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The Good, The Bad and The Idea

Assessing the Past Year

As each New Year begins, most businesses set out with higher aspirations, and the plans for greater achievements. No matter what your company goals are for 2007 whether it is greater earnings, higher sales, better profits or improved customer satisfaction, you can get a jumpstart to a great New Year, simply by looking back.

Now is a great time to conduct what you may know as a “review session” or “post mortem meeting” (a little too negative for me) or something I like to call “The Good, The Bad and The Ideas Meeting”. This title may not have been approved by Clint Eastwood but it will certainly act as an outline for the meeting.

Here is a 4 step process to help you conduct this meeting:

  1. Determine the business topics that you would like to review. A good starting point is to simply review the main job functions your staff is responsible for. You can apply the standard who, what, when, where and why’s to get specific.
  2. When conducting this meeting it is important to prepare your staff or department with some advanced notice. Give your employees some time (preferably a week) to think about the prior year on each of these topics and bring this information to the meeting. This meeting should involve all members of your team, so encourage participation and if needed make active participation mandatory.
  3. Now apply the good the bad and the ideas approach to each business topic you would like to review.

The Good

When reviewing the past year begin, with the good things, look at what went right, how last years changes impacted performance and why they worked. Recognize individual’s efforts and accomplishments and ask them to pinpoint strategies to their success. This helps to boost morale and these proven strategies maybe valuable to current projects.

The Bad

Now using the same business topic ask where things are not working and where things need improvement. Remember to focus on what the intention of the process or project is when it is fully successful. For example if the process should be completed in 2 days and is generally taking longer, ask where the breakdowns are occurring and who is responsible and what may be needed make improvements.

(Tip: when reviewing the good and the bad apply the who, what, where, when and why again in order get specific)

The Ideas

Lastly, after reviewing all of your business topics ask the team to share ideas on any area in your business. You may receive some of these during your review of the topics you scripted but many times your team will bring up subjects that may not be on your radar. Here is where some of the best changes in your business can be found.

  1. Document all of the information from the meeting and begin crafting your business plan or new “to do” list. Involve your team in implementing the changes where possible, allow them to be apart of their ideas.

This meeting can prove to be invaluable for your and your organization as you approach each year. Many times some of the best ideas, improvements and changes are there within your grasp, you just have to reach out and grab them. You and your employees will be thankful that you did.

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