Thoughts For The Week - 2025.10.26
Retros and Post Mortems, Focus and The Support Matrix
There’s great visuals in all today’s topics.
Retros and Post Mortems: It’s good to focus on what went wrong in order to support improvements. But don’t forget to zoom out, see the bigger picture and celebrate success.
Focus: Can you focus on fewer activities this week so that you can get more of them over the line?
The Support Matrix: An excellent guide for how different types of support should be used in different situations.
1. Retros and Post Mortems
Retros and port mortems provide a structured way to review the work that you’ve been doing, how it went and especially after bigger issues to look how you can improve for the future. This concentrated effort is the basis for future improvements.
But it’s also important to zoom out. It can be easy to over focus on what went wrong and forget to celebrate the success for the countless other things that went smoothly.
Takeaway Nugget 1: Take a step back and make sure that as well as looking for improvements you take the time to celebrate success. There’s probably more than you first think.
2. Focus
We live in a world where there are ever more ways to get districted and there’s always the temptation to try and do just one more thing in parallel. However, multitasking leads to task switching, causing extra mental load and a loss in efficiency.
Fully finishing off tasks gives you a positive energy boost. Meaning you can move to the next task with a sense of pride and accomplishment. Having too many open loops brings with negative feelings of overwhelm and lack of control.
Takeaway Nugget 2: What can you do this week to allocate enough concentrated time for your top 1-3 priorities? Enough time that you can fully complete them and move forward with confidence.
3. The Support Matrix
As a leader part of your job is to support your wider team, lift them up and help them. Depending on the situation the approach should be different. Gaurav Jain’s post on the four leadership support roles offers a great breakdown of the these differing roles, including concrete examples of when and how to use each one.
I find the easiest way to understand these four roles is to plot them on a 2x2 matrix, which I call The Support Matrix.
The X-axis runs from Problems/Past on the left to Solutions/Future on the right. The Y-axis runs from Tell (you give answers) at the bottom to Ask (you help others find their own answers) at the top.
Coaching sits in the top-right quadrant: it’s all about asking questions that help the other person move toward a future-oriented solution.
Mentoring is bottom-right: you’re offering guidance and sharing experiences to help someone grow into their future.
Counseling lands in the top-left: here, you’re listening and asking reflective questions to help someone explore their past or inner emotional challenges.
Consulting fits in the bottom-left: you’re analyzing and advising, often using your expertise to diagnose and solve past or current problems.
Takeaway Nugget 3: If you’re not sure how to help then before your next interaction take a look at the support matrix, identify the type of support you think should be offering and readup on the when and how from Gaurav Jain’s post.
Have a great week.