What does your team learn from success?

At your next retrospective, team meeting or even 1:1, someone is likely to talk about a success they had.

As leaders, this is often our cue to celebrate, praise and give high-fives. And this is a fantastic practice because everyone needs to hear “Well done!” on a regular basis.

You should definitely start there. But don’t stop there.

Try asking these three fascinating follow-up questions to dig deeper:

1) What factors made this success possible?2) What could have produced a different outcome?3) What could we change to increase our odds of repeating our success on the next project?

Too often we only do a “deep dive” on failures, looking for the root cause of the problem.But there’s a lot to learn by looking the root cause of our successes too.

Why I resisted doing this the first five years I lead programmers…Honestly, I didn’t think of it. My manager had trained me to get to the bottom of problems, but not successes.

But looking back, I think some cognitive biases was getting in the way.

When my team succeeded, I told myself it was because…

• We’re just that good at programming.
• We’re just that smart.
• We worked hard.
• Everyone worked together.

You also might hear answers like that.

On the surface, they sound like reasons, but they aren’t. I feel they are examples of lullabye language, which makes our mind think we’ve gotten useful information when we haven’t.

If you keep hearing those kinds of answers, a fun trick is to ask if the opposite is true. For example:

“Okay, you succeeded because you worked hard. Were your past failures from not working hard enough? That reason doesn’t sound quite right to me because everyone appeared to be working hard. But, if you say so…”

My goal isn’t to rob the team of the joy of success, but to use that success to guide their learning about themselves, and how they work together.

Leaders build teams that learn, and an environment where learning is prioritized.

Now, what questions could you ask to help your team’s learning?

What does your team learn from success? was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.