Hopefully your duties as a team manager never include the management of a serious crisis!
Whether it does or not, you will need to draw a line under your tour at some point. It is likely that this will come after the excitement of the event and can be a difficult thing to do both from your point of view and from the stakeholders who can contribute to this process.
You will need to undertake a post tour evaluation. As you know, after a tour has finished – whether it was a huge success or a little bit disappointing – it’s often tempting to just ‘get on with it’ and look ahead to the next event, or something else, like a holiday, your University work, anything!
As a result the process of evaluating performance is often overlooked. After working hard to successfully execute the tour, the last thing a team manager wants to do is go back through each minute detail.
Nevertheless, evaluation is a crucial part of moving forward and ensuring that processes can run even better the next time you (or someone else) is put in the role of team manager.
The attached resource gives a step by step overview of how to put together a post event report. It notes that it is important for team managers to be thinking about a final report from the outset, not just at the conclusion of the event.
It is also important to note that not every step will be applicable to every tour or team management role, but when it comes to planning for the next tour in 9 months from now, you (or especially your successor) will be so grateful you did it!
Don’t you already wish you had one from the last trip!?
