Do you have an action plan in place to help you reach your goals? Do you monitor it? Do you follow up if things aren’t being accomplished? If you answered “yes” to those questions you are probably doing a good job executing.

Now, here’s a harder set of questions. Has anything changed as a result of your actions? Are your customers or people better off? Are you tracking and following up on the impact?

Action is important but so are results. In many organizations, people are working hard and accomplishing a lot of work. Yet, the real changes to the business are few and far between.

Perhaps there is an opportunity to change the focus of our planning. If you are already doing action plans, you have the skill and discipline to execute. The difference is what is being executed. Instead of laying out tasks and deliverables, lay out a series of results or “impacts” to the business. Then manage your plan according to that.  What’s going to change?  What will be happening differently?  What will increase and what will decrease?  That is your impact plan.  And, your impact plan can be incremental.  Perhaps your ultimate goal is to reach 1,000 new customers.  Your impact plan might parse that into groups of 200 at a time.

You’ll still have to manage all of the activities. However, you wont’ stop once an activity is completed. You’ll keep focused until the benefit of that activity is realized.

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.