Are you an action planner? Do you make sure that you leave every meeting with a clear list of actions, responsibilities, and due dates? If so, you are probably getting a lot done. But here’s the question: Are you achieving anything?

Getting things done is about completing activities. Achieving something is about creating positive changes to your business. In many organizations, these two ideas get confused.

After a workshop on expectation setting and clarity, one leader listed two “action items” on her follow up plan:

Create team expectations
Talk with team about expectations

Both actions had due dates. The leader took accountability for achieving them. The due date arrived and both actions were complete. A month later, she called me to say that her team still didn’t seem to “get it”.

The plan let her off the hook too early. After completing the two activities (and checking them off), she went on to other things.

Instead, things might have been different if she had an outcome-plan that said, “each team member is clear on my expectations.” It’s a subtle but important difference. Simply writing out team expectations and talking about them wouldn’t be sufficient. She’d have to confirm that her team understood the expectations. If they didn’t she’d need to take additional actions until they did.

It’s true that she could have achieved the same thing with the actions if she simply followed up and adjusted as needed. While true, it’s not likely. The value of an action plan is also its potential liability. It creates focus. Leaders, especially busy leaders get so focused on achieving the plan, they lose sight of the bigger picture. They don’t take the time to check back to see if the result was achieved.

Outcome plans take advantage of the clarity and focus created by action plans. However, they change that focus to the end result rather than the activities. That might just be the edge that you need to ensure that what you do makes a difference.

Tips for creating outcome plans:

1) List outcomes! An outcome is a positive change to your business or people. Having a deliverable completed is not an outcome until someone or something is benefiting from it.  In that case case, the “benefit” is the real outcome and for what you should be striving.

2) Create sub-outcomes: If the overall outcome is too big, break it down into smaller outcomes so that you can track your progress. For example, while your overall outcome might be to reduce costs, one of your smaller outcomes might be to first get people working more efficiently.

3) Be aggressive but realistic – Outcomes sometimes take longer to achieve than actions so be realistic. However, be aggressive as well. If you set your outcomes too far into the future, nothing will get accomplished.

4) Don’t stretch the outcome date to accommodate the activities. Speed up the activities to reach the outcome quickly.

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Brad Kolar is the President of Kolar Associates, a leadership consulting and workforce productivity consulting firm. He can be reached at brad.kolar@kolarassociates.com.