If the answer to the question ‘Does your team success matter to you?’ is yes, then you need to switch from ticking off tasks to chasing outcomes, and your team needs to make the same shift.

It is easy to think that success lies in a completed to-do list, but in the modern business world, and particularly the marketing realm, a to-do list isn’t often full of the items that count, the projects that will make a difference to your customer and your bottom line – it contains a lot of the urgent, but not the important.

Developing a success-filled and successful culture within your team requires you to focus on the outcome of the projects – the right email delivered to the right customer set to lift online sales by 15% WoW.  Once the team understand the outcome they are aiming for (the stake in the ground I mention in a previous post)  they are setting themselves up for success.

Absolutely, to achieve the outcomes the team need to achieve the tasks, but the success doesn’t lie only in the completion of those tasks, it lies in the outcome the tasks achieve.

A big pit-fall of ticking off tasks rather than chasing outcomes is that you become so focused on quantity that you ignore quality.  It becomes about ‘another three things before I leave today’ rather than ‘I got two things done, and with them done we are closer to achieving our enquiry targets’.

A to do list is never-ending.  We need to be strategic about the tasks we do and when we do them, always with the outcome in sight.

Mentor your team so they plan their week ahead, so they choose the tasks that will deliver the biggest impact and outcomes for the customer and the business.

Coach your team to schedule time in do these tasks and the maintenance tasks like emails – they only have so many hours in the day to do the work that matters.

Help them to identify what will make the difference, help them to identify the outcome-generating items.  Successful and success-filled teams will follow!

This post was originally published on LinkedIn.