Outcomes vs Outputs: Are You Getting Results or Just Executing Your Plans?

“Qual­i­ty with­out results is point­less. Results with­out qual­i­ty is bor­ing.” — Johan Cruyff, Dutch pro­fes­sion­al foot­ball play­er and coach

Over the last 20 years plus work­ing with CEO and exec­u­tive teams, one con­stant theme is Out­comes vs Outputs.

When peo­ple set their goals in plan­ning ses­sions, they often say, ​“I did all the work and I com­plet­ed the plan.”

Yes, but you didn’t get the results or outcomes.

As com­pa­nies grow and end up with more man­age­ment and staff, there often seems to be a grad­ual degra­da­tion of the focus out­comes, and more on process­es, and imple­ment­ing plans, projects and programs.

This is lethal­ly dangerous.

At the end of the day, hock­ey is about goals, foot­ball is about touch­downs – and busi­ness is about results.

But for very log­i­cal rea­sons, peo­ple get caught up in an activ­i­ty or a process focus, ver­sus an out­come orientation:

• As costs get big­ger, it’s hard­er to mea­sure the results of big projects
• Human beings tend to shy away from account­abil­i­ty, if they can
• There’s often a lack of the kind of dis­ci­plined think­ing that it takes to quan­ti­fy the result you expect.

A Mat­ter of Perspective

If we look at this from the per­spec­tive of a CEO or busi­ness leader, you can either have your team focused on doing the work, or on the out­comes. If they degrade to focus on check­ing box­es, they could check the wrong box, and do the wrong work. In out­come-ori­ent­ed com­pa­nies, many of the projects sim­ply wouldn’t get approved.

The chal­lenge for most lead­ers is to makes sure there is an out­come focus on every­thing.

Then peo­ple can look for more cre­ative or inex­pen­sive ways to get the job done. This requires immense discipline.

The Ques­tions

One of the CEOs I work with uses this ques­tion to help: What must we do to win this quarter?

MUST. Not could, should or would like to, but must – and what is the finan­cial impact on the business?

Even if it’s sim­ple, rough math, quan­ti­fy­ing the impact of a project is key.

An Exam­ple

You want to imple­ment an new CRM project in your com­pa­ny (after all, everyone’s doing it, so it must be a good thing, right?) – but unless you can prove that it will reduce your total cost of mar­ket­ing, decrease your lead costs, or increase your qual­i­ty of leads — some­thing! — it’s just anoth­er project to enter­tain the peo­ple on your team.

Most com­pa­nies will imple­ment the CRM, the ven­dor will give them an award for some­thing (great mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy by the soft­ware com­pa­ny) and call it a suc­cess. But the lead cost doesn’t move. Of course, it doesn’t. It doesn’t hap­pen just because you have new software.

Estab­lish­ing a tar­get you have to hit that forces the cre­ativ­i­ty, learn­ing and opti­miza­tion to get you there — like the cost per lead is going to go from $75 to $50 – is just the begin­ning. You also need mech­a­nisms to track progress, and to hold peo­ple to it – oth­er­wise, you’ll have won­der­ful new capa­bil­i­ty, and mar­ket­ing costs just went from 5% of sales to 6%.

I’m a big believ­er in things like CRM and know that the val­ue comes not in the imple­men­ta­tion, but in the opti­miza­tion the fol­low­ing year.

It takes prob­a­bly 20, 30, 50 or maybe 100 adjust­ments and revi­sions, to actu­al­ly get the out­come you want. You have to work it, and man­age it, and spend hours sweat­ing over how to lever­age it. Then and only then can you get the lead costs down. That’s the hard work, and most com­pa­nies don’t do it.

It doesn’t mat­ter the project. On the oper­a­tion side it’s often eas­i­er, but for oth­er sup­port ser­vices, it’s impor­tant not to allow peo­ple to degrade into a process, project or doing-the-work orientation.

The dis­ci­pline is to have an out­come ori­en­ta­tion on every­thing.

Speak Vol­umes

Straight-talk­ing, pas­sion­ate and ener­getic, Kevin is known for his invig­o­rat­ing pre­sen­ta­tions, packed with prac­ti­cal knowl­edge for lead­er­ship and life – and a lot of laughs.

Click here to find out more about invit­ing Kevin to speak at your next event. Your audi­ence will love him!