“Good habits lead to good results.” This is good advice, if somewhat generic and un-actionable. But too often it gets carved in stone to the point where the habits become more important than the results.

Here is when you should focus on method over outcomes: When you don’t have any outcomes yet. When you aren’t experienced and need to build a solid foundation. When previously good outcomes have slipped. When you’re trying to pass foundational knowledge onto others.

Here is when you should focus on outcomes over method: When the outcomes are solid. When the outcomes are actually improving as different methods are being tried. When changes in conditions are making existing methods outdated or untenable.

When I trained salespeople on a regular basis, we would always start with the basics. I wouldn’t start by putting a quota in front of them, I would start by training them in their daily activities – the habits and methods that led to closed deals. I did this because inexperienced salespeople needed structure to guide their activities and a foundation to learn from. The smart ones could have figured it out via trial and error, but why put them through the pain? Instead, I laid it out for them: make this many calls, do this much research, create this many proposals, etc. Quickly these habits would begin producing results, but skipping steps or cutting corners would have a big negative impact. So during training, I focused entirely on habits, regardless of outcomes. Someone with bad habits could luck into an early, easy sale and someone developing good habits might still have an unlucky week, so I didn’t let outcomes cloud the process when there were still too few of them to be reliable data.

Now, when I managed salespeople, experienced salespeople, I had an entirely different mindset. After all, I wasn’t paying them to make calls, I was paying them to close deals. That was important to remember. I knew that generally, “more calls = more deals,” but I also know that the world isn’t so perfectly arranged. One of my people might have been doing something different that week because of unexpected circumstances and closed a lot of revenue. Did I care if they only made half as many calls? Of course not. I cared about outcomes. I only even addressed method with my experienced people in two circumstances:

1. Their outcomes had started to slip. If they weren’t producing results, we explored why and went back to basics if they weren’t using the foundations. If they were, then it was something else, and I’m glad to know that.
2. If their outcomes were unusually good, and they weren’t using the traditional methods, then I wanted to know what they were doing! It might have been something unique to their style that couldn’t be duplicated, but it might have been a new method that could supplement or even replace our old one and improve outcomes for everyone.

Those two situations both tremendously benefited my entire team. They allowed me to essentially always have little experiments running, evolving my whole team’s process while each individual member still contributed to the group outcome and got to do their best work.

I saw far too many other sales managers in my organization be incredibly strict about things like number of calls, number of visits, and other metrics – even with their best reps who were producing like crazy. And those reps quickly got frustrated with the micromanagement and found other teams. Sometimes they found my team, but too often they found teams at other companies.

It’s a tricky balance to strike, I know. As a manager, trusting in outcomes can feel like you aren’t managing. But one of the most essential lessons of leadership is exactly that: Not everything needs to be “managed.” Some things need to be encouraged, trusted, and rewarded instead.

Whenever you’re involved with solving a problem with or for someone else, the most powerful and important question you can ask is: “What have you tried?”

I’ve made the mistake plenty of times of not asking this before I started working on a solution. Many, many times I would have saved myself a lot of time and numerous headaches if I’d simply asked this question first.

Why is it so great?

First, it solves two different kinds of “assumption problems,” both of which I’ve dealt with many times. One type of bad assumption is assuming that the other people have already tried the most obvious (to you) solution, so you don’t even suggest it. Oh, they locked themselves out of their house and called you to help? Well, surely they already tried the back door to see if it’s unlocked, so I won’t even suggest that. Guess what? More often than you might think, that “obvious” solution didn’t occur to them at all. If you’d asked, you’d have known.

The other type of assumption problem is the reverse – assuming they haven’t tried certain solutions. So you make a bunch of suggestions that are sound in theory but they’ve already tried and didn’t work for some reason you weren’t aware of. If you’d asked, you’d have gathered that info instead of losing credibility by suggesting things that have already failed. And hey, you might even discover that how they tried that particular solution might be why it failed – a few tweaks later and boom.

So first and foremost, you’re just solving efficiency and communication problems by asking this question early. As soon as you’re “brought in” to solve anything, it should be your first ask.

Even beyond this, the question has a deeper value. It lets you know the kinds of people you’re working with. Are they solution-oriented, having tried many things before calling you? Or did they buzz you the second they hit a speed bump? Were the things they tried sound ideas, or are they clearly still novices learning their way? Are they frustrated and defeatist, calling you in not because they expect a solution, but simply because they want to make it someone else’s problem?

A lot of my work is helping other people solve their problems. That last part is the most essential – the solutions I can bring to the table are heavily dependent on the mindsets of the people asking for my help. I know every problem is solvable, but not everyone feels the same way. Asking “What have you tried?” is a nice, non-accusatory way of discovering that.

The next time you’re asked to help solve a problem, make “What have you tried?” the first thing you try.

If you want to improve at something, you need more than practice. You need data.

You can shoot a thousand free throws and you will definitely get better at free throws. But if every hundred attempts you review footage, map your missed shots, compare successful throws to technique and stance, and all that other stuff – you’ll get much better.

The challenge, of course, is that collecting data isn’t free or effortless. It’s easier to just make free throws. At the same time though, for most people (and organizations), collecting data should be much easier than they make it!

What often happens is that the data collection process doesn’t get improved because the bad, inefficient process hurts the wrong people. If you touch a stove and your hand gets burnt, you’ll quickly learn not to touch the stove. But if you touch the stove and by some magic someone else’s hand gets burnt, then you’re never going to learn your lesson and your poor cursed friend is going to be in a lot of pain.

Consider an all-too-common example: In sales, most sales reps have to not only perform sales activities, they also have to report on those activities. They have to log calls or in-person visits, track results, maybe even fill out daily or weekly reports, etc. The value of that data is very high, of course. It enables sales managers and trainers to target inefficiencies in the sales techniques, it enables reps to learn and improve, etc.

The problem is that in many cases, the way this data gets collected is by onerous data entry tasks on the part of the reps, often to the point where it takes more time than the actual sales activity itself! Think about the revenue lost by asking your sales team to only sell half the time. Is the improvement from the data making up that gap? Probably not!

(Imagine that a baseball player is in spring training, practicing swings. After every single swing, the player himself is required to walk over to the camera that just filmed him, watch the tape, and fill out a report on things like angle of swing, stance, etc. Sure, reviewing your footage is good! But that’s such a horribly inefficient process that the player is barely getting any practice at all.)

So why doesn’t that sales data collection process improve? Because it’s not the managers who have to collect it – it’s the reps. The wrong people get hurt by it. In general, bad organizational processes often work this way: They’re implemented by people who aren’t the direct users, and so the process stays bad.

Not only is a slow and inefficient process for collecting data a resource loss, it also often degrades the quality of the data! Because guess what, people cheat. There’s this story from WWII where soldiers tasked with counting the dead from every battle were just making up random numbers instead of risking their lives by going back to the battlefield and possibly becoming one of them. (They were found out, incidentally, because none of their reported daily counts ended in 5 or 0; the soldiers were trying to pick random-sounding numbers to increase the credibility of their fake reports, so they never picked “round” numbers that they felt sounded like estimates. But statistically, 20% of the results should have ended with 5 or 0, and none of them did.)

If soldiers will lie about how many dead bodies there are on a battlefield, your sales reps will definitely just hastily scrawl in numbers to quicken an onerous report.

Do everything you can to make the process more efficient. Use automated tools. Hire separate enablement folks to just focus on the reporting side of whatever you’re doing. Reduce the data you collect to its absolute most minimal form that’s still useful. Whatever it takes, just remember that you can’t make the reporting harder than the task, or the task won’t get done.

The best we can offer may be less than what someone deserves. That will never be a good enough reason not to give all that you can.

A lot of people in my household, myself included, made some big mistakes this weekend.

Errors in judgment, poor behavior, it all seemed to happen. We all ended up with something to apologize to someone else for this weekend.

What a wonderful opportunity to practice grace, forgiveness, and (of course) responsibility!

The most important thing when a mistake is made: own it. “Yes, that was absolutely my mistake and I shouldn’t have done that.” Don’t make excuses. Don’t explain why you did it. Don’t introduce mitigating circumstances. Certainly don’t bring up ways the other person has made related mistakes in the past, or how they might actually be partially responsible for this one. Let me be clear: doing any of those things makes you a jerk.

Owning the mistakes makes apologizing for it remarkably easy. Correcting it even easier. All the hard stuff is out of the way as soon as you admit you made a mistake in the first place.

And when someone does that, they’re remarkably easy to forgive.

It’s so easy not to do things. It’s a curse, how easy it is. But things are good – partially because it’s good to be active, but also because activity leads to opportunity.

Everything you plan to do comes with ten things you didn’t plan. Conversations and observations and moments of joy when one of your kids unexpectedly pets a shark in the aquarium when they weren’t brave enough to before.

There are little gems in every corner but the one you’re in, so go and do something.

Sometimes we give because we want someone else to have, and sometimes we give because we want to not have, and sometimes we give because we want to get.

Wanting someone else to have something is also a value judgment. Maybe they don’t want it! Maybe what is a pleasure for you is, for them, a burden.

Sometimes we feel guilty about getting rid of something – or we feel shamed, like we were wrong to get it. Then we alleviate that shame on someone else’s back; it’s not a waste if this other person ends up enjoying it! Sometimes that means we’ve just given someone else our problem.

Reciprocity is real, and I don’t necessarily think it’s bad. But if you’re giving a gift simply because you’re imagining it’s a token for an obligation from them in the future, you have not only missed the point but you’re going to be sorely disappointed more often than not.

The point is, giving can be complicated. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it, of course. It just means it isn’t a perfect gesture that always results in a good outcome. When we look at our actions that we know may cause some harm but are necessary, we consider them more carefully, execute them with more tact. When we’re doing something that we think by default is “all upside,” we’re often careless. “Why should I consider this person’s feelings or situation at all? I’m giving them a gift! They should be grateful and happy!”

Maybe. But if you actually want people to happy, you have to place that desire above your own satisfaction.

You’re fine until you aren’t, and you only aren’t once.

No matter what you’re facing, that’s the measure. “Is this the problem that defeats me?” If it isn’t, you’ll be fine. And it isn’t, so you are.

One thing that has always annoyed me is when any authority figure tries to catch someone breaking a rule at the expense of actually preventing the transgression in the first place.

The most obvious example is the “speed trap.” You have a police cruiser parked somewhere that can’t be seen from the road, often in a spot where drivers might be prone to driving faster than the posted speed limit. Often it’s the case that a low speed limit makes sense during high-traffic times during the day, but a higher speed is perfectly safe in the evening or on the weekends, but speed limits don’t work like that.

So lo and behold, someone zips by that cruiser and then boom, on come the lights and sirens and the driver gets a nasty ticket. It always struck me as transparently exploitative. If the goal of speed limits is safety, then the aim of enforcement should be to keep people safe – and letting people break a law designed to keep them safe just so you can catch them doing it is deliberately putting lives at risk, right? You could have parked your cruiser in plain sight and everyone would have slowed down. The roads would be safer – but the town wouldn’t get its ticket money. When you see that, you can’t unsee it. Either the police are deliberately putting people’s lives at risk to make money, or they aren’t putting people’s lives at risk because the speed limit could easily be higher (or time-dependent) without making anyone less safe. Whichever it is, it clearly serves the agenda of the authority figures and not the people they have authority over.

That’s an obvious example, but the pattern is everywhere. You can see it in the behavior of almost anyone whose job is to enforce rules. Principals who wait until they know kids are smoking in the bathroom to barge in and catch them instead of just being more visible so they don’t try. Bosses who ambush their employees during slow times to try to catch them surfing the internet instead of just managing them more productively. Even parents do this kind of thing to their kids, all the time.

It’s all designed to intimidate. Authority through fear. They don’t want to overly punish, necessarily – that’s why these figures often “catch and release,” giving mild punishments along with the reminder that “they’re always watching.” It’s to get as many people on their “first offense” as possible, so that combined with the fact that they now think that hidden authority figures could be anywhere, they get paranoid and (in theory) stay on their best behavior all the time.

There are two problems with it: One, “authority through fear” is just bad in general. It doesn’t teach people to value a system proactively, it makes that system their enemy. Maybe you need people to have this sort of paranoia-based adherence in a prison, but in most systems, your goal isn’t just obedience to a rule set, it’s respect for the system and environment itself. Running a school like this doesn’t make kids want to be a part of the learning environment, it makes them treat school like a prison.

Which brings us to the second problem: When people view the system they’re in as an enemy, they start resisting. Fear-based authority breeds rebels. And it breeds smart rebels. People learn how to beat speed traps, sneaky principals, overbearing parents. In fact, they have the advantage – the authority figure is ruling through fear, and once you’re not afraid anymore, a little paranoia just makes you sharp. Once you start treating the system of rules as a game to be beaten and outsmarted instead of something you respect, it’s trivially easy to beat it most of the time.

Don’t enforce rules this way. If you have behaviors in any system you oversee that you don’t want people to engage in, then give them reasons not to engage in them. Some people still will! But some people still will no matter how you try to enforce rules. But when people respect their environment, it happens far less, because people won’t generally want to. And that’s always more powerful than them being afraid to.

Some people just thrive on handing you stress. They’re stressed about everything, in a constant state of neurotic panic, and they try to give it to you. They might do this by trying to pull you into their panic with emotional outbursts. They might try to let their own lack of project management skills overflow into work that they try to get you to do. Whatever the form of the contagion, you need to remember to innoculate yourself.

Just because someone else is in a high/negative emotional state doesn’t mean you have to be. Their urgency is not currency by which they buy your attention. If they can’t take a few deep breaths and circle back to you at a scheduled time, then don’t make exceptions. Don’t trade your own sanity to someone who’s just going to chew it up.