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Are the actions you and your organization are taking enough?

A critical fact of performance is that the only thing that ever produces any result is an action. No amount of planning, strategy, vision, or desire ever produced a result. At some point, someone needs to take an action.

Start with yourself

Great leaders always begin by examining how they are working. Choose a result you are accountable for delivering and start with these two questions:

• What actions are you taking to deliver that result?
• What actions are you not taking?

Talking or taking action?

When we are coaching a team in producing a breakthrough result they have promised one of the first things they have to confront is how much time they spend talking about taking action vs. taking action.

The next time you are in a meeting, be it a project team or a leadership team, examine how much of the time is spent talking about taking action vs. actually planning the actions.

Planning action sounds like people making requests of others, or making promises to others. These requests and promises need to be specific and measurable, with clear deliverable times. There also needs to be a structure for capture the actions and follow-up.

Right and sufficient action

Is the action sufficient enough to cause the breakthrough in results? Often times a team will be taking better action and what they and others consider good action or more action, but it isn’t breakthrough action?

A great question for your next team meeting:
Are these actions going to get us to X result by Y date?

If the answer is uncertainty, then I go back and challenge the team to create an action plan that will.