Stop Chasing Results

How great leaders don't just focus on goals, but on the behaviours that drive progress every day

Photo by Silvana Carlos on Unsplash

Whether you’re looking to lose weight, build a thriving business or become a better leader, success isn’t determined by how strong your goals are, but by the behaviours you choose to encourage.

Last month marked my tenth wedding anniversary and I suggested to my husband that we celebrate with a small photoshoot. Nothing extravagant, just our closest family, our wedding outfits and, most importantly, our children, who weren’t even a twinkle in our eyes ten years ago.

Now, my wedding dress is very fitted. It looked fabulous on the day, even if I say so myself. But ten years and two children later, recreating that same look felt... ambitious.

So naturally, I decided to lose a couple of kilos. Nothing dramatic, just a sensible little goal.

Most mornings, I’d step on the scale.

Down a bit? Excellent.

Up or exactly the same? Deep sighs and mild outrage.

My strategy was admittedly rather loose. Say no to sweets, eat slightly smaller portions, maybe skip the occasional snack. Very scientific stuff.

My attention was fixed on the number on the scale.

And honestly, that’s exactly how many organisations approach performance.

They obsess over the final outcome: sales, retention rates, growth, profit... while paying far less attention to the habits, behaviours and systems that actually create success in the first place.

The Measurement Trap

Most organisations love metrics. KPIs, outputs, targets, rankings, productivity dashboards, the full corporate buffet.

And to be fair, they’re useful. Metrics tell us what happened. They give leaders a snapshot of performance.

But here’s the problem. They rarely tell us why it happened.

Most performance problems are visible in behaviour long before they appear in a dashboard. By the time the numbers shift, the habits producing those results are often already firmly established.

When organisations focus only on performance metrics, things can quickly go sideways. Short-term thinking creeps in and the wrong behaviours may start getting rewarded.

Take revenue targets, for example.

If employees are judged purely on quarterly sales figures, the focus quickly becomes hitting the number at all costs. Discounts get handed out more freely. Aggressive sales tactics replace relationship building. Short term wins become more important than long term trust.

And occasionally things drift even further into risky territory, inflated reporting, cutting corners or avoiding difficult but necessary decisions.

Checking only the scoreboard can be misleading. You might reward excellent performance, or you might accidentally reward luck, shortcuts or behaviour that creates problems later on.

The more useful question is this: What should we be measuring before the results appear?

Economist Charles Goodhart famously observed that “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”.

The moment people are judged solely on a number, they often start optimising the number itself rather than the behaviours that originally produced it.

Ultimately, outcomes tell you whether you succeeded. But it is behaviours that tell you whether you’re likely to succeed again.

We should be playing the long game.

So, how do we shift the focus?

Putting Behaviours in the Spotlight

Performance metrics still dominate most conversations. Partly because they’re easier to measure and partly because they’re what the outside world notices.

We need a subtle but important mindset shift. Stop obsessing over outcomes alone and start paying closer attention to the behaviours producing them.

If the behaviours are right, the results tend to follow, even if not immediately.

Ask yourself: What actually moves the needle here?

For a sales team, that might mean focusing less on the number of closed deals and more on the actions that increase the likelihood of closing them:

• Building rapport with contacts

• Demonstrating empathy when issues arise

• Being proactive with meaningful check ins

• Building trust over time

For a client service team, success may come from:

• Developing a deep understanding of client challenges

• Sharing relevant insights that genuinely help

• Being consistently responsive and reliable

• Building credibility and sharing your industry expertise

The goal is to identify the real ingredients behind success so you can intentionally reinforce them.

These behaviours rarely appear neatly on dashboards, but their impact on performance is enormous.

So, it’s worth asking:

How do these behaviours currently show up in my team?

What would excellent look like?

What needs to change to close the gap?

But there’s another question that matters just as much:

Am I rewarding those behaviours?

And be honest with yourself on that one.

It’s easy to recognise outcomes. Positive client feedback. An impactful presentation. A major sale finally crossing the finish line.

But are you recognising the behaviours that drove those results?

More importantly, are you recognising those behaviours when the result wasn’t the one you hoped for?

When organisations reward outcomes alone, they risk undervaluing people doing excellent work in difficult circumstances.

But My Senior Leaders Are Still Obsessed with Metrics

Many senior leaders aren’t close to the day to day reality of every team. They can’t observe hundreds of interactions, conversations and decisions every week.

Metrics are often their way of understanding whether things are broadly heading in the right direction.

Is it ideal? Probably not.

Is it practical? Usually.

Your senior leadership team probably understands that curiosity, expertise and empathy matter. The challenge is that they’re difficult to measure consistently.

So those qualities often get translated into targets, revenue growth, retention rates or customer satisfaction scores.

And that’s perfectly reasonable.

The mistake is treating those targets as the entire conversation.

They should be the starting point.

If senior leadership decides employee retention should sit above 75 per cent, don’t stop at the number.

Start asking better questions.

What makes people stay here?

What causes people to leave?

What do our best managers do differently?

What are other organisations doing better than us?

While senior leaders continue monitoring retention figures, you and your managers can focus on the factors that actually influence them: the systems you create, the behaviours you encourage and the everyday experiences people have at work.

That’s where meaningful change happens.

And that’s how you move from hitting a target once to sustaining success over time.

Results Follow Behaviour

Organisations that focus only on performance are essentially measuring history. Organisations that focus on behaviours are shaping the future.

It’s a bit like my bathroom scale.

The number wasn’t going to magically change because I stared at it every morning with enough emotional intensity.

What I actually needed was habits, structure and consistency.

The same applies to organisations.

Results matter, of course they do.

But they’re usually the outcome of hundreds of smaller moments happening every day. How people communicate. How decisions are made. How problems are handled. What gets rewarded and what gets quietly ignored.

Focusing on results alone won’t create sustainable success.

Reinforcing the right behaviours just might.

So, ask yourself:

If someone wanted to earn recognition in your organisation tomorrow, what behaviours would they quickly learn to display?

And are those the behaviours you actually want more of?