Focusing on outcomes vs. outputs
My son got a bad grade on a report. He was upset. "I worked so hard on this," he said. I felt for him.
After a string of strong reviews and success at work, I had a hard quarter and got a low score. I'd done a lot of big rock projects that I knew would set us up for success, but the results hadn't come in yet. Like my son, I bristled.
I'd busted my butt that quarter. But I didn't hit my goals.
My son worked hard on his report, but it didn't deliver.
We all have been there. It's easy to not feel valued for the work we put in. But the hard truth in business and life is that what often matters most are outcomes not output.
This is not to say output that doesn’t lead to great outcomes isn’t important. Failure is inevitable. You won’t always hit your goals. I wrote an essay years ago on why failure is important (“I don’t want to be a loser”) and I stand by it. Even failure can be a good outcome, if it helps you learn and grow to do better towards your objectives.
I've found there are three ways to ensure that you can provide great outcomes on a consistent basis.
Align to the right goals
A lot of pain comes with not setting goals properly—and not making sure there is alignment across leadership to your goals.
Most likely you've heard of SMART goals:
Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Relevant
Time bound
If you're handed a goal that falls short in any one area in the SMART framework, it is your responsibility to push back and broker adjustments. If you're setting your own goals, make sure they hit on each area.
I use an Objectives and Key Results (OKR) methodology both for myself and for my teams. It is built around a top 3 each quarter. Each top 3 is aligned to a departmental top 3 and the company big 3, and breaks down into three components: objective, initiatives, key results.
Objectives are high level goals. So it might be something like improve brand awareness. An objective is usually a close-handed item in a quarter. Once we set it, we stick to it.
Initiatives are the body of work we think we'll need to accomplish our OKRs. This might be launching X feature or a brand awareness campaign. These are open handed items. It's important to have flexibility in initiatives. More on that later.
Key results are the way we measure success. In the case of brand awareness, this might be an increase in direct traffic. These are partially closed handed. COVID or the loss of a key resource are good examples of a time when you might need to re-negotiate a key result in a quarter.
My personal OKRs look like this:
I like the OKR model because it aligns us to the right outcomes without getting us married to the outputs required to accomplish them. I don't care how you increase brand awareness nearly as much as you actually increasing brand awareness!
With all these models, however, it's imperative that you align across the organization and with leadership to make sure everyone feels this is a fair ask and that you will be appropriately resourced.
Focus on what's essential
One of the biggest obstacles to great outcomes is focusing on the wrong things.
Competing priorities are a fact of life. I'm convinced that the most successful people are those who can determine on a regular basis what is most essential and to say no to everything else without remorse.
There are lots of ways to do this.
David Cancel talks about big rocks. He determines each day the one big priority he needs to do in order to create the biggest impact. If he gets that one thing done (it can be personal or business related), then the day is a success. Check out his podcast episode on this, “Prioritize the Biggest Rocks (and Don’t Feel Guilty if You Never Get to the Small Ones)”. It's very good.
Greg McKeown wrote a whole book on this called Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. It’s a book that changed my approach to life and business.
On a personal level, I love what The Minimalists are dishing out.
And recently, I've started using Monk Manual to get clear on my monthly, weekly, and daily priorities. My productivity has skyrocketed, and my outcomes have improved.
People who value output over outcomes often overcommit. They have a hard time saying no because they think their reputation will suffer because they view their value by what they do vs. what they produce. But at the end of a quarter, if you hit your goals, no one cares that you said no to something. Conversely, if you don't hit your goals, the way you spend your time gets heavily scrutinized.
Pivot fast
If you don't have the right inputs, you'll naturally have the wrong outputs to achieve the outcomes you want.
The reason why I tell my team to treat initiatives as open handed is because they need the freedom to abandon something if they don't think it will help us achieve our objectives and key results. And they need to be able to pivot fast and without politics.
Point in case, we recently ran a homepage test in service of an objective to raise overall website conversion rates. We felt great about the variant, but once it was live, we weren't seeing the performance we hoped.
A lot of organizations would take the wait and see approach since the test wasn't statistically significant yet. But we looked at the usage patterns from a UX perspective and knew in our gut this thing wasn't going to win. In fact it would fail miserably. The result would have been an output (homepage test) but a missed outcome (increase website conversion rates).
Long story short, we pivoted fast, produced a new variant in less than two days, and watched as it crushed the competition. That variant increased session to prospect conversion by 39%.
Giving my team the freedom to make that pivot without having to run things up the chain or being bound to a set of initiatives we set a month ago ensured that we could make the right move, in quarter, to achieve the outcome we wanted.
You can apply this personally as well. I had a fitness goal to get to 155 pounds. I was doing a ton of road biking, but when the weather turned and the mornings and evenings were dark, I couldn't bike any longer. I hadn’t planned for this in my OKRs.
I switched to yoga and walks at lunch, and I achieved my goal. If I'd been married to my initiative (biking) I would have been frustrated and probably quit. The result would have been a missed goal. As it stands, I'm at 154 lbs, down from 173 last spring.
We're all going to miss goals. It's part of life, but if you want to make hitting your goals the norm rather than the exception, adopting an outcomes mindset, along with the three approaches I've laid out, will go a long way towards a consistent track record of success.
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