Seth Dobbs (he/him): Do you have a to-do list that’s a mile long? Do you often feel at work if you’re just checking a box? Is your work aligned with the overall strategy of your organization? Hi, I’m Seth Dobbs, and this is the Principle Driven Leadership Podcast where I share principles of leadership, along with examples of how to apply them to help make you be the best leader you can be.

These principles are based on my years of experience as an executive leader in building organizations and in coaching others to become leaders as well. And I believe that not only can anyone develop leadership skills, but that everyone can and should develop leadership skills. I think they’re essential for helping you achieve your best in whatever way you may be trying to make an impact.

And that’s because leadership skills help you better influence others to effectively create durable results. And leadership is a journey. The step we’re gonna take today involves shifting the way you think to better center you and your team on achieving real results instead of just checking boxes. And a good vision helps you do that by focusing on what you want to achieve rather than just enumerating a list of things to do.

So I have a friend in HR who expressed concerns with his company’s onboarding, how they brought new employees into the organization, and that process of onboarding typically has many aspects to it. So there’s a lot that needs to get coordinated, organized, and get done. There’s all the legal stuff, all the paperwork, the tax forms, the benefits, and proof of citizenship or otherwise being able to work wherever you’re trying to work.

There’s all the company policies to review and understand. Often there’s training on what it means to be an employee of the organization, and that might even include videos from various leaders around the organization talking about how each of their teams fit into the broader whole. And then there’s sort of the, the basics.

Getting your equipment set up, getting accounts, access to email, to chat to spreadsheets or whatever else might be part of your job. And if you’re in a physical office, there’s the touring of the office itself, getting to know your way around it, meeting people in real life, in, in virtual through, you know, video conferencing and stuff, and, and ultimately even learning about their first work assignment.

And of course all of that makes sense. It’s pretty necessary and I’m probably even missing details you might have encountered. And this process where my friend worked involved multiple teams and multiple departments, and the way they approached this, each team had their list of what they needed to do with a new employee.

And each team member then simply worked to check everything off of their list. Now over time my friend started to observe, a few things that kind of bothered him about basically behaviors or patterns he started seeing in the new employees at the end of the day, at the end of the orientation, and he started seeing exhaustion and actually disorientation notice, it almost felt like there was.

Competition between some of the different teams and departments, confusion because of that, on the part of the new team members, many of them couldn’t remember half of what they were told and even almost sort of a prevailing sense of disappointment after the onboarding was done. And so because of that, the teams, uh, started collecting feedback.

In fact, each team started collecting feedback on the day, basically on the day’s events. And they pretty quickly saw that one, the scores really weren’t where they wanted and they were actually starting to go down. So fortunately, I guess maybe the teams took action. Some teams actually started adding more things to the day to make it

quote, more fun so that they could get a better feedback score for their team. Some of the teams involved in the onboarding even started jockeying for position in the day, hoping they could get better feedback. Maybe if they were start of the day when the new people were fresh, they would feel better about that team’s orientation and give them a higher score.

Now they started adding this and noticed that actually things were still getting worse. They actually started having week one turnover as people felt like they had joined a different company culture wise than they thought they had signed up for. And so of course all the different teams were alarmed by this, and they took more action.

Some started adding videos that emphasized how important culture was. And this increased sort of the load of onboarding. And in fact, in some cases, I think forced sort of compression of other content and in some ways continued to add more confusion. So, so here’s the thing. Actions can add up to nothing, but sometimes worse than nothing.

They can move you and your team someplace you don’t wanna be. So this team, my, my friend’s team had problems. They took action and ended up in an even worse state. So let’s analyze a little bit of what happened. If you think about it, if you look at what was going on, each team had their own checklist to complete.

But it was in the frame of a larger effort, the onboarding of a, of a new team member. And so when they, each individual or each team even encountered some kind of negative outcomes, they took more actions in isolation and repeated. And repeated, and those actions took them further from where they actually wanted to be.

Which brings us to the principle that a bias to outcome. Is more important than a bias to action. So I realize there’s a longstanding management principle to have a bias to action, but actions by themselves don’t necessarily add up to anything meaningful. Also, we’re talking about leadership skills, not management, meaning how you guide people to effectively create meaningful results.

That means you need to have a bias to outcomes. So that you can align people and filter actions around an end result that you’re trying to reach. So this is a shift from thinking about what you need to do to thinking about what you need to achieve. In other words, you should be thinking about what outcomes you and your team are trying to create.

Now to be clear, this principle does not mean you should never take action. Of course, we need to do things, but rather you want to center your thinking around outcomes first and move towards achieving something with those actions move itself as an action. But in this context, it’s a mindful action to head in a specific direction.

Checking all the boxes on a list is an action. But it’s not necessarily forward motion, especially if there’s no consideration to the outcomes you’re actually trying to reach by checking those boxes. So you don’t want your team to engage in just a flurry of activities if you’re not actually certain that all that activity that work drives towards meaningful outcomes.

Now, it’s not uncommon for folks to think in a task first approach instead of an outcome first. It’s fairly natural. We’re often trained, educated that way throughout our lives, and so it takes practice, but you should always try to start first with what you want to achieve before you turn to what you wanna do or how something is done.

And I’ll say I’ve found over time it is difficult to get alignment when everyone is simply focused solely on actions, on completing tasks. Coordination might be possible, but that’s not the same as alignment. It’s not the same as working cohesively together towards a set of outcomes. Centering on outcomes instead of task is hard.

It’s difficult. It takes practice, but you can start seeing progress as your team develops a better sense of the why behind what they’re doing. The more your team talks about why they’re doing their tasks. In other words, the outcomes the tasks are leading to, the more your team has a bias to outcome, which means you’ll see better alignment and forward motion towards reaching your goals.

So if we go back to my HR friend, what if at the point they realized first that things weren’t working, they started seeing the exhaustion, the disorientation, the confusion, and so forth. What if instead of just taking a bunch of independent actions, what if they took a step back? What if they really thought about what they were trying to achieve?

Sure, there’s stuff that has to be done, but think about a new employee’s first day or week on the job. What if my friend’s team had decided that they needed to work together? To achieve an outcome, like every new hire should end their first day believing that coming here was the best decision they ever made, or something like, every new hire should end their first week feeling that they understand what our organization does, where they fit into it, and that they have the support needed to succeed.

How do you think my friend’s team would think differently about their work? I think they’d no longer simply be doing a bunch of tasks to get them done, but rather be working towards something greater and in some ways more meaningful than simply checking the boxes and filling out the forms and stuff.

They would have more clarity on how to work together in a way that transforms the way they onboard people. So some of the content across teams might be combined to be clearer and more cohesive. The processes might smooth out instead of feeling jagged, it might enhance the feeling to the new team members, the new employees, that it is one well organized company rather than feeling like they’re being bounced around from department to department.

And tests would certainly still be completed, paperwork filled out, but in line with a broader outcome that might just positively impact their retention. And for the team members themselves, the people that are, executing the onboarding process, this approach will help their work feel more purposeful and enjoyable because they’ll feel connected to a positive impact on every new hire.

And that feeling will come through and be felt by the new hires in sort of this virtuous positive cycle. And in fact, fortunately my friend was able to change some of the focus along those lines. It took time. It does take time, but they actually moved a lot of the paperwork and stuff like that into work done prior to the first day, wherever possible, so they could focus the first day on more meaningful and enriching experiences for the new employees.

So in episode one I talked about how a good vision helps provide clarity and drives forward motion, but focusing on outcomes now, being clear on what your team needs to achieve is the best way to achieve that. Forward motion outcomes are essential to a good vision as they provide that north star, that beacon to head towards.

Again, you certainly need to take action and need your teams to do so, but without framing those actions in terms of what outcomes you’re trying to create, these actions may get you nowhere. Imagine running a marathon. But thinking that all you’re trying to do is run, that’s the purpose of your marathon.

Just run. How much energy would you burn? Scrambling around side to side, going in circles and et cetera, right? All of that is action, but action that is ultimately exhausting and a waste of time. That’s why it’s not enough to just take action. Throwing water on an oil fire is an action, but not an effective one and will not have the outcome you’d likely want.

So not knowing where you want you and your team’s actions to take you can be disastrous, but if you can provide direction and clarity in a way that drives forward motion, the results can be truly amazing. So are you talking to your team about tasks or about outcomes? If you’re only talking about tasks, how can you start changing the dialogue the way you interact with them?

And as you start focusing on outcomes, are you seeing that you’re asking for tasks that aren’t aligned with those outcomes? And what can you do to change that? Thanks so much for joining me. Please subscribe and tell a friend if you liked it, and join me next time where I will talk about how narrowing your focus can help you achieve more.