Your Leadership Adventure: Team Failure

Dr. Sara Reed
Feb 13
3 min read

Note: I loved Choose Your Own Adventure books growing up, and over time, I have started facilitating leadership development with this model. Despite my husband’s prompting to have a dramatic ending, I kept it more real life.

Below is a super (super) rough draft of my thinking ... so I would love your thoughts and feedback.

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Your Leadership Adventure: Team Failure

Your boss comes to you and shares details of missteps and a lack of details on a recent project. They aren’t happy … and something needs to change for it not to happen again.

What do you do?

A. Set up a process that ensures you see everything moving forward.

B. Gather the team together to debrief and determine how to prevent these problems in future steps.

C. Quit your job. You don't want a boss who will give you feedback.

D. Fire your team. They screwed up & it wasn’t your fault.

——-

A. Set up a process that ensures you see everything moving forward.

Without talking to the team, you set up new processes that require you to see all the project pieces - always before your boss and well before deadlines. You are proud that you solved this problem quickly and know you are right about preventing future problems. Your team doesn’t really need to know about what your boss shared. They don’t need that stress, and it’s your job as their boss to take care of things.

In the short term, your plan is working. You can manage the workload, your team members didn’t question your direction, and your boss hasn’t returned with the same feedback. Your plan worked—or did it?

Your star performers follow through - and are clearly unhappy with you. Did you imagine someone muttering “micromanager” under their breath?

Wait … what … micromanagement? What does that even mean?? You decide to google “Am I a micromanager?” You learn that micromanagement is generally not great for a team and signs of micromanagement includes:

- Compulsively managing everyone’s work (even top performers)

- Go alone to their bosses (often to claim credit)

- Come in early and stay late (often to double check the work of others)

- Focus on meaningless details

- Create deadlines for deadlines’ sake

- Rarely praise others

You want to slam your laptop closed. Never should have googled it. Maybe some of it IS true, but …

If your team only knew how you were protecting them - THEY didn’t have to face the wrath of your unhappy boss. THEY didn’t know how badly the prior project had gone. It was YOUR responsibility to get it right. So, what if that meant you didn’t sleep? So, what if that meant you had to double and triple-check everyone’s work?

One of your top performers asks if they can talk with you. You are stressed and overwhelmed and can’t imagine having this conversation. You think to yourself - can’t they figure it out themselves?

Now what?

B. Gather the team to debrief and determine how to prevent these problems in future steps.

After pausing to reflect, you realize that you need to

(1) Deliver the feedback

(2) Problem solve with your team

(3) Commit to returning to your boss with how you and your team will do things differently in the future

You have recently been reading about how to do this process and are a little nervous, so you reach out to a mentor who asks you if your team will feel psychologically safe in this situation?

You admit to your mentor that you don't know what psychological safety is, so you research it and learn that psychological safety, as defined by Amy Edmondson, in her book The Fearless Organization,