The Billion Dollar Discipline Anyone Can Use

Post-mortems prevent us from continuing to repeat mistakes, plan poorly, and settling for good when great is well within reach.  

Whatever you do professionally or for fun will always be defined by your last performance. Why should you settle for good enough when great is readily available? Here's the billion dollar secret that the best performers in every profession, sport, activity, project, and task use to get better, reach the top, and set new heights.

Following the completion of anything worth doing, the billion-dollar best practice is to perform a post-mortem.

What's a post-mortem? It is a Latin medical term meaning "after death" that involves examining a body to more fully understand what caused the body's death. The TV series CSI (Jerry Bruckheimer and CBS Television) gave us an inside look at how forensic science enabled the CSI team to determine exactly what happened at the crime scene.

Post Mortems Help You Improve Subsequent Performances

Virtually everything worth doing that will be subsequently done again will benefit from a post mortem to uncover:

1. What went well and why (things we want to repeat next time),
2. What didn't go as well as desired and why (things we don't want to repeat), and
3. What we should do differently the next time (our key learnings).

Projects. Sales. Meetings. Presentations. Interviews. Marketing. Product design. Production. Service delivery. Websites. From the simple to the complex.

While the most important perspective will be the assessment by those who are impacted by what was done (such as customers, interviewers, and people down the supply chain) , it is highly instructive to objectively and candidly evaluate how you did during each stage of what was done. It is possible that your prospects, interviewers, project team members, and customers may provide you with feedback on what you did and did not do well, but that is not the norm. The best feedback you get from them may be their body language during a meeting, and the messaging it sent.  

Mastering anything, from a job interview to managing people to selling solutions, will be a series of progressive realizations and learnings coupled with continuous improvement, and the post-mortem process is the most organized way to drive this.   

Break Down the Process

As part of your pre-performance or activity planning, consider the factors and actions that will make what you do successful. Since planning is the thinking that precedes the work, what specific steps or actions do you want to take to optimize your results? 

For example, in a job interview or sales presentation, such factors could include the quality of your preparation and research; a timely arrival; being appropriately attired; a strong introduction that builds rapport and trust; your use of active listening skills; modeling effective body language; clear and concise answers; an effective use of proof documents; a good summary; and an agreement of next steps.

• Additional sales factors might include the quality of your needs assessment and its ability to expose the prospects circumstances, motivation, and points of pain; presenting solutions tailored to uncovered needs; your observation of their buying signals; how effectively you identified and handled points of resistance; and how well you tied your solution’s features to benefits that mattered to your customer.
• Additional job interview factors could include how effectively you utilized examples to support your answers; how well you handled the deeper, probing questions; your tone and demeanor during the least enjoyable parts of the interview, and your use of pre-interview research that demonstrated a deep level of understanding of both the employer and your interviewers.   

Ask Yourself the Right Questions

Write down all of the appropriate factors you’d like to assess in your post-mortem, in order of where they fit in the meeting flow. A good list will assess twelve to fifteen areas. Then answer these three questions about EACH area as candidly as possible:

• In this area, what things went as well or better than I wanted? These are the things you’ll want to replicate in future meetings.
• In this area, what didn’t go as well as I would have liked…and why not? This will expose the greatest opportunities for you to improve next time.
• What specific changes do I need to make for next time? This is the heart of your post-mortem, and where you’ll need to be very specific. Don’t just say that you need to improve your body language…WHAT SPECIFICALLY needs to change to improve?

Why Post Mortems Are a Billion Dollar Discipline

Here’s a little secret. Not many people will be diligent to spend the time and effort required to perform a detailed post-mortem.  A quick two-minute reflection won’t move the needle much on making the changes necessary to vault you into the top performers. Your investment of time may seem high now, but in two or three cycles you will see dramatic improvements in what you accomplish.

Bottom Line

Your diligence in performing detailed and thoughtful post-mortems will accelerate your mastery of the process and set you above the vast majority of people with whom you will compete for a job, sales, market share, presentation, and any worthwhile performance.

I love working with people and organizations who want to improve their effectiveness! Here are several outstanding resources that can help you and your organization to go to the next level:

Improving your (or your team’s) management and leadership skills: Leading Through People™

Raising your (or your team’s) selling effectiveness: B2B Sales Essentials™

Conducting a more effective job search: Get a Better Job Faster™

About Me: I help leaders and aspiring leaders improve their performance and acumen, and sales and marketing professionals to become more productive and effective. I also work with some of the world’s top employers by helping them get the most out of their talented people. My company's extensive leadership development course catalog provides effective skills-building for everyone in the organization, from the new / developing leader to the seasoned C-level executive. We develop sales teams with our highly regarded B2B Sales Essentials™ and B2C Sales Essentials™ tailored sales curriculum. My company's coaching programs produce significant results in compressed periods of time. To find out more, please visit us at  www.boyermanagement.com, email us at info@boyermanagement.com, or call us at 215-942-0982.