The Post-Festival Leadership Check-In
Festival Leadership · Deep Identity · Leadership Development
⏱ Reading time: 10 min.
You ran the team debrief. You sat in the room while the department heads walked through what held and what broke. You captured the near-misses. You wrote down the protocols worth keeping. You did the organizational work, and you did it well.
There's one debrief you didn't run.
The one where you're the only person in the room. The one nobody schedules, nobody assigns, and nobody will hold you to. The debrief of how you led. Not how the festival operated. How you led it.
That's the one most directors skip every single year. And it's the one that decides who you are at season five, fifteen or fifty.
The cycle nobody finishes
There's a rhythm to the weeks after a festival wraps, and it has four beats.
First you recover. You get your body and your house and your sleep back. Then you capture. You debrief the team while the memory is still warm and honest. Then you reflect. You turn the lens on your own leadership. Then you communicate the changes forward into next season.
Recovery. Capture. Reflect. Communicate.
Most directors get through the first two. They rest. They debrief. And then the next planning meeting lands on the calendar, and they skip straight past the part where they look at themselves. Reflect gets dropped. Every year.
Here's why that matters. The operational debrief tells you what the festival did. The leadership reflection tells you who you were while you did it. One makes the next event run smoother. The other makes you a better leader. They are not the same work, and only one of them changes you.
The blind spot is bigger than you think
You may already feel like you know how you led this season. Be careful with that feeling.
Organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich spent years studying this with nearly five thousand people. Her finding is the one every leader needs taped to their mirror.
In research with nearly 5,000 participants, organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich found that while 95% of people believe they are self-aware, only 10 to 15% actually are. Almost everyone thinks they see themselves clearly. Almost nobody does.
And here's the part that should stop a festival director cold: Eurich found that the more power you hold, the less self-aware you tend to be, on average. Not because senior leaders are worse people. Because the higher you climb, the harder it becomes to get anyone to tell you the truth.
Think about your season. Who told you, to your face, where your leadership cost the team something? Who felt safe enough to do that at 5am during load-in, or at 2am when the radio would not stop? The more central you are to the operation, the more the honest feedback dries up exactly when you need it most.
That's not a character flaw. That's a structural problem. And structural problems need a structure to solve them.
Reflection is not a soft skill. It is a performance multiplier.
Let's kill the idea that this is the touchy-feely part.
A landmark study out of Harvard and HEC Paris ran the experiment across thousands of people. One group practiced a skill. Another group practiced the same skill, then spent fifteen minutes at the end of the day writing down what they had learned. Same work. Same hours, almost. The only difference was the reflection.
Across ten studies with more than 4,000 participants, researchers at Harvard Business School and HEC Paris found that people who spent fifteen minutes reflecting on what they had learned performed about 23% better than those who only kept practicing. The mechanism was self-efficacy: reflection builds a clearer, more confident sense of what you actually know and can do.
Twenty-three percent. From thinking on paper. You stop repeating the same season on a loop and start compounding.
So why do so few leaders do it? Look at the research on professional soccer goalies facing a penalty kick. Goalies who stay in the center of the goal stop the ball about a third of the time. Diving left or right works far less often. And yet goalies stay in the center only six percent of the time. Why? Because diving feels like doing something. Standing still feels like failure, even when standing still is the smarter play.
Leaders are the same. Reflection feels like standing in the center of the goal while the action happens somewhere else. It feels like wasted time. It is the opposite.
The Leadership Self-Debrief: five questions to turn on yourself
Here is the structure. Five questions. You ask them about yourself, in writing, alone, two to four weeks after wrap, when accuracy and honesty still overlap and the story has not yet hardened into legend.
One rule before you start, and it comes straight from the research. Ask what, not why. "Why did I lose my temper at the production meeting?" sends you spiraling into excuses and self-defense. "What was happening for me in that moment, and what did it cost the room?" sends you toward something you can actually use. What questions build insight. Why questions build alibis.
One. What did my team experience of me that I never intended?
This is the gap between impact and intent. You meant to project calm. Did they feel calm, or did they feel a held breath? You meant decisive. Did they experience decisive, or did they experience steamrolled? Eurich's work is blunt on this: people who work for leaders without this awareness often do not trust them, and a single unaware leader can cut a team's odds of success roughly in half. Your intent is invisible to your team. Only your impact is real to them.
Two. Where did I lead from my values, and where did I lead from fear?
Go back through the season's hardest calls. The artist trailer with the very big problem. The vendor who failed at the worst hour. The staffing decision you made on no sleep. For each one, ask honestly: was that choice an expression of who I say I am? Or was it fear wearing the costume of strategy? You will find both. The point is to know which was which.
Three. What pattern showed up this season that shows up every season?
This is the question that separates an event review from a leadership review. The specific problems change. The pattern in how you respond to them usually does not. Maybe you go quiet and absorb everything yourself until you crack. Maybe you over-control the things you should delegate and under-tend the things only you can do. The recurring pattern is not about the festival. It is about you. Name it, and you can finally work on it.
Four. What did I avoid?
The conversation you kept not having. The underperformer you kept reassigning instead of addressing. The decision you let the calendar make for you because making it yourself felt too costly. Avoidance is the most expensive leadership habit there is, precisely because it never shows up as a line item. It just quietly shapes everything.
Five. What is the one thing I will lead differently next season?
Not ten things. One. Reflection that ends in a vague resolution to "be better" changes nothing. Reflection that ends in one specific, named, written-down change is the entire point of the exercise. This is also the bridge to your fourth beat, the one where you communicate that change forward to the people who need to see it.
Let me tell you about the season Question One changed me.
A few seasons back, I started inviting staff for coffee and lunch. Bottom up and across, not just the people who reported to me. I wanted them to know I was listening. Really listening.
I learned so many wonderful things about them. Their rituals. Their aggravations. Their dream travel places. The conferences and workshops they wanted to do, the skills they wanted to learn. How their parents were doing, the aging parents, the busy parents, the ones caregiving for a parent. I caught up on their children's events. And I let them see a warmer, less hurried and less direct side of the work EJ.
It made for a richer, deeper production year. I thought twice before pushing a button around someone's holiday, or when I could see they were already juggling a lot. I checked on them more all the way through the festival. I made sure they were truly taking care of themselves.
That meant a lot to them. And it changed what they experienced of me.
That is Question One, lived.
The strengths connection most directors miss
Here is where self-awareness stops being abstract and gets practical. The clearest mirror most leaders never pick up is their own strengths.
Don Clifton built his life's work on a single conviction: people perform at their best when they maximize their natural strengths, not when they spend their energy fixing weaknesses. But you cannot maximize what you cannot see. Knowing your strengths is self-awareness, made specific and usable.
When you run your self-debrief, run it through that lens. The moments you led best this season were almost certainly your strengths doing their work. The moments you struggled were often a strength overused, or a real gap you have been trying to white-knuckle instead of building a team around. That is not a verdict on your worth. It is a map.
When to do it, and how
The timing is not optional, and it mirrors the window you already know from the team debrief.
Too soon, and you are still defending your decisions instead of examining them. Too late, and the honest details have faded into a flattering story. Two to four weeks after wrap is the window where accuracy and honesty still overlap. Put it on the calendar now, the same way you would protect any meeting that mattered.
The method is almost embarrassingly simple. Pen and paper, or a blank document. The five questions. Forty-five minutes of honesty. No audience, no performance, no one to impress. Just you, finally telling yourself the truth about how you led.
You produce a festival by being relentless. You become a better leader by being honest. Those are two different muscles, and the second one only grows in a quiet room.
Run Your Own Leadership Self-Debrief
- What did my team experience of me that I never intended?
- Where did I lead from my values, and where did I lead from fear?
- What pattern showed up this season that shows up every season?
- What did I avoid?
- What is the one thing I will lead differently next season?
"You debriefed the festival to make the next event better. You debrief yourself to make the next you better. Only one of those compounds across a career."
Why this is really Deep Identity
Everything in this practice lives inside the first pillar of the Three Depths: Deep Identity. Not identity as a slogan. Identity as the disciplined, ongoing work of seeing your own leadership clearly enough to choose it on purpose.
The directors who plateau in mid-career almost always plateau in the same place. They get very good at running the event and never get honest about running themselves. They repeat their patterns for fifteen years and call it experience. The directors who compound, who are still sharp and still growing two and three decades in, are the ones who learned to turn the lens around.
You already did the hard part this season. You led. Now do the part that makes the leading mean something.
If those five questions landed somewhere real, that is the beginning of Deep Identity work. It is more rigorous than people expect, and far more freeing.
That is exactly what Festival Leadership Foundations is built to do. Not motivation. Not theory. The structured identity work that turns a season of experience into a decade of growth, with CliftonStrengths as the mirror and a cohort of festival leaders doing the work alongside you.
Festival Leadership Foundations
Build the Leadership Practice That Compounds
Cohort 1 is currently in session. Cohort 2 enrolls Fall 2026 with locked-in waitlist rates for early registrants. Built for festival directors and live events professionals ready to lead themselves as deliberately as they lead the event.
Join the Cohort 2 Waitlist →Locked-in waitlist rate ends when public enrollment opens.
What is a post-festival leadership reflection?
It is the practice of debriefing your own leadership after an event, separate from the operational team debrief. Where the team debrief captures what the organization did, the leadership reflection examines how you led while it happened: your impact on the team, the values and fears behind your decisions, your recurring patterns, what you avoided, and the one thing you will change next season. Done two to four weeks after wrap, it is one of the highest-return habits a festival director can build.
Why does reflection improve leadership performance?
Research from Harvard Business School and HEC Paris, conducted across ten studies with more than four thousand participants, found that people who spent fifteen minutes reflecting on what they had learned performed about 23% better than those who only kept practicing. The mechanism is self-efficacy: structured reflection builds a clearer, more confident understanding of what you know and can do, which translates directly into better performance the next time.
Why are senior leaders often less self-aware?
Organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich found that while 95% of people believe they are self-aware, only 10 to 15% actually are, and that self-awareness tends to decrease as power increases. The reason is structural, not personal: the more senior and central a leader becomes, the harder it is for the people around them to offer honest, critical feedback. That makes a deliberate self-reflection practice more important the higher you rise, not less.
What is Deep Identity in the Three Depths Framework?
Deep Identity is the first pillar of EJ Encalarde's Three Depths Framework, taught inside Festival Leadership Foundations. It is the disciplined practice of seeing your own leadership clearly, including your strengths, patterns, values, and blind spots, so you can lead on purpose rather than on autopilot. Deep Identity is the foundation the other two depths, Deep Stillness and Deep Agility, are built on.
Who teaches leadership development for festival directors and live events professionals?
EJ Encalarde, Founder of The Leadership House, teaches structured leadership development built specifically for festival directors and live events professionals through Festival Leadership Foundations, a cohort-based course. She is a Gallup-Certified CliftonStrengths Coach, Coordinating Producer of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, a 2024 Billboard Touring Power Player, and an instructor in Entertainment and Festival Management at Tulane University's Freeman School of Business.
General leadership and wellness information, not a substitute for medical or mental health advice. The work of looking at yourself honestly can surface hard things. If you are struggling, please reach out to someone you trust or a qualified professional. In the US, music industry mental health support is available 24/7 through B-LINE at 1-855-BLINE99 or text 254-639 (operated by Backline and Vibrant Emotional Health). The 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available nationally by calling or texting 988.