Why You're Not Getting Out What You Put In- A Lesson On Outputs-Driven Leadership

I have been fortunate to have gained such a wide range of professional experience so early on in my career - from an educator, to school leader, and now a full-time entrepreneur juggling two companies. In navigating both the education and for-profit space, I have come to realize that there are some key elements of leadership that transcends sectors, and has allowed me to be successful in both. Some of which include a clear vision, ability to motivate teams, and having strong accountability systems. However, one element that doesn’t get as much discussion is outputs driven leadership. It’s the type of leadership that constantly requires leaders to assess what their end goal is, even on a micro level. It’s the type of leadership that sometimes doesn’t jive well with people who struggle with delegation and would rather “get it done themselves”; but it’s also the type of leadership that increases your efficiency, builds an autonomous team culture and gives you the 1,000- foot view needed to improve your outcomes.

Let me provide an example-

As a department chair, you are managing a teacher who struggles to get results. His students have been failing their last few unit assessments and your principal is putting pressure on you to “fix it”. Like a good teacher-leader, you schedule a meeting with the teacher to action plan how you are going to help him get his students on track. You walk through the lesson plans together. You help him script out instructions. You go through his exit tickets and make sure they align to the rigor of the unit tests. You schedule observations so that you can help him co-teach the class. This goes on for a month. He’s getting the hang of things. You press on. You start holding weekly check-ins to see how well he has been able do the lesson planning, grading, and parent calls independently. You now head into the classroom at least once a week to make sure that children aren’t swinging from the ceiling, and that he is engaging in rigorous questioning. It looks great in there. The next unit test comes up, and the kids don’t do so well. He’s upset because he thought the he had done everything he could, and you are flabbergasted because everything seemed okay. What the hell happened?

What happened was, you made his job about being a good lesson planner, a good question asker, and a good behavior manager. So once that was accomplished, from his vantage point, he became a good teacher. But that is not what a good teacher is. A good teacher is someone who gets students to learn, as evidenced by their growth/performance on assessments (Sorry, I don’t make the rules.) What you did was give him tools that could help him be more successful, but you forgot to remind him regularly that his ultimate responsibility was to hit that percentage. Now, I’m sure that in your first meeting, you discussed the unit test pass rate goal. However, you forgot to lead subsequent meetings with smaller goals that would lead to that end result.

Don’t get me wrong. It is important that you take the time to show teachers (or any employee for that matter) the tools that they need to do the job, and give them reasonable time and support to excel at those tools. BUT you have to continuously come back to what the north star is, outputs/outcomes. Tools are inputs and by focusing too heavily on these things, you end up shifting the accountability from them to you. If they followed your step-by-step guide and didn’t get the results, then who’s fault is it? Take a moment to reflect: Do you have routine deliverables for your team like submitting lesson plans every week so that you can check them? That’s cool for the first month or so of school, but after that, IT’S A WASTE OF YOUR TIME AND ENERGY. If your routine deliverables are not directly connected to outputs, get rid of them. Who cares if they do the lesson plans the day before or the week before? Do they get results? That’s what matters. That’s what you focus on. That is outputs driven leadership. (Educators should see my article on developing effective teachers through student work for an example of outputs driven, routine deliverables.)

If after giving appropriate support and sufficient space to work independent of your watchful eye, that team member cannot get the outputs that you want, then you sit back and peel back the onion on why that is happening. This may be the time where you have them sharpen up on the tools in their tool box, or push them to collaborate with others. However, it is not the time to micromanage, handhold, or do the work for them. What will help you gain clarity on whether or not this person is coachable and still right for the job is setting time-sensitive, outputs-driven goals, and managing him or her against them.

There are plenty of examples of this sort of inputs driven management in the business world. I’ve seen it while consulting with teams for my company, Stone Solutions . Tactics such as reprimanding team members arriving 5 minutes late to work or leaving 20 minutes early, or requiring work summaries on a hyper-frequent basis to make sure people are “doing their job”. Not only is this type of behavior time consuming, but it communicates to your team that you don’t trust them. Outputs-driven leadership is the exact opposite. It is designed to give people autonomy and for you to focus on big picture goals.

Once the aforementioned teacher-leader was confident that her struggling mentee knew how to do the basic teacher moves, she then should could have set a goal with him related to a small in-class assignment for that week. She should have laid out clear expectations as to what she wanted to see from students in that assignment (pass rate, work quality, a certain level of understanding, etc) and then allowed him to create a plan to get there. He would feel like she trusted and respected him as a professional, and simultaneously would have had clarity on ultimately who was responsible to “fix-it”. Through this process the teacher-leader would have gathered more information about the teacher’s strengths and weaknesses, which provides more direction when designing a development plan for a team. Oh and let’s not forget all the time that would be saved, such that she won’t lose sight of the rest of her team’s performance.

Ultimately, outputs-driven leadership helps leaders make really objective decisions because it requires defined responsibilities and clear checkpoints to determine whether or not the team is successful. It helps leaders get past feeling guilty in the midst of personnel decisions, because they are coming back to simple, objective, and pertinent questions in measuring performance. Questions like:

Does this person get children to learn?

Does this person get people the services that they need?

Does this person ensure the organization is in compliance with codes, regulations, etc?

Does this person generate money for your company/organization?

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Now tell me, are you an outputs-driven leader? If not, what steps are you going to take to make the change. Email me at [email protected], I will be your accountability partner! Also feel free to comment below with your thoughts on this topic.