What is a Good Leader?

When people talk about leadership they are often talking about the title or the personality of a leader. But real leadership is about a set of behaviours which we see and value in others, and can exhibit ourselves.  Real leaders lead not because of their title, but because of the authority they develop in others.  So, what is a good leader in business today? 

Lead Yourself to Lead Others

Leaders today are selected not from the oldest or those ‘in favour’, but from those whose behaviours reflect the values the business believes in. Successful leaders exhibit their leadership traits through their behaviours and actions which people chose to follow. These behaviours are seen as a set of value-based leadership skills. True leadership is therefore earned authority from your peers. 

What people stand for and how they behave therefore matters in assessing people’s leadership skills. 

Doing the right thing even when no-one is looking, is an excellent first place to start when looking at a leader living their values. How you lead yourself is the first and most valuable assessment any leader can make.  If you cannot lead yourself, how can you lead others?  

How you lead others therefore often starts by looking at how you lead yourself, with self-reflection. Do you as a leader look to find multiple viewpoints from across the organisation, or do you bunker-down with a few trusted voices?  Bringing in balance and inclusion is the most successful way to gain a complete understanding of potential outcomes of any critical decisions. It is also the most effective way to carry people with you as a leader, especially in today’s flat, diverse and skill centred organisations.  

Confidence and Humility 

Demonstrating your self-confidence in your abilities while simultaneously recognising and confronting your limitations through mentoring and coaching in developing those additional needed skills as well as counterbalancing them through a balanced team skillset is also vital for successful leadership. Leaders must be seen as human and recognise what being human means in their leadership.

This humility factor in acknowledging the whole team contribution in everything you do, is seen as a vital leadership skill in todays’ workplace.  Leaders who genuinely value their team create a positive team culture build stronger organisations, which both trust and enable people to dream, do and become more. In cultures such as these the leader becomes invisible as the culture becomes the defining driver of success. 

Successful Leaders Create Leaders

Successful leaders develop people who follow them, not obey them. In many of the most successful cultures leaders want people to challenge them as this makes decision making more robust and sustainable.  Inside positive leadership cultures there are often many leaders, leaders are trusted and respected, and often sit in various roles within the organisation.  

Leaders must also create collaboration and cohesion within their team to build in all the skills the leader will need to succeed within their role. Finding and pulling together the right group of people to create a winning team requires creating a common vision of where they are going that brings together the 3C’s of cohesion co-operation and ultimately collaboration.  

The process of collaboration maturity recognises the need of co-ordination of disparate people who must co-operate for mutual benefit and then will actively collaborate to achieve a shared outcome they could not achieve without each other. Collaboration maturity occurs as the team embeds this relationship into a single operation respecting and valuing each elements valuable contribution.

 

Leadership Model

 

Strategic Responsibility

Ultimately leaders are responsible for everything that happens within a company.  They are solely responsible for setting the direction, the strategy, and the prevailing culture within the organisation. That ultimate responsibility leaders must develop and own. They may take advice but they cannot look elsewhere for responsibility for the strategic decision making.   

 

Leadership Behaviours 

Leadership is a set of personal attributes which inspire others to behave. While leaders need to remember their humility, they do also need to adapt their leadership style to respond (or drive) situations. Leadership styles must also adapt to whom they are leading. Different people respond to different situations.  The idea that one style of leadership will work in all situations, is not true. 

Leaders also need to flex their leadership style based upon situations. While the humble leader is the ideal, it will not work with all people in all situations. So, leaders need to be able to create and deliver influence across all their spheres of influence. Leaders must adapt their leadership style both to influence diverse audiences but also to deal with the situations they face. 

Situational leadership is as much an art as a science. Predicting and reading situations is a learnt skill which leaders need to develop over time and through situations. Either through shadowing roles or through scenario planning being able to stay objective and understand what situational leadership skill you need to deploy to achieve the required outcome takes time to learn.   While each leader has their natural style they must also be able to adapt to motivate different types of people and different situations, moving from reflective / humble leadership styles to directional and pacesetting when needed.

Leading People 

Creating and leading teams of people takes time and effort. Team building was often seen as the occasional activity to bonding, recognising, and rewarding.  Today team development is on ongoing exercise, not the once-a-year review, but a continual mentoring approach supporting people develop and evolve into their role and through their role as it evolves over time. 

What used to be called Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing function of team building has been replaced by the view of continual team development. It is a supportive process that supports everyone as individuals, small cohorts as well as whole units to excel within their environment. Leaders today must now focus on barrier removal and building resilience within their people and teams to enable them to achieve their goals. 

The focus today for leaders is on outcomes not outputs. It’s easy to be busy, but to achieve planned and desired outcomes as bottom-line results teams require leaders they can trust, who are accountable, provide commitment and remove conflict. 

 

Successful Leadership 

Leadership is like any skillset, it can be learnt and developed. It is best developed within the culture of the organisation within which that leader will emerge as a leader within. But it does not have to, and often bringing skills learnt elsewhere is a great way to develop new leadership skills within an organisation. Becoming a leader should not be the end of someone’s development, but the start of their leadership development. 

If you would like to know more about how we help leaders lead, then get in contact with us here Richard@cowden   

 

Why Plans Don't Work: And What To Do To Make Them Succeed

Why Plans Don't Work 

Why Plans Don't Work, 

Here's Why And What To Do To Make Them Succeed. 

Leaders often say they have a plan, it can be written down or in their head. Sometimes they have great names, from action plans, to project plans, to business plans.  When I visit clients I am often presented with plans, ideas and concepts all in some state of existence. Some are online share documents with many contributors, several revisions and are carefully annotated graphs and charts, others are glossy brochure plans with pull out action and implementation plans.  

But Plans don't work!  A plan of any kind is just some works (images graphs etc) to make change happen. But plans do not make change happen. Plans only show the steps to make change happen. To move the company from where it is today too somewhere new. But that does not make change happen. That just moves people out of their comfort zone to somewhere where they are not comfortable.  

Habits Matter More Than Plans

Plans make change, but don't make change happen.  ITs what happens next that matters if plans are to work. Taking people somewhere new is interesting but getting them to stay there and thrive is the real goal of any vision. It is the afterwards that matters if change is too be sustainable. If you want people to perform in a new way it's making those new ways their habit that matters.

Habits matter because that is where change becomes the way. Habit is what matters in making change happen. The biggest driver of people's behaviours is creating new habits, but these do not feature in business plans. Habits are very powerful but business plans, action plans and implementation plans fail to have habit forming built into them.      

Habits are why people do things. Habits are why people are reluctant to implement real change. Habits are the most powerful driver in people's behaviour. Habits are often more powerful that people's desire to succeed in making change happen.  Employees are often open to change until it becomes something they have to do differently to their habits. 

Plans Fail. 

Habits are a lot more powerful than someone else telling you to change. This is why plans fail. Even if people see change as necessary they will agree that change needs to happen they often fail to embed it, preferring to go back to what they know, like and have always done, they kept their habit. 

"Plans change processes but fail to change peoples' habits."  

Changing habits needs to be built into a plan. The changing habit phase is rarely, if ever identified until after the plan has failed to succeed. Look at why plans fail and the most common and frequent reason given is the failure to change peoples' habits in implementing change. 

Creating and sustaining change requires plans to build in habit changing as part of culture change. Habit changing     takes time and needs to be planned out over the long-term not a short-term fix.  A plan saying we will change this process next week, is unlikely to succeed if it has been around for a period of time and is part of people's habits and is supported by the existing culture. 

The Power Of WHY

Simon Sinek has outlined the importance of why change is being made as a driver of supporting change. Leaders' must provide context, the WHY change is happening not just WHAT and HOW. The power of why is an essential underlying rationale which changes the relationship between leaders and employees, buying them into the strategy, rather than them being kept in the dark on a need to know basis of information.

Leaders need to understand that plans don't work, but people do when they are doing something they love, in a way they control for a cause they believe in.  

Plans are meaningless unless they carry everyone to somewhere they can create new positive habits. When you remove those habits you alienate your people. 

Changing Habits Takes More Than A Plan

Here are a few ways I have found to make plans really work, to get them beyond the page, implemented, and embedded with new habits in place.

Leadership Behaviours

]Leaders needs to act as ambassadors of change and provide new habits for people to adopt and ideally develop their own new habits within the new model which the plan determines.  Leaders need to proactive lead from the front in creating a new culture, being and developing role-models of the right behaviours and habits in each department so those role-models can be seen and modelled against.   

Recognition And Reward

Recognition is also a key element of habit forming, recognising and rewarding the right behaviours is central to bring the new way of working. Too often leader's spend too long penalising those not doing the right stuff rather than focusing on people doing the right behaviours.   

Burn Bridges

Burn the bridge of the old ways, change everything that needs changing with no going back or slippage options. This drives new behaviours which can be supported and allowed to develop.

Zero Tolerance

Zero and immediate corrective action to keep people on track with the new behaviours and performance which the plan requires. Do not let people have leeway in moving to the new way of doing things. Leaders must not just lead but also carry people forward and then allow them to flourish within that new environment. 

Champions Keep Everyone On Track

Creating habit champions is a highly effective strategy. But not just line managers, identify early adopters of the new from wherever they sit within the team, ignore their title or role, and make them champions to keep everyone on-track with the new, so that they can support across all the whole company the new way of doing things.

Buddy up people through change. Encourage those who have adapted early to support those who need to be nudged along the way. But don't waste energy on the change deniers (laggards), never waste good people on carrying deadwood. They won't thank you. 

Accountability Matters

Make everyone accountable to someone else for making a permanent change happen. Keeping a change alive is one of the biggest challenges a plan has, how to keep it living post the initial launch phases. Once the excitement of plans launch and big changes has happened, keeping the plan alive so that the cultural and new habit forming changes are shaped and embedded are often where the most required to deliver the plans Return On Investment ROI.  

Embed Change

Make the change permanent across the whole organisation. Plans don't work unless you make the change permanent across the organisation and re-enforce the changes you want to see and as importantly see the change that has happened. So often looking at where you have come from to where you are now and where you see teh company getting to carries your people forward. If you have made  change which can increase your processing by 25% then show them that change from where you were to where you are now and where you will get to over the full rollout of the plan as new habits are formed.  

Create An Environment Where New Habits Can Form 

To get people to stop smoking experts identified that getting people to stop for a month increases the likelihood of them giving up smoking for good six times more effectively than other traditional stop smoking campaigns.  It takes time to form a habit, and in stopping smoking giving yourself time and changing your existing habits from breaks to who you go for a work break with (don't hang out with smokers, or carry on the smoking driving habits) if you want to stop smoking. Form new habits that support you change your habits to the ones you want. 

The same is true to making change happen at work. For people to change they need to burn the old habits that are no longer wanted, but more importantly be allowed to create their new habits which fit with the new model. That requires leaders to allow people, actively encourage them to create new habits, so do not tell them what to do, give them the environment and the freedom to do it their way. Allow people to create their own new habits.   

Measure The Change

If you measure what matters, then measure how people adapt to the new normal, the change by their habit forming as they normalise to the new work environment the plan delivers. If you measure habit forming, people's ownership of the new way of doing things, how fast they take ownership and lead the change, then you will see the plan deliver the positive outcomes which your plan wanted to achieve. 

Plans don't work, but people making change does. Focus more on delivering a plan that moves people and allows people to own their plan then you will see the productivity and effectiveness that you wanted to see the plan deliver. It's not the plan that matters, it is how people react to that plan that will deliver the results leaders need to see.

Strategically are you leading ahead of the curve of behind the curve?

For a Managing Director or Chief Executive Officer, knowing where your business sits within its market is an important first step in leading it to where it needs to be. Where you are today is the result of action taken years before. For leaders' determining where they want their business to be is about deciding where a business is best positioned to succeed within its market over the leaderships tenure. 

Strategic Brand Positioning

That conversation of where to be (and where not to be) requires careful consultation with the shareholders, and key stakeholders as well as the people within the business.  What are their aspirations for the business today and over what horizon?  If a business is a mid-market player within a sector then is everyone happy to stay there and defend their market position and market share, or do they want to move to somewhere else?  Pressure mounts as other players within the market accelerate their growth by moving to other areas of the market. Staying where you are needs to be defended, then the leadership team must be able to defend these strategic decisions.  

That desire to shift should be based not just on a simple aspiration, or the selection of a new MD / CEO to move the brand, but on key factors which will include growth potential within segments of that sector, short-term opportunity analysis of moving compared to staying where you are as well as long-term goals including profitability and sustainability over the a long-term strategic and team culture goals.

Leaders' Biggest Decision

Moving position is not about dropping what you currently do, unless that is redundant within the market, but more about where will the business will be over time. Deciding where make prioritisation of future investments and place resources, including your energy is how businesses naturally migrate. Dramatic events such as Covid where businesses have to overnight pivot their model is the most often need to make complete shifts. Traditional change models are often driven by macro market drivers, (PESTLE) factors most of which are driven in response to consumer demand, reflecting changing preferences or within markets by changing dynamics of a market. 

The big decision for an MD / CEO is where to go from where you are today. That decision starts by answering why where you are today not where you want or need to be tomorrow. For a new leadership team moving the company's position is the reason they have been brought in as shareholders are not happy with the current position in terms of profits, ROI or sustainability. Deciding where to go requires some deep sole searching as well as emerging market opportunities from existing key customers but also in where and what impact emerging trends will make on the business. Dealing with the conflicting pulls and pushes of advice as to where to go, requires detailed analysis and evidence building, so as not to be pulled from pillar to post in strategic thought.

  

Leading ahead of the curve, or behind the curve.

Moving a business requires a thought process of where is that business sitting today within its market. Is the business ahead or behind the curve? Is the first and most important question to answer.  The gulf between the two is a huge chasm, are you a brand leader or a sector follower. 

What is the curve?

The curve is where a company/brand sits within a market. Any and every market are structured around the technology levels within them. From cars to computers, fashion to furniture, to energy to engineering every sector has its own defined structure. The curve is how customers see a market, and how customers engage with brands along that curve. In effect the curve shows where customers are by their buying behaviour, what they will spend based upon their value perception of each brand. It's why Rolex and Tag Heuer can charge more than Swatch and Timex. Those ahead of the curve invest more in research and their product across their marketing mix than those behind the curve.

This understanding of a market is a strategic issue for leader's to assess, understand and determine where and how they position their company to develop their long-term success. Where to position a company for long-term success is fundamental to the business's success.  Where you sit within a market provides you with a place to defend and an according accessible market presence, it is easy to use an existing cash cow to sell more downstream, it is harder to reposition yourself upstream with a new product as the brand perception is outside comfort or competency  The danger of growing using just cash cows is that it naturally slips the brand down the curve, a dangerous precedent which is hard to stop or reverse. 

Strategic Curve Positioning

This structure, the normal distribution curve is a line along which every player in the market is mapped by perception as to where they sit. At the far left are the innovators, small technical product/service creators at the cutting edge of the market who develop bespoke new products. While there are always very few of these players (in a mature market) they are vital as the develop the new and innovative products and services the sector is known for. To do this they require the right mix of talent, creative space to succeed and deep pockets to support their innovation development. That makes them small players but with disproportionally  big brand presences and are often funding (owned or in Joint Ventures with main stream players).  

As the curve increases businesses are seen as early adopters, where higher growth companies sit who have developed sufficient market size to stand alone, and who quickly adopt ideas form innovators and take it to the mainstream market. for many people these flagship companies are what determines a market as they reflect the innovation but in a larger scale than then the pure innovators. Typically good at marketing and sales as well as product development these companies can premium price their products and services to the discerning customer who buys the pure value proposition that early adaptors offer.

Early majority companies, play in the mainstream, safe, established with a wider value proposition than the product they bring innovation in once proved. By being a mainstream player the brand USP and value proposition has to be clearer across the entire marketing mix and unlike the earlier sections a wider skillset of people are needed who can identify trends and develop them into the mass market position early on in which those companies operate. 

Late majority companies gather trends and repackage them with lower priced versions of that trend, but bring it to new audiences with enhanced convenience, more support and rely upon mass acceptance using a wide range of marketing mix techniques suitable to their sector.

At the tail end of any sector are the laggards, players in the market who hoover up trends that are now past, but have some lower price or new laggard customer segments who they can resell these products too. Laggard markets can be extremely successful where they extend lifespans of trends to keep them alive by repackaging them to wider, often high value alternative markets. 

Why being ahead of behind the curve matters

Where a new or existing customer, sits on its sector curve is a core strategic issue. A company must play it its competitive advantage, and shifting that takes time and resources to achieve.  The gulf between the front of the curve, the innovators compared to the laggards is huge. Players within the same sector but at significantly different market positions are almost speaking foreign languages to each other and certainly very different cultures.   

Innovator and early adopters will more heavily invested in new products and services while those behind the curve invest significantly less, sometimes very little in products and services.  This reflect sin visual differences in the relative prices they can charge for their comparable products and the timeline with which they bring bring their respective products to market.   

That investment in new products require high investment which is offset by higher profit margins to premium customers, while those further down the curve have to offset lower gross margins with lower costs in product development coupled with larger market segments increasing sales volume and therefore lower costs to come to market. Choosing where to sit 

Strategic Sustainability

Choosing where to position your company is therefore a vital strategic decision to take. The key criteria of a long-term strategic view is essential, where does the company want to compete over the next 5 years, not just to capitalise on next years' opportunity. It takes time, even in agile companies to orientate, become established and achieve positive ROI's and develop a sustainable position within a market.   

This means that strategic positioning defines a leadership's success or failure. Picking the right strategic position is the biggest single decision which a leadership team has to undertake, it will determine what your business future looks like, determining your business model through to defining your long-term success.

Getting your strategy right.

Strategic planning is the most reliable way to develop a sustainable and successful market position. Evaluating all options, stakeholder and shareholder needs aligned to the current and future market opportunities and risks. It also focuses leaders on setting their goals and aspirations in context with those key factors aligning the whole business with a focus and shared direction to take. 

For leaders to lead they must be going someone and that requires them to make the big decisions, but make them strategically not tactically.

How to STOP pointless meetings 

If I were about to walk into a lamp post, what advice would you give me? I imagine…

"Stop"

And you'd be right.  Why would anyone keep going on a path which was only going to get more painful?

Which brings me onto meetings…

Some of those meeting you attend will be pointless, useless and mind-numbing wastes of time. To keep going on this path will only make things more painful. Meetings are often seen as an essential element of working in a company or organisation, but why are they so prevalent in todays' working environment. 

"Stop"

And, by this, I mean meetings that…

• Add nothing to the business – then stop having them
• Add nothing to you – then stop attending them
• Include people who can't contribute – then stop inviting them
• Substitute discussion for decision-making – stop them being an excuse for inaction
• Are too long – stop putting an hour if you don’t need it, if it can be done in 5 minutes
• Always start late – stop starting them late! It's disrespectful of everyone's time
• Nobody has done the prep for – stop the meeting, and say you’ll re-convene when people have done the necessary pre-work. Anything else will waste everyone's time

Sounds easy, but it is not. People often see this type of advice as challenging how companies operate, breaking the  Comfort Zone is often seen as tacking a great taboo. Meetings are seen as a management function, a control mechanism, and above all as a core element of business communication. Meetings are often a default mechanism, rather than a productive communication tool. Habits are difficult to break, the key challenge in breaking them is how to replace them with mass physical (of Zoom) communication with something that looks familiar and is seen to engage (even if it does not) with all levels of the organisation.   

Classically a senior manager calls the meeting, runs the meeting, talks the entire meeting and looks for nodding heads, produces the meeting minutes and tells other senior management that it was successful. Engagement is self-certificated self-rewarding and there is often no understanding of its real impact upon the other attendees.

Action point

List the bullet points above.

And how many of them happened and impacted upon you?  Definitely more than none!

Identify better ways of communicating with your colleagues and make a plan to try these to replace pointless meetings. 

Successful Leaders Measure Outcomes 

Many leaders struggle with leading people effectively. While I come across many different issues one which is prominent is that leaders do not set the right environment for people to work within. Too often leader's focus on outputs, not on outcomes. The challenge that leaders struggle with is in creating a results focus cultural attitude that measure outcomes instead of outputs.  

So what is the difference between an outcome and an output? Why does that matter and why is it difficult to differentiate between the two? And finally why is it crucial for leaders to focus on key results measures of outcomes and not just outputs?  

I recently had a client who called me in because his sales team were not following the sales process they needed to undertake. Each one of them has developed their own way of doing through the procedure, reinventing it or tweaking it (their words) to make it work for them. They were all busy doing things and their management and leadership teams could see the stress on the workload, the impact on the processes and on the customers, and on the results. Working with  them I could see that they were focused on being busy creating new steps and explaining why things could not be done when the customer wanted. The team had become busy being busy, but not focused on the customer, and the management response was to look at how busy they were through CRM micromanagement, which demotivate the team and the support functions rather than focus on what they were achieving.    

This is the challenge for leaders. They deploy a plan and step back and mange outputs through CRM KPI's, not on outcomes for the business, the employees or the customer. Here's this issue visualised in a chart by Burns and Bass, outputs v outcomes.  

Outputs vs Outcomes

An output is something that people do, while an outcome is something that happens as a consequence of that doing activity.  “I have made 50 calls to prospective customers” is an output, “I’ve closed a new customer” is an outcome. Which one is more important? 

Measuring the activity, the output, tells you how busy someone is, while measuring the outcome, the result tells you have effective they have been at the task in hand. Outputs, being busy always start out as the simplest measure to activity, but they are a false measure of success. Outputs are activity measures, while important in their own right, they are not what leaders should be measuring, these are measures which management should measure activity through. 

A strategic thinking leader might ask to their line manager, “Why have you made 50 calls and not generated  new customer from those calls? What are you saying to people?”

Being busy is simple; being effective is what matters for a successful leader. Strategic leaders focus measuring outcomes towards the end goal. Effective leaders start with the end in mind, measure what matters, is what differentiates successful leaders in leading their organisation from others.    

Most people naturally focus on outputs, being busy. It’s relatively easy to come up with a list for what you need to do today, this week and this month. However, as Stephen Covey explains in his book The 7 habits of highly effective people, outputs always come last. In order to be successful, you need to start with the end in mind, by focusing on the outcomes you want, and then work backwards to outputs that lead to the outcome(s) you are focusing on.

For example if you want a new customer, that is a outcome. How you achieve that is to identify what are the steps to getting a new customer. 

1.     Defining a target audience.

2.     Prospecting that audience with a call to identify likely suspects

3.     Gain a meeting with suspects, present a solution / offer.

4.     Close the sale and confirm the customer is on-board.  

5. Pass onto the customer retention team and start again.

The objective, one new customer is a clear outcome. The outputs to get there, steps 1 to 4 above are all activity-based outputs, which the team focuses on delivering towards that outcome. The outputs are measurable activities, which are supported by operational initiatives, such as who is going to do what to deliver them. 

Leadership Strategic Approach

1. Where do I want to go? Is an OBJECTIVE: the outcome.
2. What are the results that lead us to achieve in order to get there? KEY RESULTS outputs towards the outcome, steps 1 to 4 above.
3. What do other people need to do to achieve those results? Theseare the operational INITIATIVES, task activities.

If leaders start with activities (i.e. the Initiatives) they take themselves out of control of where they are going. Leaders must focus on the objective, the outcome to be accomplished. Anyone can be operationally busy, but it leaves the operation unfocused on the end objective. Initiatives such as writing the script, recording the stages in the CRM system and who to call back are all operational activities, which are important to achieving the objective, but are overseen by the management not the leadership.  

Successful leaders define the outcome and resource the outputs to their management team and then focus on leading the team to achieving the outcome.

Activity-based or results-driven?

Leaders must obsessively focus on the objective, from its inception through to its completion. By focusing on the outcome leaders, lead their people relentlessly towards the objective. Define the outcome you want to achieve before you define the outputs that will get you there. 

For many leaders, focusing on outcome achievement instead of outputs requires a significant shift in culture and thinking. Defining outputs is easy, focusing on doing things. Doing something makes people feel good, but doing the wrong thing can still feel good until someone steps back and sees that they have not moved towards the objective, they have just been busy. 

Doing things to achieve a specific outcome is a lot more complicated, and now success is not measured anymore by, being busy or by the percentage completion of your output, but by progress towards the end goal.

This shift can be a challenge for many leaders, but the results demonstrate the consequences of your actions and learn what you can do to achieve certain results. The faster you learn, the better you get, as an individual, a team, and a company.

Leaders must measure performance towards objectives within your business? Are you activity-focused or results-driven? Are you happy when 50 prospects or 100 prospects have been called this week or is what really matters to you how many customers you closed? The latter measure of outcome achievement is more informative to the business KPI than the former. As long as Key Results are on track, leaders should not get involved at the Initiative-level. If the business is off-track, then it is sensible to review the initiatives with the relevant management and operational staff to ensure they have a clear output plan that supports the objective outcome. This is where leaders can help the team to figure out what or why it’s not working, and brainstorming what other initiatives we could try to get things back on track. 

KPI’s: measure outcomes

KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators, just in case you don’t know) are the reporting  indicators which drive decision making. For KPI’s to drive business results then they must indicate outcome performance, not work rate outputs. 

One big advantage for leaders of measuring outcomes rather than outputs is that it enables them to step back and allow management to manage more effectively. Giving space for managers to manage, removes the accidental tendency to micromanage operations. The risk for leaders in any organisation is that they struggle to define where they should get involved and where they should not.  By stepping back leaders can retain their overview rather than being drawn into operational activity.

Summary

To improve your organization, then leaders need to focus the whole team on outcomes instead of outputs. Focusing on outcomes puts the end in mind first, tracks the progress of what really matters, and enables the leadership to learn about company capabilities.

5

Focusing on outcomes will not only boost performance, but it is also a natural protection against micro-management. Don’t tell sales reps how many outbound calls they need to make today (output), instead make them responsible for closing a certain amount of customers each month (outcome).

Like to learn more about leadership? Then buy the book Strategy: the Leader's Role by Richard Gourlay 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Strategy-Leaders-Successful-leaders-business/dp/1508761965