Seth Dobbs (he/him): Have you ever found yourself or your team caught in a whirlwind of activity, feeling productive, but unsure if you’re actually making progress? Do you keep checking things off the list, but still don’t feel like you or your team are getting anywhere?

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 teams and organizations, and in coaching others to become leaders themselves.

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 in helping you achieve your best in whatever way you might 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 going to take today involves understanding that real progress is more than just time elapsing and checking boxes. And how sometimes just checking boxes can actually take you in the wrong direction. So I want to talk about Lucinda.

She worked in the research department of a financial services firm. She had her first opportunity to lead a team that was responsible for coming up with a new financial product for first time investors to attract more business. Now Lucinda was really excited about this and had a lot of ideas, and as she built out the team,

She emphasized the importance of their work: that upper management felt this was key to future growth. She told the team that they would all need to do whatever it would take to create this new product on time for the new fiscal year. So she set up a conference room for the team to gather when on site so that they could all work together, and she gathered everyone there to kick off, sharing her to-do lists, research material, lists of data to gather, and all sorts of stuff like that.

Telling them again how important this work was, how much they needed to do, and then ended with, “now let’s go get busy” to the cheers of the team. And they did just that. They got really, really busy. The team was pumped up and they got to work on all the lists that Lucinda had provided. And they were quickly nicknamed Team Flurry because they were always in a flurry of activity.

Coworkers from other departments would hear nothing but how busy this team was, and Lucinda and the team took that as a source of pride and it encouraged them to do more. So long days and nights running Zoom meetings for hours where they were collaborating when they were remote, new lists being made as old ones were completed.

All that kind of activity. Now, almost two months in, Lucinda was so excited to list all the things that they’d done in her first milestone report to upper management. She created a dashboard to show off the average hours spent per week, the number of research papers read, the number of update sessions across the team, time spent in the strategy room, number of surveys sent out, number of responses and all of that.

So upon seeing this, her management told her to keep up the great work, reemphasizing this really was important and that they looked forward to see where it was all headed. So she brought that information back to the team: “we’re doing great, and they’re really counting on us”. And so they all dug in even harder and became even busier.

And so the next major milestone report was supposed to be a midway checkpoint. Lucinda looked at all her measures and was happy to see that most things were increasing. Average time spent per week had actually gone up. Total cumulative hours on the project was growing faster.

They’d processed a lot of research, they’d issued more surveys, gathered more data. All the numbers really showed how much work everyone was doing, and she couldn’t wait for the feedback. Which as it turns out, was not what she had expected. At this update. Her management actually seemed kind of perplexed.

They asked Lucinda what was actually happening, so she started repeating all the tasks that were checked off, all the work they were doing, and her boss stopped her in the middle and said, “no, no, I’m sorry, but what is actually being accomplished?” She found herself at a complete loss at this question. She didn’t know how to respond.

So she left the meeting feeling down. She didn’t understand what had happened and had no idea what to tell her team. So the principle to apply to this story is that “Progress is Measured By Outcomes”. Lucinda made a common mistake, confusing busyness with forward motion, thinking that with all that activity, something good had to be happening.

Time was being spent, things were getting checked off the list. Good people were working really hard. How could her management say that wasn’t enough? But the thing is, it’s not actually about how hard their team was working, how much was getting checked off from the list, because progress comes from outcomes, from learning, from making successes and mistakes and driving forward motion.

If you’re only measuring progress through time spent through activities, through busyness, you’ll likely find that eventually you’re actually going nowhere. So Lucinda wasn’t able to make the connection between the goal, creating a new product that would bring new customers, and specifically for first time investors to their company, and the work she had her team doing.

It’s not that the work was unrelated, but it wasn’t focused on those outcomes. It was just focused on doing. The team was just focused on being busy and doing activities. And I get it, it can feel great being at the hub of such a flurry of activity. It can be energizing to see so much “doing” going on around you.

But unfortunately in Lucinda’s case, without the “doing” being connected to the bigger picture, it was just so much running in place. So Lucinda was despondent and spent several days in a funk and didn’t give the team any of the management feedback. And the team had enough energy on their own at that point to keep active, and so they carried on, only slightly worried why their leader wasn’t so visible and why she didn’t come give feedback.

But honestly, they were too busy to really notice or even care that much. They knew that they couldn’t let anything slow them down. Whatever they thought that might mean, which Lucinda started to realize was the problem. After some downtime, really analyzing the situation. She realized her management was right.

She actually had no idea what was truly being accomplished in terms of the outcomes. So she re-engaged with the team and started changing her meetings, pushing the team, not to report on quantities and time spent, but rather on what was actually learned from this research.

What implications did what they learn have on what would be a successful product? Now the team struggled with this change during the first week. They kept on the old habits of wanting to report the boxes checked, the time spent and so forth. At some point in a meeting, Lucinda finally said, “I don’t care how much time you’re spending”. Which resulted in dead silence, and she took a breath and said that wasn’t quite right. Personally, she cared how much time people were spending on work, but more importantly, she cared how effectively that time was being spent for their sake as well as the companies.

She realized she had done them a disservice by letting them become Team Flurry. She actually instituted a required day off for everyone to take a break and come back fresh. She then challenged them to shift focus from the constant swirl of action that she created to thinking about where the actions were taking them, what were they learning in the research, and how is that learning gonna be applied to designing the financial product the company was counting on them to create. So after a little bit of shifting gears, there was suddenly a new surge of energy through the team, and they were still putting in a lot of time. They actually started putting in fewer hours as they shifted their thinking because they realized some of the things that they had been doing weren’t actually leading to the results they were trying to get to.

So with this shift, Lucinda was able to bring a better update to the next major milestone meeting and floated a few key ideas to get feedback. Now, in the end, it was hard work, but her team actually managed to deliver several solid ideas. Management worked with Lucinda and the team to refine one, and were actually able to bring it to market.

So a lot of what this principle gets down to is vision. Lucinda knew what was needed, but wasn’t able to articulate it in a way that actually moved the team forward. She, at first, didn’t see the connection with the vision and the work being done.

This isn’t unusual. A first time manager thrown in with no support and then expected to succeed is gonna follow fairly similar concepts. And I’ll unpack some of those concepts related to this in the future. But I also want to say that there are people far more experienced than Lucinda who also view the world this way.

And it’s possible that her management was also unable to make the connection clear for her, even though they could see they weren’t getting what they wanted. Now once Lucinda was able to shift and make clear what progress actually looked like in terms of outcomes, in terms of what their goals were, the team was able to take tiny steps and then larger ones that actually helped them move forward towards those goals.

The thing is we live in a world full of busyness. You can hear it all the time and people talking about their work, how “busy” they are. This is just a commonplace thing. It’s almost a plague that if we don’t attest to our busyness, we’re somehow underperforming, that we’re not dedicated and so forth. You can see it how and how people post in social media about their work, how people talk in casual conversations, how people will praise coworkers that work so hard and put in long hours.

And you’re more likely to hear praise of, “oh, so and so put so much time into this. I’m so grateful,” than you’re gonna hear something like, “oh, it was amazing how this person moved us forward and still had time to go to their kids’ baseball games.” Unfortunately, measuring busyness often measures little of value by itself, and worse, being busy creates a kind of organizational inertia, often in the wrong direction or with no direction at all.

Your vision, the outcomes you need to achieve and why you need to achieve them provides the measuring stick for what progress, what forward motion looks like. With it, Your team can function like Lucinda’s team did in the end, and without it, they’re just going to be really busy.

So I want you to think when was the last time you took a step back to assess whether your team’s efforts were actually moving you closer to your goals, or if it was just keeping you busy and Consider reminding your team to think about where are their actions actually taking them?

What are they learning, and how can that learning be used to address the problem they’re tasked with solving? Thanks so much for joining me. Please subscribe, follow, comment, and share with a friend if you liked it. And you can send feedback and questions to contact@pdlpodcast.com. And I’ll try to address a few later in the season and join me next time where I’ll talk about how communication is a two-way street and you as a leader on the success of both directions.