Unpacking what it means to be results oriented
"Goal-oriented." "Results focused." "High achieving"
Managers want to hire top performers. Clients want to hire an agency that will get them results. Your boss wants to see you 'move the needle' on whatever you are working on right now. Everyone wants results, very few truly understand how to get them.
Being focused on results in a meaningful way is about looking past yourself, your team, your boss and thinking 'what's best for the business?" Whether that business is your own, your client or the company you are working for. This sounds so obvious, but actually achieving it is very difficult. What's easy is being able to fake it in retrospect.
This is a problem that perpetuates because it's so hard to prove. You can look at any challenge and assuming it wasn't a complete dismal failure, spin it positively in your favour.
Say you're interviewing someone for a potential job, an agency for a campaign, and they say they are results-oriented, you're going to ask for what that means. And likely they'll spit out some impressive sounding numbers that makes them look good. If it resonates with your own challenges you'll be impressed and perhaps they'll get the job.
Does that mean that person is results-oriented?
Absolutely not. Well they may be--but you don't have enough information to judge that yet.
Results start at the beginning
The most common problem I see in this scenario is results are defined ONLY after the project/campaign/initiative is completed. You think results are the outcome of what you did, therefore they come at the end, right? Wrong.
In a truly strategic setting, results come first. Specifically--defining results and the metrics that matter. And more often than note they are not apparent. You have to do some digging, research and analysis to understand why you are doing something and what is the desired outcome. Even if you know the overall goal, unless you likely have to do some legwork to really define and understand the outcome.
SMART objectives
We all know that objectives should be Specific, Measureable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely (SMART) right? How many times have you acknowledged this importance, yet failed to actually develop SMART objectives? There's always a seemingly good excuse for why it can't be done. A truly results-focused person would not accept this.
Defining SMART objectives can be a challenging process but one that is always worth it. While we can always fall back on subjectives measures and opinions after the fact, having defined objectives and measures against them is an indisputable way to demonstrate that you are, in fact, results oriented. It's also of critical importance that when you develop your SMART objectives, you pass them around and get consensus and buy-in before proceeding.
Results and problem solving go hand-in-hand
What is the problem you are trying to solve? This is my go to question with anything I want to produce results on. It's about asking 'why' and digging to the root cause of what you are doing. If your boss (or client) asks you to produce a newsletter, instead of jumping into action, go back and ask why and understand what is driving the need for that newsletter (Let's say it's unhappy customers) and develop some SMART objectives to measure those efforts. In this case, you know your end result is not about how many open and clicks your newsletter gets, it's about increasing customer satisfaction through improved communication.
Being results focused keeps you on strategy
Have you heard of the term: "design by committee?" it usually means something looks terrible because it had to go through 30 people to get approved and everyone had an opinion on all the trivial details. This is a problem that arises from not having clearly defined objectives and lacking an overall strategy. If you have those two things in place before setting your deliverable out to the vicious approval chain, you can always stand up for your decisions and bring the team on board. If you can't, then you've failed to be results focused and your results will suffer because of it.
Theory vs. practice
I'm the first to admit, not everything I've ever done has been results focused. That's because in order to do this effectively, everyone on the team has to be on board. If you're not leading it, or your key decision maker does not understand this, it's probably not going to happen. In the agency world we're also faced with the tough balance of what the client wants vs. what is the best method to produce results (and while I always fight for the second, I don't always win.) That's OK. We don't all do our best work 100% of time, we aren't robots (but maybe it's coming with the advancement of AI?)
So don't be too hard on yourself and savour those moments when the opportunity is right and you can push for it. And if you do that at every chance you get, you're probably a results-oriented person.