This is part of a series called 12 Key Traits to Look for When Building Your Dream Team.

I have three kids ages 5, 2.5 and 6 months. I work. My wife works part-time. We’re busy. Every morning can easily feel like I’m getting swept into a rapid river of demands, needs, chores, disputes, tears, feeding, changing…and then I go to work. Open my e-mails, and I’m swept over the waterfall of requests, updates, changes, forms, proposals, answers, interventions, calls…and then I go home and am swept away again.

It is very easy, perhaps the easiest thing, to just click into survival mode. Do what needs to be done. Take care of what is right in front of me. Deal with the closest, most important fire.

Try to make it to the end of the day without major damage.

What happens, understandably, is I can easily forget (or perhaps never even consider) what am I trying to build in terms of my marriage? My business? My family?

What will success look like? At work? At home? In my life? In my client’s lives?

What am I trying to accomplish?

Most leaders, the majority, in fact, become very skilled at navigating situations and storms. We become captains who can handle any stormy sea.

We just aren’t sure what port we’re trying to get to or why.

Dream Team Leadership Trait #2: Outcome Focused Leadership & Management

“Begin with the end in mind” -Stephen Covey

This quote is the second of the seven habits of highly successful people described by Stephen Covey.

It is another way of describing Outcome Focused Leadership & Management.

Practicing this habit is one of the easiest ways to dramatically increase your own productivity and impact. It is one of the most effective ways to increase your team’s performance.

Question One: What Are We Trying to Accomplish?

You might frame it a little differently:

• What is our mission?
• What is our purpose?
• What is success?

The purpose is targeting. Selecting a destination.

There is no exception to this – outstanding leaders know what they are trying to accomplish. Any leader who can’t answer that question is operating below their capacity.

It’s easy to forget to make ourselves answer this question.

That is why you and I need to make it a habit.

It is also why, when building a high performing leadership team, we need to screen for people who make this a habit.

All your senior leaders should think this way. It should be a requirement in the selection process. Otherwise, you aren’t hiring a leader. Leaders, by definition, are going somewhere.

Effective leaders build a culture that insists on the question and on getting answers to the question.

It is leadership to define the answer to this question – both at the macro level of “what is our mission as a company?” and at the micro level of “what is this new project/policy/ position supposed to accomplish?”

When teams and employees know what is supposed to be accomplished, they can more easily self-manage to that end.

“If you can’t Measure it you can’t Manage it.” – Peter Drucker

Question Two: How Will We Know If We Succeeded?

Successful leaders define the metrics for success before the fact.

Unsuccessful leaders define the metrics of success after the fact.

Think about that.

Leaders and leadership teams who achieve the most start out knowing how they’ll measure progress and accomplishment. They have such a clear vision of what they are trying to build, it is easy to describe measurements around it.

They ask questions like:

• What will indicate to us that we’ve been successful?
• What will be different/changed/new/gone and how can we measure it?
• How will things be improved as a result of success?

Unsuccessful leaders resist asking those questions upfront. They prefer to just do a lot of work, splash a lot in the pool and based off how tired they feel call it a good swim. They aren’t interested in defining laps, meters swam, calories burned or even movement.

I’m oversimplifying. But only a little. It is very, very common for a proud leader to brag to me about his 60, 70 or 80-hour work weeks.

The fastest way to burst that bubble is to ask what he was trying to accomplish.

“Why should anyone care?” – Simon Sinek

Question Three: What Makes This Accomplishment Important?

I’ve learned the incredible value of clarifying, “Why are we doing this?” with clients. It taps into their motivation. Which is important.

My standard contract that takes more than a few days or weeks. In the course of time, a client’s urgencies shift. Priorities fade in their focus. New demands or challenges or opportunities emerge.

The client’s attention and energy wander.

Because I know their answer to “Why?” I can go back to them and ask, “Does this still matter?”

It usually still does.

So, I can help them determine if it still matters more than the new project, demand, shiny object that caught their attention.

Is usually still does.

So, I can help them get back on track.

They usually do. Then the accomplish the goal.

And they become high performers.

Good leaders flesh out and remind themselves and others the answer to the question, “Why?”

They might frame it differently:

• What if this fails or you did nothing? What would be the impact?
• What difference will success make for (fill in the blanks?)
• What does it currently cost you (or what are you not experiencing) because you’ve not yet succeeded in this area?
• Who will success matter the most to and how will it impact them?

How to Apply This Towards Building Your Dream Team

1. Practice Outcome Focused Leadership & Management Yourself.
   • This will help you understand it so you can teach and coach it.
   • By practicing it you will more easily attract, to your team, the kind of people who think this way.
2. Build Your Team to Be Outcome Focused
   • Recruit and screen for this quality in anyone that you bring into senior leadership. It should be a required trait and capacity for senior leadership.
   • Model this practice. Make it part of your culture.
   • Coach managers and leaders with potential but are weak in this area. Don’t assume that they will naturally understand it or have developed the habits of being Outcome Focused.
3. Build Outcome Focused Approaches into Your Culture and Structure
   • Planning should be outcome focused.
   • Policy development should be outcome focused.
   • Hiring decisions & practices should be outcome focused.
   • Incorporate the following simple questions into all your practices: “What is this supposed to accomplish?” “How will we know if we succeeded?” “Why does it matter?”

How to Start 2017 With a Strong Leadership Team

Would you like to build a unified, high-performing team that will start 2017 strong? Would you like to launch into 2017 with excitement, clarity, and focus?

If your answer is YES, then I have something special for you. I have a few slots on my calendar to speak with you 1-on-1 about the best practices to build a strong leadership team or how to improve your own ability to practice Outcome Focused Leadership.

On the call, I’ll share with you specific strategies you can use to improve team effectiveness that will help you attract, retain, and get the most out of your people, strengthening company culture and operational results.

Due to my busy schedule, I only have a few slots open for this complimentary call on a first-come-first-served basis. Email me at Christian@vantageconsulting.org, call me at 907 522-7200 or simply hit REPLY to this email now.