Coming to Know What You Don’t Know

As business leaders and owners, we hope that we have our finger on the pulse of the important things in our business. In fact, we probably are clued into many if not most of those things that represent the essential opportunity and risk inherent in our business. That said, we are actually more likely to be disconnected or even clueless about major areas of risk. This isn’t because we are bad business-people, it’s because the limits of our brains dictate that we categorize and sort and that leaves us open to ignore potential issues.

Years ago, I was part owner of a thriving and growing business … until it wasn’t. It seemed like in one day our fortunes had changed from GREAT to Uh-oh. Before the shift, I couldn’t envision anything going wrong. Once it was going wrong, I was too stressed and befuddled to figure out what was happening. I was in the type of survival mode that almost never leads to survival and my case was not an exception.

It was shortly after I had unspun from the business that I sat down to think about what had happened. After weeks of post-mortem analysis and thought I realized that my partner and I were overconfident in certain areas of the business and that led us to discount other areas where we lacked strength. Ultimately, it was these areas of weakness that doomed the business.

It was this experience that led to the creation of the SuccessTarget.com survey (click here). The hope of SuccessTarget is not to be the planet’s most analytically rigorous assessment. In fact, it has been my experience that while academic surveys are usually rock solid from a mathematical point-of-view … they aren’t necessarily helpful and often not widely applicable to many different types of organizations.

The purpose of the SuccessTarget survey is to illuminate areas of potential opportunity and risk in your organization and to do it in a way that allows you to benchmark. The survey results are divided into six main areas (Personal, InterPersonal, Teaming, Organization, Marketplace, Societal) and each of those are further subdivided into 4-6 topic areas in the deeper reports available. This categorization and subdivision has been created to allow leaders, managers, and staff to quickly identify areas needing attention.

The survey itself is under 50 questions and usually takes less than 7 minutes to complete. Again, we’re going for usefulness over pinpoint accuracy. We also deliver results in percentile format because we believe it’s more helpful to understand where you stand when benchmarked against other teams, organizations, and people.

Our plea here at SuccessTarget is simple … spend a few minutes to answer the questions. Doing so will help you come to know what you might not yet know.

Last updated: December 13, 2017