For Real Success, You Must Align Your Actions to the Outcomes You Seek

We can have a number of measures or metrics for ourselves or our businesses. I discussed what some of those might look like in the article around quantitative and qualitative measures. I also covered the importance of managing what you measure to ensure it is not overwhelming in the last article. The final step is matching the actions you take to the outcomes you are looking for. That requires a plan for change, creating action, measuring your team’s behaviors, and finally making the adjustments along the way to dial in the results you are getting and aligning those to what you set out to achieve.

Generate Change

Creating change is not high on most people’s proactive list. But part of a leader’s role is to do just that, create the necessary change that will lead to long-term success. It starts with defining the vision of what you are working towards. Now is the time to shift the paradigms in your business and the members of your team. Challenge the status quo and look for positive ways to generate change.

Change does not have to be scary. In many cases, once the initial adjustment occurs, people find that change is actually good for them. Change is being thrust upon us from external factors, and that change feels nearly continual. But many things are within our control that can help us feel as though we are steering in a positive direction versus drifting along.

Create Action

Use your data to help determine and define the actions you and your teams need to take. Information from both your leading and lagging indicators removes the emotion of the situation (in most cases), paving the way for the data to direct your steps.

What are the small steps along the way you will take? This is an important part of breaking down the bigger picture into what will ultimately be the day to day activities of the front line people who will bring your vision to life. It can be narrowed all the way down to what are the one or two things I can do today to move the needle forward on the ultimate goal. For example, “Ask every customer to sign up for email” is the most basic level action for building your customer information database for future marketing. This is an observable behavior for your team. It is also measurable. It may be a manual measurement throughout the day (did I ask each customer - leading indicator) and a systemic measurement (a report that shows the number of transactions with emails attached - lagging) that can be used for follow up discussions.

Measure behaviors

Calling back to that balance between qualitative and quantitative results - the leader’s role is to observe, coach, and provide feedback on the actions and activities and plan for the next steps based on those steps. Shifting time into observation activities will be a change that leaders need to make in order to identify many of the root causes for the results that are being realized. Identifying the positive behaviors are as, if not more, important than viewing the behaviors you are not looking for. When you see it happening in the right ways - reward and celebrate. Learn what those people are doing in order to inform how you coach others that may be struggling to keep up. This can be a critically important role that multi-unit leaders play in support of supporting their teams. You have the ability to see many options across your geography and share those learnings with the others in your area.

Adjust Accordingly

Fail fast and learn from those experiences. Make the necessary adjustments to flex with your customers and needs. These could be very small items that you are trying to shift the outcome at a store or district level. It could be a scheduling change. It could be a matter of who is working on which shifts - these are easy ‘tests’ leaders can put in place to see if they generate a different outcome. You can learn quickly from those experiments and then adjust. They are low cost and low impact, but can begin to refine the longer-term strategies you need to employ.

What can you do quickly to learn and then make adjustments? They do not need to be huge, sweeping changes. If you have a well thought out plan, you should be most of the way there, but every plan requires ‘on the fly’ changes.

Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable - General Dwight D. Eisenhower

Things change. We have already discussed how much and how quickly things are changing in our current environment, so it goes without saying that plans will change along the way. That does not mean you can skip the planning part. Planning prepares you for the scenarios ahead of you. It helps you anticipate what might happen next, but not in every conceivable way. It is the data that comes from observing daily behaviors and the results that are producing that will yield the steps for what should come next.

Throughout this series, I have covered the need to review how you measure your business and the methods you can explore for doing so. Change is rarely easy, but almost always necessary. No one could have predicted how this year has gone. This is both unprecedented and a once in a lifetime (we hope) shift in how we live and operate in the business world. There have certainly been some negative impacts that many people have felt in business, let alone the tragedies that a lot of people have experienced in their personal life. Yet, there can be some silver linings to what this means in the years ahead.

Moving beyond metrics that only compare to the past and concentrating on the behaviors of the recent and now can begin the shift to a new way of thinking about what success looks like. It can create more immediate term actions while creating a stronger foundation for sustainable activities for the long-term. Now is the time to challenge old ways and welcome the possibility of new insights and initiatives that will lead to a future full of possibilities.

How can you take the ideas and discussion points from the last several articles and build a new strategy for measuring success in your business?

I also recently discussed this topic and some of the ideas from this series of articles with Graeme Grant , CEO of Blueday on their webinar Measuring Store Performance in Turbulent Times: Defining Your Key Metrics for 2020 and Beyond.\

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