Key to success

- [Narrator] Link number four, recognizing the kind of results that your organization should be judged on is the key to success. The role of good leadership is to know what needs to be fixed to achieve the organization's mission. This means keeping a keen eye on performance and how it measures up against criteria. For this to happen, you need to ask the fourth question, what are our results? In focusing your attention on results, it's important to recognize that long-term success often comes from short-term accomplishments. When thinking of the results you hope to achieve, make sure to think both long and short-term. The staff of a small family-run mental health center defined its mission as: to enable the recovery of people "with serious and persistent mental illness. Not only did they judge their results against the ultimate goal of recovery, but they judged all the small steps it took for a patient to get there. This meant checking on how many group sessions the patients were attending, whether there was a reduction of hospitalization, and if there was an improvement in how well participants understood their conditions. All this helped the institution understand what programs were working and which needed refinement so that more patients could return to a stable family life and a steady job. When looking at results, you should pay attention to both the qualitative and the quantitative. Qualitative results are about subjective non-numerical information that can help you understand your customer's experiences. For the education director at a major museum, one great qualitative result was being told by a man that the museum had changed his life by opening up his teenage mind to a new world of possibilities. This inspired a new initiative at the museum to bring in more at-risk teenagers. Quantitative results, on the other hand, focus on statistics and numerical data. For many businesses, profit and earning speak the strongest, but for a nonprofit organization, the important numbers might also include the percentage of welfare recipients who gained employment after completing the company's job training program, or whether child abuse rates fell after introducing 24-hour crisis care. These measures provide a clear understanding of the effectiveness of your organization and the difference it's making. Appraising your performance will also help you with the last question.