able to fix it. So once we noticed it, we fixed it. We AR ed it. So, okay.
Scott McCarthy:
What happened? Well, we talked about it. We said, okay. What went right? Not well, you brought it up. That is what went right. You brought up the mistake, the issue. It was brought up. It was flagged. It was like, oh, there’s a problem here.
Scott McCarthy:
And you admit it that, hey. I must have made a mistake. Awesome. And by the way, we’d visit this in front of the whole team. And the goal was was not we didn’t say, oh, you messed up. We weren’t pinpointing a member because you’ll find out our mitigation in a minute, but rather we were doing an environment so that if anyone else came across this type of task, they wouldn’t make the same mistake. So it wasn’t about placing blame, but rather it was focused on it was focused on learning and growth. So we asked what happened.
Scott McCarthy:
We asked what right. Okay. What went wrong? K. The money was was, you know, sent to the wrong spot. Okay. Great. K. How do we fix this in the future? And the member speaks up, he’s like, I I was never trained.
Scott McCarthy:
We’re like, what? He’s like, yeah. This isn’t my core job, and I was never trained how to do this in the system. So I thought I was doing everything right, and there lied the problem. So, immediately, we’re like, well, we’re gonna get you some training. We’re gonna teach you what to do and get the experts in. We taught them. We taught everybody what to do, how to do it properly. And the only hope, we didn’t have that problem again.
Scott McCarthy:
And it wasn’t about, you know, placing blame, saying, oh, you’re at fault and writing them up or killing this performance review, but rather, it was above that learning environment. Okay. We’ve made a mistake. How do we learn from it? How do we move forward? So we implemented that. We implemented some SOPs so that whenever someone new took over that post, we always checked in to see if they knew what they were doing in that role and made sure that they felt like they were able comfortable to say, I don’t know. And the default was was to provide the training, and that was the big thing. We recognized the people going into that role didn’t necessarily have the training for that job, and our default setting was to provide the training. And there you go.
Scott McCarthy:
That is a real life use of an AR in a very small context, but you get how you can use it moving forward. Alright, ladies and gentlemen. That’s it for this edition of Monday military leadership insight. Hope you enjoyed it. Let me know what you think about this segment. If you like it, awesome. Got some, got some a air points for me, Even better. Love to hear them.
Scott McCarthy:
Alright. Thank you as always. Lead the boss, and we’ll see you Thursday. Take care now.