Happy Sunday Everyone:
Sitting at airport trying to crank this out before departure.
Not sure about all of you but Q1 was tough on this end. I need to remind myself what q1’s have looked like in the past to determine if I need to calm myself down, make changes, tweak things, be satisfied, or a combination of all. There is a balance right now of needing to understand that our business is changing at the macro level and at the same time understanding what is still very much in our control. We need to adapt and we also need to constantly take inventory of what is working, and why, and what is not working, and why.
For me, and I like to think this is true for most people, we learn from our mistakes more than we learn from our wins. It’s not to be negative I just think acknowledging what didn’t or isn’t going right is a more pronounced, and in your face, than what is going right. If we can then make the necessary changes, put a process around them to ensure it happens a new way consistently, we have much better odds of setting ourselves up for success in the future.
With his permission, I’m sharing a note I read earlier this week from a fellow coach, and good friend, Kevin Polackovich. I cut some of it out but net net, as he just completed his q2 meeting, which we all should be doing, he had his team do an exercise below around “Premortem”. Basically looking into the future, and trying to be in front of what could go wrong. I love the idea and will be doing the same exercise with my team.
“I asked my team to participate in an exercise I had recently read about. The exercise is called a “premortem” versus a postmortem. In a postmortem, doctors convene to examine the causes of a patient’s unexpected death. Outside of the medical field, like in the military world, there is an after-action report or debriefing. In our own businesses, we do exit interviews or wrap up meetings. I gave the entire team two days’ notice to prepare for this “premortem” scenario: Let’s look in the future, December 31, 2019 to be exact. We did not hit our goals, we are not going on our reward trip that we planned and worse, we may have to let some people from the team go. What went wrong? Where did we screw up? Why did we not hit our numbers?
The exercise was very emotional. Several threats and missed opportunities were addressed, such as issues with our CRM, our database, our TBDs, our business partners, not doing enough and not appreciating the clients we have; to name a few. After everyone shared, I brought us back to the reality that it is only March and we have almost an entire year ahead of us! Let’s fix these issues before they become issues, each item that was discussed was written down and we are preemptively attacking each one”
Our businesses are multi-dimensional and should be looked at as such. We can learn so much from looking back into the past, the present, and the future. To me this is a great exercise for looking into the future in a different light and making the changes needed ahead of time before issues become real.
Have a great week ahead. I apologize for formatting, got to run……..