The UK’s unexpected election result immediately led to resignations, investigations and recriminations for the losing parties. This is particularly true for the Labour Party, which had hoped to install its former leader, Ed Milliband, as Prime Minister. There are already countless newspaper, TV and blog articles assessing and theorizing why Labour lost, and this exercise will continue for months, if not years.
Far less attention has been paid to why and how the Conservative Party won, and what the lessons are from its success – or, for that matter, the Scottish National Party’s revolutionary performance north of the border.
It’s the same in business. Failures are pored over to understand what went wrong, who’s to blame, how the weaknesses should have been spotted and corrected and what new approaches are required to improve the chances of success the next time around.
But successes deserve an equal amount of analysis and assessment. Some critical questions I would want the winning parties – and winning businesses – to ask themselves include:
- What were the specific drivers of our success?
- How can we replicate and extend these drivers of success in the future?
- How can we leverage this success into other areas of our organization?
- Were there any negative factors that reduced the size of our success, and how can we address them going forward?
- What elements were missing from this success and how could we improve future performance by adding them into the mix?
- How could we have achieved this success more quickly, and what do we need to do to accelerate the pace of future results?
How could you use these questions to more effectively review the secrets of your success so that you can further accelerate growth and identify ways to raise the bar still higher?
© Stuart Cross 2015. All rights reserved.