Great teams don’t focus on results

I lost my car key last week. What. A. Hack.

The experience made me think. The result was a lost key, and a load of admin: spare keys, battery replacements, auto-electricians, locksmiths, borrowed cars and begged lifts.

It made me ask a load of questions. How did it happen? Why did I lose the key? Were there poor behaviours that lead to this less-than-ideal result? Did I act in a certain, perhaps reckless way, that caused this poor result? What’s the correlation between behaviours and results?

We often over-emphasise results. Especially in organisations. Obviously, we want the numbers to increase.

But we tend to overlook the behaviours, processes and rituals that lead to those results.

And it’s normal to do this, it’s our human nature to focus on results. The result of our favourite sports team is the reason we love them. We don’t love them because they’re “nice guys”.

But no sports team worth their salt considers the result and determines their training plan based on it. No – they painstakingly analyse every behaviour on the field, and every process and ritual off the field to understand how they can improve.

Why? Because you can’t change results. You can only change behaviours, processes and rituals.

I lost my car key. It happened. I can’t change the result. I can, however, analyse the behaviours that led to that result, and change those behaviours, which would hopefully lead to a different result next time.

organisational behaviours

Similar to the experience with my key, leading me to ask questions, we’ve realised there’s a set of questions to ask for any team on a journey to better results.

Every single team has something that they need to deliver on. Which means every team plans for the future, in some shape or form.

Effective teams that plan for the future seldom focus on the tasks they need to complete as a starting point. Rather, they focus on the outcomes that need to be achieved, and tasks are informed by those outcomes. Once teams transition to focus on outcomes and not outputs, they create clarity of the end goal, propelling them into a different level of execution. So the first set of questions to ask is related to desired outcomes in the future.

Some teams add a layer to that. They realise that simply setting a goal or an outcome is not going to get them to the destination. There needs to be a focus on behaviours, processes and rituals required to arrive at the desired outcomes.

But now, how do we know which behaviours will lead to the desired outcomes? What are “good” behaviours?

That’s where the third set of questions come in.

Great teams don’t only look forward; they look back as well. They seek to understand the correlation between their historically rendered behaviours and the actual result at a point in time.

Google’s people team did this in a famous study back in 2012. They looked at the outcomes of 180 teams, considered the most effective ones (with the best results), and analysed the rendered behaviours of those teams. If they can understand the behaviours, they can duplicate the results.

“Good” behaviours, processes and rituals are those that lead to the result you want and minimise the gap between your expectation and reality. If you can learn from the past by looking back at rendered behaviours, and duplicate those behaviours by looking forward, you can scale it across teams and exponentially increase the speed of execution.

Great teams don’t only focus on the results at a point in time. They understand that results are the way they are, they can’t be changed. But there is a correlation between behaviours and results. They take time to analyse behaviours, in order to more accurately predict their results or outcomes into the future.

If you want better results, it might require some time to analyse your behaviours.

Happy predicting,
Paul