Post #5 in New series: How Leaders Actually Get Better. This 12-post sprint is about building adaptive capacity: uncomfortable challenges, quick debriefs, real feedback, and psychological safety so stretch ≠ stress. Each post = one move you can use each week. Ready for learning that sticks? let’s go. ⚡
Post #5: Do you ever feel like your team is stuck on autopilot? Everyone is working incredibly hard, but you keep tripping over the same communication glitches or making the same costly errors?
The most successful teams in the world—from tech companies to healthcare units—have a simple, powerful secret: they don’t just work; they pause, examine, and tweak their process together.
This deliberate practice is known as Team Reflexivity, and it is fundamentally the team’s scheduled time to hit the “reset button.” It’s an honest, structured check-up where you look at how you are working, figure out what’s broken, and immediately plan how to fix it for the very next week.
Why You Can’t Afford to Skip the Pause
When teams neglect this collective check-up, they fall victim to blind spots and cognitive errors. They often continue down the wrong path simply because they have already invested so much time in it, ignoring clear evidence that they should change direction.
A weekly dose of reflexivity helps you:
Avoid Costly Mistakes: It acts as a built-in quality check, forcing you to question assumptions and prevent the team from repeating failures.
Get Smarter, Together: It strengthens your team’s collective intelligence, ensuring everyone knows who knows what. This shared knowledge is crucial for finding information fast and coordinating complex tasks efficiently.
Boost Creativity: Teams that consistently reflect on their methods are proven to be more innovative and effective .
The Solution: The 15-Minute ‘Keep / Stop / Try’ Check-Up
You don’t need a four-hour offsite retreat to fix your processes. You only need a 15-minute slot during your weekly meeting, focused on three simple questions :
KEEP (3 minutes): What’s working well? Identify the successful behaviors, tools, or positive communication methods that contributed to your recent wins. You want to celebrate them and make sure they become permanent habits.
STOP (7 minutes): What’s creating friction? Be honest about the obstacles, bottlenecks, or processes that are wasting time and energy (known as “process loss”). This critique must focus on the process, not the person .
TRY (5 minutes): What’s our immediate experiment? Define one or two concrete, small actions to test in the coming week. The focus is always on process goals (actions you can control) rather than outcome goals (results that depend on external factors). Example: “We will try limiting meeting attendance to five people.”
The Golden Rule: Trust is Everything
This check-up only works if team members feel safe enough to be truly honest. If people worry about being blamed for raising an issue, they will simply stay silent, and the entire exercise fails.
This environment of trust, or psychological safety, starts at the top. The most effective leaders model humility by admitting their own mistakes and genuinely inviting advice and suggestions. This sets the tone and makes critical reflection legitimate for everyone else .
Ready to reset your team’s performance? Schedule your first 15-minute ‘Keep / Stop / Try’ session this week. It is the single highest-leverage investment you can make in your team’s sustained excellence.
