Go on have a party....

Author: Graeme Nichol, MBA

Celebrate Successes

In our last article I spoke about failure and what you can learn from it. This edition will be the opposite side of the same coin – success. Just as it is important to analyze your failures and learn from them so it is also important that you celebrate your successes and repeat them.

Every year we strive to do be better and be more successful at what we do. Often, however, we only remember successes that are so large that they hit us right in the face, when they are so large that everyone else congratulates you. We remember landing a $100 million dollar account or tripling our profits from the year before or being awarded some Presidential award.

While these are amazing successes that you should definitely celebrate and tell the world about they are not the kind of successes that most of us can hope to achieve. The rest of us need to be happy with the smaller more mundane successes. Successes like generating a profit in our business, getting the client we have been trying to land or simply being thanked by one of our clients for a job well done.

Although these may seem like small successes, lots of small successes like these add up to a successful business, motivated staff and a happy you. Now what if you could repeat each of your small successes so that you could achieve them on a monthly or weekly basis – wouldn’t that spell big success for your business?

To achieve that big success you therefore need to celebrate each of your small successes. You need to remember each of them, examine them and find a way of repeating them. Sit down now and think, over the last year, what you did well. Think about what you succeeded in doing, what someone thanked you for, and, where you were appreciated.

Create a list of your successes – no matter how small – examine them to find a way that you could repeat them. What was the essence of the success that would make it repeatable? Break the success into small process steps, think about everything that you did to get to the end point of success. Not just the big steps, think about each little step that was taken.

It is often not the big steps that determine a success – it is the little things. Maybe you wrote a client a thank you letter, or you called a client to see how they were doing. Maybe you referred a client to someone else to solve a problem that you couldn’t. You could also have rewarded your staff or done something out of the ordinary for them to make them perform above and beyond.

Think about each success in great detail.

You should now be able to see where you did something differently to achieve the successful result. Your next step is to put together a plan on how you are going to repeat your past successes. Your plan should include each of those necessary steps that resulted in the success.

By understanding and planning for your successes you will be able to repeat them and eventually be able to achieve the large success – a successful business or department.

Plan for Success

About the author: GRAEME NICHOL, MBA, President, Arcturus Advisors. Graeme Nichol has worked on 4 continents and in 137 unique businesses, in 37 countiries, gaining experience in manufacturing, transportation, agriculture, communications, banking, direct marketing, consumer goods and retail amongst others. He has significant management experience and consulting experience, including Business strategy, project management, change management, big six consulting, team