The review stage is one of the important principles of management - remember those 4 steps: Plan, Organize, Implement and Review. But how often don't we as leaders focus on the Implement step to the detriment of the others. In fact in my experience few people give the Review step due time in both their organizations and sometimes their own lives.
So what does the review entail? To me it is a time of reflection on the past period, on the road you have travelled so to speak, during which you focus on a few key areas. such as:
How successful was I in meeting my goal or intentions ? Of course this assumes you had set yourself clear goals and had a very clear overarching metric against which to measure true success.
How closely did my actions match my plans I had set out at the start of the period?
What did I/we do that added the most value and facilitated the success?
What did i/we do that did not work out and hindered or distracted us from success?
Is there something I would do differently if I had to set out on the same 'journey' now that I have experience of it?
What lessons can I take from this and where can I apply them in other tasks, goals or projects?
This does not need to take a long time or be overly analytical. Just going through the steps and giving each question some serious consideration should allow you to distill lessons, strengths, weaknesses and improvements to your leadership abilities and of course goal achievement. Try it today on something you have recently completed - or even on the past year. And remember it works for both work, social and family interfaces.
Till next week
Key take-outs:
- Always make a point of reviewing a task or activity either along the way or at the end
- Review against your over-arching metric of true success
- You should search for the lessons and ways to do things better next time - thats where growth comes from.