I know the word results can sound cold. Maybe it has landed that way on you before, in a meeting where the number mattered more than the person in the room. I have been on both sides of that meeting, so if you brace a little when you hear it, I understand.
What changed how I hear it was Hurricane Harvey, a month into my first senior executive assignment. Our CEO called me from overseas every day with the same first question: Are our people okay? There is more to that story in my book, The Career Bridge, coming 2027. What I learned was the order. People follow a leader they trust, and they trust a leader who cares about them.
Every result has a shelf life, and the people behind it carry what they learned into the next one. Results expire. People compound.
So how does a people-first leader still deliver? John Maxwell calls one of his laws of leadership the Law of Victory.[1] Leaders find a way for the team to win. You will not always know the way, and the commitment is to keep looking. When something looks impossible, it is natural to ask, "Can we?" Owners ask a different question: "How can we?" The constraint stays the same, but the sharper question can change the outcome.
“Results expire. People compound.”
Asking "How can we?" also changes who the result belongs to. Owning a result includes the part you handed to someone else. For anyone who leads a team, the shift is from "I deliver" to "my team delivers, and either way it's mine." Progress is owned, not assigned.
Ownership like that needs a scoreboard. A plan describes what you hope will happen, and a scoreboard shows what is happening. Edwin Locke and Gary Latham, who spent 35 years studying goals, found that goals paired with feedback on progress work better than goals alone.[2] Somebody has to read the score out loud, calmly and often, and that somebody is usually the leader. The scoreboard measures the work. Your worth was never on it.
A score only helps if people can see where their part fits. Researchers at MIT Sloan studied 124 organizations and found that the best predictor of alignment was how consistently managers explained what their team's priorities meant for the team and for the whole company.[3] You can start on that in your next team meeting.
Then comes the harder moment, when the score is not going your way. Ed Mylett makes a point about the Law of Victory that has stayed with me.[4] It is easy to lead when the scoreboard looks good. The leader is revealed when the team is behind, because that is when everyone turns to you with one question: Do you still believe we can win?
If that question is on your mind for your leadership team, I would welcome the conversation. Book a 30-min consult, and we can start with where your team is today.
Sources
John C. Maxwell, The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership.
Edwin A. Locke and Gary P. Latham, "Building a Practically Useful Theory of Goal Setting and Task Motivation: A 35-Year Odyssey," American Psychologist, 2002.
Donald Sull, Charles Sull and James Yoder, "No One Knows Your Strategy, Not Even Your Top Leaders," MIT Sloan Management Review, February 2018.
Ed Mylett with John Maxwell, "John Maxwell's #15 Law of Leadership: The Law of Victory," The Ed Mylett Show.