Why Leaders Should Focus Less On Results
In a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world—that is, the one we’re living in—what worked yesterday will not work today. And yet, most bosses still cling to the old mantra: “Bring me solutions, not problems.” You get your bonus if we hit the quarterly profit goal.
That might sound like decisive leadership. That type of incentive structure might have made sense 20 years ago. But if we truly want organizations that can adapt, solve new problems, and thrive through uncertainty, then we need to stop expecting results out of the gate.
Great results on the first try only happen in two situations: either you’re operating under the exact same conditions where your last solution worked, or you got lucky. Neither is a recipe for long-term competitiveness.
Context matters—and context is always changing. New customer needs, new technologies, and new threats are constantly emerging. Counterintuitively, the more we focus on being right, the more we limit ourselves from discovering what is actually right for an emerging challenge.
As my colleague Sylvain Landry writes, “Paying attention solely to results often leads to gaming the system and gains that are unsustainable over time.”[1] When the scoreboard becomes the goal, creativity and collaboration are strangled. People take shortcuts, hide problems, or avoid experiments that might fail. They stick to safe bets that don’t fundamentally alter the status quo in order to avoid any dip in results. Ironically, this “play it safe” approach undermines long-term resilience.
The False Comfort of Immediate Results
Our corporate cultures often encourage this behavior. They expect action, and they expect each action to be successful. They might say they want employees to “be innovative”, but then reward people for quick answers and perfect outcomes. That’s like telling someone they must learn to surf, but forbidding them from falling off the board.
As Landry continues, “Organizations cannot encourage experimentation on the one hand and expect every step to provide a measurable benefit on the other.”
If the expectation is that every action must “pay off,” then we’re not really experimenting—we’re performing. And performance mode kills learning and innovation.
Nonstop Production Sabotages Itself
David Marquet describes this tension beautifully: “While the focus of the manufacturing process itself is…reducing variability, it is improved through…embracing variability, inviting thinking and dissent.”[2]
We can only keep running so long the way we’ve always done it before we must pause and ask: How could we do this better? What is our customer now asking of us, and are our capabilities keeping up? Are we even serving the right customer with the right product? What could we be doing differently to meet the shifts we are seeing?
But most businesses have a natural bias against stopping production to reflect: “they’re moving faster, but possibly in the wrong direction.”[2]
Ironically, the pressure to perform makes our decisions worse: “For complex cognitive challenges, stress can and does have a strong negative impact on performance [because it] impairs the prefrontal cortex.”[2]
When leaders send the message that results are all that matter, they drive out precisely the kind of thinking needed most—collaborative, divergent, and creative. We make incremental improvements that dance around the margins, convince ourselves we’re doing pretty well, and go back to work without having built the new skills and capabilities needed to tackle the next wave of change.
What Can Leaders Do Instead?
None of this means results don’t matter. As one of my mentors Tilo Schwarz puts it, “We need and want to achieve goals and, as a manager, you’re responsible for the results.”[3] But he also imagines leaders saying, “‘Here’s the deal, you can do anything you like as long as it’s aimed at getting closer to our target condition and you’re following a scientific way of exploring the path.’”
That last clause—following a scientific way of exploring the path—is critical.
Instead of focusing on results, focus on the method:
Have you provided clear direction about what ultimately needs to be achieved?
Are your teams following a structured process of experimenting, observing, and adjusting?
Are you rewarding curiosity and clear thinking, not just outcomes?
Instead of focusing on results, focus on behavior:
How do you want people to act every day, especially when they hit a snag?
Do they pause, ask questions, test ideas, share learning; or do they hide the problem and push through?
Instead of focusing on results, focus on process metrics:
Have you helped the team identify the levers within their control that will influence the results you’re ultimately after?
Are people running experiments, then measuring the impact in their process metrics?
Are they using that information (good or bad) to better understand obstacles and inform adjustments?
If we get the behaviors and methods right, we can trust that the results will follow; but they may be uneven for awhile, and they may come about through means you didn’t expect. Just because the last few experiments haven’t “worked”, it doesn’t mean you’re not on the right path.
Rethink What You Reward
One of the most dangerous forms of results obsession is how we reward people. Immediate, positive, and certain rewards are the most powerful for shaping behavior. A bonus handed out in April for last year’s company performance? It won’t change a damn thing.
If you want people to build new habits, reward the right efforts, not lagging, diffuse outcomes. Celebrate when someone runs a sound experiment in pursuit of discovering a better way. That’s how you create a culture of improvement rather than a culture of anxiety and disempowerment.
Letting Go to Grow
So maybe the challenge as leaders isn’t to drive harder for results, but to loosen our grip on them.
When we shift the focus from being right to discovering what works, from avoiding failure to utilizing failures as fodder for the next, more informed experiment, we start to cultivate adaptability. And that adaptability is what enables organizations to continuously improve in order to sustain performance over time.
That shift requires leaders to focus more on creating the conditions for learning: giving time to think, opportunities to question, and the psychological safety that supports bold experimentation.
➔ Stay tuned for the next post: Why Learning Cultures Must Start with Psychological Safety.
[1] Landry, S. Bringing Scientific Thinking to Life, 2022.
[2] Marquet, D. Leadership is Language, Portfolio / Penguin 2020.
[3] Schwarz, T. and J. Liker. Giving Wings to Her Team, Routledge 2023.