The Role of a Manager: #3 Deliver Business Results

This is the focus area that most likely already gets most of your attention. My guess is most of the conversations you have with your team today, and that your boss or team has with you, is focused on how you are doing delivering your business results. Even though it is probably the most obvious focus area, it still requires attention and intentionality to drive success in this focus area.

When focusing on delivering business results, there are (3) questions you need to answer that will help drive clarity and alignment within your team and with your key stakeholders within your organization.

1. What is success? — Defining success is critical in order to set expectations, drive alignment and establish a vision for where you want to take your team. This will communicate to your team you aim and the value your team brings the organization when you deliver your results. In the absence of clarity on how success is defined, your team will create their own or wander aimlessly feeling their work is disconnected from a bigger story. Defining success helps you contextualize the results you are accountable to deliver and serves as the foundation for the next two questions.
2. How will we get there? — This is focused on providing clarity on how the work will be done that will enable you to deliver on your success. As a manager, it is important to be in tune with the way the work is being done so you can support driving the improvements needed to increase effectiveness and efficiency.
3. How will we measure if we are on track or not? — What is your scoreboard? How do you know if your team is on track or not in delivering your business results? If you cannot measure it, you will have a very hard time managing it. This is focused on building the measurements that will help you know at any given time how you and your team is doing tracking against your business results. This will help you be effective at managing up and filtering down the story of how your team is doing executing against your expected results.

In order to drive the 60% failure rate down, these are the (3) focus areas a manager should invest in and drive action in. Effective managers lead me first, develop their team and deliver business results and do it in that order. They recognize that when they are healthy they are better poisoned to develop their team and a developing team puts the entire team in a position to effectively deliver business results. It works.

Here is access to our YouTube playlist discussing the (3) focus areas of a manager. Check these out for additional insights — Playlist Link