Hey Founder, Are You Pointing Fingers or Learning?
If you were to ask me what is the number one skill that impact leaders and founders need to learn, I would tell you, “the ability to learn.” I’d even go so far as to say that as a founder, you need to fail as quickly and early on as possible so you can learn from that failure as quickly and early as possible. Learning from failure requires learning how to learn, and to foster faster learning, I recommend a tool I created a “pink sheet.” (No, not a pink slip!)
A pink sheet gives you everything you need to conduct a post-mortem on a project or process or event or even a conversation that went wrong. It’s about evaluating something in the past to learn from it. Click here to download a pink sheet to use in your own company. A useful post-mortem includes fully evaluating the situation from beginning to end, identifying and capturing key learnings and lessons, and, most importantly, identifying the tangible steps you and your team will take to ensure that these learnings are redirected or reflected in new projects and tasks going forward.
Remember, it’s not enough just to learn; you also want to improve your processes and make your business stronger for the long run. Every post-mortem needs a moderator who doesn’t necessarily have to be the founder or CEO. For bigger projects you’ll need more time and for smaller projects less time, but I generally like to book an hour for a post-mortem. Every post-mortem should have the following flow:
Set a positive tone and explain the purpose of the meeting — explain that the goal is to learn, not to place blame (5 mins)
Recap the project (2–3 mins)
Recap the outcome of the project (3 mins)
Fill out the Pink Sheet (40 mins)
Wrap-up (10 mins)
By asking what methods or processes went well and what didn’t go so well, you are likely to find that many projects were not total failures after all but fell below expectations for some or all of those involved. Once you get the ball rolling and the conversation starts to flow, this is a great time to enlist the team in using what they’ve learned to generate ideas to use in the future.
Here’s out it might play out. Two co-founders of a very small company I know were arguing about the appropriate level of technical detail for a piece of marketing content they were producing. They picked the lower level of technicality, and it was not successful. The founder whose argument for simplicity had “lost” was feeling . . . sore about it. I introduced them to the pink sheet concept, and they adopted it. By going through it, they were able to depersonalize the dynamics that produced the wrong decision, overcoming any soreness they felt over their differences and getting a plan in place for future content development.
In other words, they stopped pointing fingers and started learning.
Learning to learn is the most important skill an entrepreneur needs to succeed. And I think the pink sheet is a wonderful tool for allowing that to happen. Check out the above video for more and, as usual, please feel free to reach out to the ScalePassion team who are standing by and ready to help you scale your impact through your business.
Sincerely,
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All credit to my ghostwriting partner, Dave Moore, who is instrumental in getting my thoughts out in a coherent manner & into these blogs. Thanks Dave!