Study Success

October 22, 2024

My son in Kindergarten brought home his first report card last week.

I worked hard to overcome my natural bias to go straight to the negative. Instead, I told him how great it was that he was excelling in so many areas.

This isn’t an “everyone gets a trophy” approach. It’s a carefully crafted strategy to find positive areas so that we can get more of those results.

The same is true when we are leading teams. Most of us spend a lot of time working to understand and learn from failure. 

We talk a great deal about learning from our mistakes and come to some familiar conclusions:
We often learn the most from our failures.
Failures are not final or fatal.
When you fail, that’s how you learn.
If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.

These are all true. We can certainly learn great lessons from failure.

But sometimes we put so much emphasis on failure that we forget to study success.

Have you ever done something well, but when asked how you were successful, you didn’t know?

If you don’t know why something is going well when it’s going well, you won’t know how to fix it if it breaks.

At ADDO our failures have been great catalysts to help us learn and grow. We look for things that are broken and try to improve areas of weakness. Recently, however, we’ve started working to also pinpoint and learn from the things we’re doing well.

We are serious about surveying and analyzing our customer satisfaction. In one program with more than 30,000 participants, we experienced a drop in satisfaction. Our team identified problems, created a plan, and made consistent and conscious decisions to get better. As a result, our customer satisfaction rebounded.

Instead of moving on to another area, our team spent time and energy studying what specifically led to this increase in satisfaction. We understand that if we can clearly identify which decisions, actions, and behaviors are driving positive results, then we have a greater chance to replicate them in the future or course-correct if things go wrong.

Identify areas where you can study and replicate success.

Talent: How did you attract the individuals who are now your most valuable team members and employees?

Sales: What did you do differently that helped you make the sale with the stubborn client?

Hospitality: How did you encourage your team to keep intentionally serving customers?

Management: How do you facilitate your most productive meetings?

When you are successful, evaluate your actions. Think about what you’re doing differently when you succeed instead of fixating on why or how you’ve failed. Determine the actions and decisions that lead to positive outcomes, and replicate them in all areas of your life. 

You’ll find that you can solve problems more widely and efficiently, while pursuing a lifestyle that is proactive toward success rather than reactive to failure.

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