The 2 Critical Updates Top Leaders Always Ask For

As leaders, we need to stay informed about our team's progress. Two primary types of updates from your team are particularly important:

1. The initiatives they take
2. The outcomes of those initiatives.

When asking for status updates from our teams, we need to ensure to address both these types of updates.

Initiatives

Initiatives are the actions and steps our teams take to tackle tasks, solve problems, or explore new opportunities. Some examples include:

1. Identifying a problem area
2. Bringing in a new lead
3. Attending key meetings
4. Delegating tasks to others

These updates are super valuable because they highlight someone’s creativity, consistency, and resourcefulness. Plus, these initiatives can grow into full-blown projects that bring in more business. Updates on initiatives tend to come in frequently, usually daily or weekly.

Outcomes

Outcomes are the concrete results generated from the initiatives your team is working on. Examples of outcome updates include:

1. Delivering a product to a customer
2. Fully resolving an operational issue
3. Implementing a cost-saving process
4. Successfully onboarding a new client

These updates highlight how tasks and initiatives impact the bottom line, and they’re the key way we measure team productivity. Outcome updates tend to be less frequent, typically shared on a monthly or quarterly basis.

Mix it up!

Initiatives fuel innovation, and outcomes show if that innovation is really making an impact. As good leaders, we should recognize effort but also celebrate the wins. A simple way to do this could be a weekly check-in on initiatives and a monthly review of outcomes—whatever works best for your tasks and workflow.