Debriefs: The Simple Strategy to Boost Team Performance by 25%

Throughout your career, you’ve worked hard to progress from a junior role to a senior leadership position. It hasn’t been easy — years of dedication, long hours, and hard-earned experience have brought you to where you are today.

As a leader, you've had the privilege (and the pressure) of managing multiple teams over the years. Yet, how often were you given formal training on how to actually build, nurture, and lead high-performing teams? For most leaders, the answer is "never."

Maybe you were placed in a leadership role early on without any preparation, left to learn on the job. Later, you might have attended leadership development programmes — but they often lacked specific tools for understanding and improving team dynamics.

Fast forward to today: Your company has restructured. You're balancing hybrid working, navigating constant change, and leading a matrixed team. Like any dedicated leader, you call strategy meetings to address the challenges at hand.

But something isn’t working.

You fall back on familiar tactics:

1. You focus on technical issues because that’s your comfort zone.
2. You dominate discussions, telling your team what to do.
3. Meetings spiral into debates over irrelevant issues.
4. There's plenty of talk but no concrete action steps.
5. You prioritise tasks over teamwork — again and again.

Sound familiar? You're not alone.

Research consistently shows that collaboration and teamwork are critical to organisational success (Sull, Turconi & Sull, 2020). Yet, most leaders aren’t taught how to effectively manage these dynamics.

The Harsh Truth

Being technically brilliant and socially skilled doesn’t mean you can lead an effective debrief.

This is the reality for many leaders: They focus on the wrong issues, and their teams suffer for it.

When you finally do receive training on building and leading effective teams, a crucial lesson emerges:

The most effective debriefs focus on both teamwork and task work.

To facilitate a meaningful debrief, you must:

1. Address teamwork issues alongside technical ones.
2. Actively involve team members for diverse insights.
3. Keep discussions focused and purposeful.
4. Ensure every debrief leads to actionable steps for improvement.

Why Do Debriefs Work?

Research shows that teams conducting debriefs outperform others by an average of 25% (Tannenbaum & Cerasoli, 2013).

Here’s why:

• Teams learn from experience and self-correct over time.
• Shared mental models develop, enhancing coordination and performance.
• Feedback becomes a norm, driving continuous improvement.
• Knowledge gaps are identified and addressed.

Beyond Leadership Training

Despite the evidence, most organisations stop at training leaders on individual skills: goal setting, delegation, conflict management, communication, and feedback.

While valuable, these skills focus on one-to-one conversations rather than the complexities of team dynamics.

Even leadership assessments often miss the mark, focusing solely on personality tests, emotional intelligence, and 360-degree feedback.

But leadership isn’t just about self-awareness. It’s about building and maintaining high-performing teams.

The Bright Side

One survey found that employees appreciated their colleagues even more than they valued a pay rise. Another study revealed that 89% of employees would prefer team-building activities over an extra day off (Davey, 2025).

But here’s the catch: Team-building activities must be intentional.

You can’t throw random solutions at your team and hope they stick. You must assess the team’s needs and tailor your approach accordingly.

Mastering team dynamics has never been more critical. Be the leader everyone turns to for building and leading effective teams.

Do the work, and your team will give you back more than you could ever imagine.

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