Are You Learning From Your Successes Successfully?

Have you been in a situation where a major success has been achieved, but when asked what was the driving force, every person, leader and/or department involved has taken some kind of credit?  It was the customer research, the new processes, the systems enhancements, the marketing, the leadership skills.  Although we learn a lot from our mistakes, do we spend the time in ensuring that we fully learn from the successes too?

As our confidence is high when we achieve a success, there could be the tendency to over-estimate our impact as individuals and as management teams, taking credit for our skills, and ignoring other factors such as external forces or critical information which could help us in the future.

When a project or initiative is completed, there are considerable benefits from learning from both our mistakes and our successes.  And as with the detail we put into learning from our mistakes, we need to put the same robustness into finding out what achievements can be taken forward and planned into our next goal.

You could set up a success criteria at the beginning of the project/initiative, and could also include some of the following post-project reviews:

• Overall design of the project
• Stakeholder support and meeting successes
• Simplicity of strategy and structure
• Raising and understanding risks
• Progress updates
• Training and development
• Internal communication skills
• Review with the employees doing the job and any improvements they have found
• Analysis of reports and KPIs
• Customer feedback
• Industry changes and reviews

Celebrate your successes, it’s important.  And then, by taking a detailed and realistic approach to identifying how and why they happened, you and your organisation can gain an upper edge which will help achieve even more in the future.

How have you identified your successes?

If you’d like to find out how executive coaching and developing your leadership skills can help you learn and encourage learning in your team, then please click HERE.