Early in my presentation of business development systems, I listed three key elements to analyze and improve those systems. One of these elements is results, or the evaluation of your systems.

Certainly, one of the most important business systems is the development of your staff. That begins with the hiring of staff members, and then evaluating their performances to improve them.

One of the mistakes that many large and small businesses make is to base the hiring and evaluation of staff members on whether they can accomplish a list of tasks. That is important at a fundamental level. What makes an employee outstanding and valuable, however, is his or her ability to generate the results you want when performing those tasks.

Hiring and evaluating employees can be much easier if you create task- oriented and results-oriented job descriptions for each position. For example, an important task of a receptionist at a martial arts school is to answer the phone. It’s important for many reasons, but the most important is that it is the first point of contact with potentially interested prospects.

With proper training, however, a receptionist will be able to do more than answer the phone in a friendly and professional manner. He or she will know how to handle an information call (or immediately give the call to someone who can) to maximize potential sales by obtaining prospect information. That is the expected results of answering the phone, which is the task.