322 | Get Results: Stop Settling For Task Completion

It’s NOT the task that wins, it’s the result of the task that wins.

Do you have a task result gap? It may look like this…

  • Tasks are getting completed, but KPIs aren’t being hit
  • You don’t see the results from the vendors that you were promised
  • Team members come to you seeking your solution to every issue instead of taking steps to solve it

Close the Task-Result gap and start seeing more ROI in your role, on your team, and in the business:

Key Takeaways:

  • How to tell if your team members are 8 year olds 😂 [0:31]
  • What the task-result gap looks like in your office [2:36]
  • Where teams lose focus of results, and how leaders can help [3:14]
  • The 3 steps to get teams driving results instead of just completing tasks [4:40]
  • Step 1 to closing the Task-Result gap [4:45]
  • Step 2 to closing the Task-Result gap [12:38]
  • Step 3 to closing the Task-Result gap [17:10]

Resources:

How To Create A KRA (Key Results Area)

Episode 320: Finding Your Authentic Self

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Chris LoCurto: Is your team task focused or results focused? How was that affecting their ROI and your bottom line? That is coming up next.

Welcome to the Chris LoCurto show where we discuss leadership and life and discover that business is what you do, not who you are.

Welcome to the show folks. Now imagine you tell your eight year old, go to your room and pick everything up off the floor. They come downstairs and proudly say “all done.” Obviously you don’t question that at all, right? You go to check their work and you find that they did in fact pick up everything on the floor and now it’s on their bed. Hashtag face palm. They accomplished the specific task you asked, but did they deliver the results that you were looking for? Of course not. Now ask yourself, when it comes to your team, when it comes to your business, when it comes to your individual role, is there a task result, gap? Is there a gap in you doing the tasks that you’re doing and getting the results that are expected? We’re going to hit the three steps to get your team driving results instead of just completing tasks.

But first I want to tell you about next level life. Next level life is our two day personal discovery experience. It’s a one on one personalized event where we guide you through a process to help you discover your root system, to get unstuck in life and to discover what’s holding you back from freedom and peace. Imagine this, what if you could wake up every morning with a clear purpose? What would it look like to have healthier relationships with less conflict? Where would you be in a few months, a year, five years if you had clarity, purpose and peace? Probably a big difference from where you stand today. Now, I know it’s possible because I’ve been where you are asking myself, is there more? There is and there is a better way and it starts with next level life. You can go to Chris LoCurto.com/discover to take the next step.

Now if you’re struggling with discontentment, regret or not feeling good enough, which most of you are, if you’re filled with anxiety or your relationships are lacking, don’t keep going through the same motions every single day. Learn how to move past the things robbing you of peace. Go to Chris LoCurto.com/discover and take the next step. So folks we’re talking about this task result gap. What it looks like when you have one. Sometimes it can be something like tasks are getting completed, but the key performance indicators aren’t being hit. You don’t see the results from the vendors that you were promised you should receive. You have team members coming to you seeking for your recommendation on every issue or you know a change that comes up instead of taking steps to solve it. You have team members that don’t have a crystal clear picture of the goals that they’re after and how they affect the mission, but they are accomplishing tasks.

Here’s what’s happening. You or your team are focusing on task and productivity and not necessarily focusing on the desired outcome of the task and the productivity. The result of the task is either not being clearly communicated or it’s not being clearly led, one or the other. And another piece to this puzzle is we may even be communicating the results and yet we are not looking to see if the tasks that are being completed are actually accomplishing the results. You have to measure that. That’s why we’re big on putting in key performance indicators or what we call KPIs, is to make sure that we’re actually measuring the result that we’re trying to accomplish. Now, I can tell you this, when we talk to the more task folks on the DISC personality profile, your high Cs, you’re high Ds having that big picture that result, here’s what it’s supposed to look like.

Here’s what the outcome should look like is incredibly important because when they can see the outcome, then they can do a much better job of hitting it or know what they’re supposed to do. However, that still does not solve the problem of the gap between task and results. So how do you fix it? How do you close the gap and get the results focus that you need or that you want. So there’s three steps that we’re going to be talking about to get your team driving results instead of just completing tasks. One of the big ways to close that gap is by utilizing KRAs. So when we’re looking at the individual team member, one of the things that we want to do is to define the result that we’re looking for. M

any people still mess this up like crazy. That’s why we put together a big lesson on KRAs, is to help them to understand people will put down, well, here’s the tasks, here’s the area and here’s the tasks.

It’s not the task that we’re looking for. I’m not saying that you can’t have parts of the task in there or be mentioning the task, but a great KRA, which means key result areas. All right, the key results that you’re looking for in an area, in multiple areas, whatever you have for the person, for the role, that it’s not just the task that wins, it’s the result of the task that wins. It’s the understanding of what we’re looking for in this area. So you have to understand that when you give somebody an assignment, you’re putting together a job, you’re putting together a specific role in your business. You’re going to put together a job description. You should have a job description and what does a job description it is the description of job. It is the tasks and things that you need to put in there that they have to know that they have to accomplish.

Now, you don’t have to get down to every single nitty gritty, you know, tasks that they’re going to do, and if you’ve explained it so much that a monkey can do it, you probably shouldn’t be hiring somebody for that role, right? We do need people to think for themselves, but the job description is going to be much heavier in what the job is and what you’re doing. KPIs are those key performance indicators. It’s the measurements. This is powerful. This is what we put, and this is one of the many elements that we put into KRAs is a KPI. How do you measure between the task that they’re supposed to be doing and the result that you’re expecting? What does that look like? You need that measurement in there. That’s one of the big pieces that closes that gap, right? So then that leaves the KRA and the KRA is the result that they should be getting or seeing or experiencing because of the job that they’re doing.

So if we took something like, I dunno, let’s take a salesperson. Salesperson is a pretty easy KRA because you’ve got the tasks, you know what you need to do, you know, the calls, the emails, the conventions or whatever. And the KPIs are pretty simple too because you’re looking at numbers. What are the numbers that we’re looking for? But the result may be something like, so if we’re looking at our business, one of our results is that everybody must be clearly communicated to about what they’re going to receive in this event or in this product or, or, or…because the last thing we want is anybody, I’m not here to bust out a whole bunch of money by selling products and selling services. I am so glad that that’s what we do and we love doing that, but our bigger focus is changing lives.

And the last thing, we wanted somebody to walk in and go, wow, that didn’t change my life. So our focus is that they understand what to expect from this sale. If we took a marketing person and we said, okay, we want you to market all of our products, all of our services, part of the results of the KPIs obviously are going to be the measurements. This is how many leads we’re looking for on this product line. And this is how much sales were looking for online through this thing over here. But one of the results might be making sure that everybody knows, you know, every product that this is based in my belief system, which is Christianity. You know that there is a biblical basis to this. It doesn’t mean that people who aren’t believers don’t do this. We have plenty of folks that are not believers that come through our services that listen to us, that come to our events.

That’s great. The reason why is because they know that we’re not somebody who’s going to cram this down their throats and tell them that, you know, if they don’t do this, then they can’t show up. But we do want to understand that it’s biblically based. So that might be a result that we’re looking for. If it’s not communicated, then we have a problem. Those are just a couple of examples. It’s not, hey, make sure you put this piece of information on the sheet. The result is if they don’t know this, if this isn’t communicated at some way, then you’re not achieving the result that we’re looking for. So if we have a content marketing role, we could have a job description or tasks that says write weekly content for the email newsletter and we can have a KPI that says generate 50 leads per quarter through the email newsletter.

We could have a KRA that says that the copy must be compelling and convert potential customers into leads for products or services. Right? Because the result that we’re looking for here is that we are converting people. It’s not just that the task is done. It’s not just that the, the newsletter is written, it’s that we’re converting people into the potential customers, right? The KPI helps us to narrow that gap so somebody could come along, you could say, hey, here’s what we want you to do and this is what happens in so many situations. Your job is to convert leads through the newsletter. So you’ve got to write a weekly newsletter and that’s it. And then they’re not getting the result that they want. And the result that they’re hoping for was, well, you need to generate 50 leads and then we’re still not getting it.

Well, what do we do? Well, I’m doing the very thing you told me to because we did not actually put a stronger result in place that we did not explain a stronger result. Then they’re doing the task. They’re doing the thing. We said, do this task over here. But when we look at our KPI, what are we discovering? They are not hitting the KPI. We’re not getting the result that we wanted. We’re not getting the numbers that we wanted. Why? Because what we didn’t go back and do is discover whether or not the copy that’s being written is actually converting people that it’s actually working. So we have this gap. We have somebody who’s doing the tasks, they’ve been doing it every week. They’ve been getting that newsletter out, but we’re not getting the results that we want. And so we go, well, you’re doing something wrong.

Well what is the piece that’s missing? You had to actually stop and write, Focus the content, not being on stuff, you know, not being on information. We had a sales page that we put up and we had to take it back down because the sales page didn’t sell anything. The result of the sales page was to be selling and unfortunately it was all informational. So it didn’t actually sell anything because there wasn’t a sales process on it. It was just information, surprise, surprise. It didn’t work. We took it down because we were able to very quickly look at the result that we wanted and compare to the task that was done and see that it did not align with the result. So we have to switch this, we have to change this, fix this quickly. So implementing KRAs and KPIs. KRAs not only define the result of what they’re doing or what we’re looking for, but it also shows them week after week after week what it looks like to actually accomplish this.

To actually win in this role. KRAs provide a clear visual, you know, it’s a document for what is expected, so we have both parties on it. Make sure everybody’s on the same page, that we all understand that this is what we’re looking for. This is the result. And we also have an outline for KPIs on almost every single team member role. Every role we can put KPIs on, even if it’s a admin role, if there is something that we can measure, we’re putting it on that. Number two, you have to paint the vision. How often are you just doing the tasks on your plate instead of leading somebody or being led to the vision? You have to paint the vision for your team when the project kicks off, or you know, when you’re working with a specific client or when you’re starting a new role, whatever it is, you have to paint the vision of where they’re going.

Now for me, this is very simple process that we do. Mission is your purpose. Vision is where you’re headed. So here’s an example that I use all the time. Everybody’s been to the beach or everybody’s been to the mountains. So imagine pick a place that you’ve been to on vacation and think of what it’s like to go there. So if it’s the beach, let’s say it’s the beach, you know what you’re going to do. You know what it’s gonna look like when you get there. You know what the water’s going to look like. You know what the sand is going to look like, you know the restaurant you’re going to eat at, you know that you’re going to be tossing a Frisbee or laying out getting a tan, whatever that is, whatever it looks like when you’re there. That’s the vision. That’s the destination. That’s where you’re headed.

That is what you need to paint for your team. When they’re doing a project… That’s what you need to paint for a new team member when they come on board. That’s what you need to paint, business owners, you should be painting this for your whole business. Guys this is the direction we’re heading in… Every single piece of this, whatever it is, if you will paint the vision, it helps people to close that gap between what they’re supposed to do task wise and what the result is expected to be. Now I can tell you very quickly, and this happens a lot through Stratplan. We’ll get a lot of companies in here that have no painted vision and so they have this shotgun approach. Where different aspects of the company are going in different directions. They do not have a unified vision. They do not have a unified direction and by the time we’re done, there this this pointy arrow “go that way” and it’s drawing people back because when we are unified in the direction that we’re going in, oh my gosh, we see momentum, we see productivity? But when you have people going in different directions, they’re not aligned, they’re not under the same mission, then it’s like you know, herding cats. You are not getting anywhere near the productivity that you want and you’re definitely not getting the productivity on a specific area, a specific focus, a specific brand, whatever that is. So be painting the picture all the time. Now before we get to the third step, I have to tell you about our next level leadership live event and you only have a week. There’s only a week left, April 24th at midnight. That’s when tickets, close. I’ve never seen a leader that’s had everything that they wanted. Out of thousands of leaders that I’ve coached most are probably a lot like you.

You wish you saw greater productivity and less drama from your team that you didn’t spend your energy putting out fires, that you had more time to invest in your family and the things that you enjoy and you felt more equipped to lead your team to success. The only thing that’s holding leaders back from the results they desire is having the right tools and you can get those tools at the next level. Leadership live event. So if you’re young, old, new, experienced, struggling, or really successful, this event is for anyone who is ready to learn from 25 years of best practices that get proven results. It’s not about short term fixes. In three days, I’m going to teach you how to have sustained revenue growth to generate greater productivity from your team and get immediate momentum toward the results that you want. It’s going to be detailed, practical and loaded with how to’s. From the lessons we’re teaching, our clients have seen an average of 46% increase in gross profit in one year’s time.

That’s one year’s time. These clients run normal everyday businesses, and your business can have the same level of success. So if you’re ready to see those results, go to Chris LoCurto.com/events and get your tail to this event and invest in your leadership and your business. That’s Chris LoCurto.com/events I can’t wait to see you there. Okay. We’re talking about the third thing that you can do to stop settling for task completion to get the results that you want. The third thing that you need to do is evaluate and implement accountability. Now, if there’s clarity on KRAs, KPIs and they’re being led well, the task result gap should close. If you have shown them what the result looks like, if you’ve shown them the measurements of how to get there. If you have gone in and painted this vision, the gap should be really closed.

It should be done well. However, you still need to hold your team accountable to the results so you don’t put somebody in place and have them do task, task, task, task, task, and then go, “did you hit the results?” Well, I did the task, but did you hit the results? Well, I dunno. You tell me. It doesn’t look like you did. You’ve got to get in there. If you didn’t get the results from implementing step one and two, you have to ask the question, why not? So again, we use a simple example of using KRAs and again, or I’m using KRAs, but guys take projects, swap this out for a project that you’re doing for a client. Schedule recurring meetings on the KRA review. Now for us, the way we do it here and we teach in the KRA lesson, is that you should be reviewing the KRA every single month when somebody starts until they’re getting the results you want and then start spacing it out every two months, maybe once a quarter, no less than twice a year

should you be reviewing that KRA. The only time that I actually ever say like once a year is if somebody does the most static role and they’re hitting their results, I mean it’s just, you know, somebody does a, I go back to the times when we used to do events and we had paper tickets. You know, I had a fantastic gal that would sit there and stuff these envelopes with tickets. That’s what she did for hours and hours and hours and hours and hours. That was it. So it wasn’t like there was a whole lot, and I know everybody out there who’s not a high C is like, oh, I couldn’t do that. All the high Cs are like yeah, I could totally do that. It takes a high C to be able to do this, right? That might be something if somebody does that all day, every day it’s the same thing over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.

Then maybe once a year, but even then, I’d still really consider twice a year. So schedule those recurring meetings. It’s the same thing. If it’s, you know, again, swap us out from KRA to a project, schedule the recurring meetings to discuss and see are we hitting the results right now? So let’s say you have somebody who’s dealing with clients and they’re brand spanking new, then you’re discussing with them their results. Often it might be weekly, definitely no less than monthly, right? Until you can see that they are being very successful at nailing that. And then from there, you can actually start to move that out. When you know that you’ve got it, you know they’re doing a great job, then you can start backing it out and backing out and backing it out. But you never stop holding them accountable. So make sure that you’re setting the meetings, make sure that it’s not about the tasks.

Don’t get in that meeting and discuss tasks. Discuss the results, discuss the vision. Make sure that you empower them. Make sure that you empower them to win and contribute to the mission based on their KRA, right? Hey, you can make decisions here. Hey, you can, you can jump in and push back here if you don’t feel like the things that we have. If we’ve not set this up well and it’s not going to get the results that we’re telling you that we want, you’re empowered to push back, you’re empowered to question. You’re empowered to, you know, whatever, fill in the blank. So make sure that you empower them in the process as well. Make sure that you’re holding them accountable to their KPIs. So if it’s on their KRA that’s one thing. If it’s a project, what are the KPIs we should be getting this result for the client

by here, we should be getting this result by here, this result, this result, this result. What are those key performance indicators of accomplishing the result that we’re looking for? Also, make sure that you have accountability for leadership on leading team members to see the results. You know, getting clarity on their KRAs, KPIs on the project that they’re working on. So if you have leaders under you, are they doing a great job of leading this process? If you’ve not been doing it, then I can promise you they have not been doing it. So it makes sure that you hold your leaders accountable and you will be amazed at what happens when you do that. Now we have a download for you this week. This week we’re going to give it to you. It’s an example of a KRA that sounds like a job description. Then an example of a KRA that sounds like a KRA.

You can see the side by side comparisons of KRA, KPI, job description, all that kind of fun stuff. So to get that download this week, go to Chris LoCurto.com/322 So get clarity, get your KRAs done so you can start leading to results instead of tasks. Your team should be focused on what results they’re accomplishing instead of putting a check mark by the task and calling it a day. So we’re also going to put more KRA resources in the show notes for you. So make sure you check out the show notes. Now, next week folks, we have a fantastic episode on leadership transformation. It’s a real life example of a leader who has become a healthy, phenomenal leader and the steps he took to get there. Now I cannot wait for you guys to hear it, so don’t miss it.

next Tuesday. If you haven’t already, please do us a huge favor. Make sure that you go and get subscribed to the podcast so you don’t miss when we released the content. Make sure that you’re getting the notifications and not missing it in the noisy world of social media and email. Go to iTunes or the podcast app, wherever you listen and hit subscribe, and if you would do me an even bigger favor, leave us a review. Even if it’s just clicking some stars on that bad boy. Do us a favor. Leave a review. That helps us to reach more people. Well, hopefully this has helped you today. As always, take this information, change your leadership, change your business, change your life, and join us on the next episode.

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Meet Chris LoCurto

CEO

Chris has a heart for changing lives by helping people discover the life and business they really want.

Decades of personal and leadership development experience, as well as running multi-million dollar businesses, has made him an expert in life and business coaching. personality types, and communication styles.

Growing up in a small logging town near Lake Tahoe, California, Chris learned a strong work ethic at home from his full-time working mom. He began his leadership and training career in the corporate world, starting but at E'TRADE.

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