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Outcome bias runs on a shortcut: it's far easier to judge what happened than to judge how it was decided. A result is visible and immediate. The reasoning behind it, and the luck or circumstance that shaped it, usually isn't, so the result becomes the whole story.
For a leader, this shows up as praise or blame handed out on the strength of the number alone. A win gets treated as evidence the strategy worked, and a loss gets treated as evidence it didn't, regardless of what was actually knowable at the time the call was made. The decision and the outcome get judged as though they were the same thing.
Outcome bias is closely related to recency bias, though it distorts a different part of the picture. Recency bias skews which period of time you weigh most heavily. Outcome bias skews which part of a decision you judge, the result instead of the reasoning behind it.
The practical tell is a result nobody investigated. If a good number was accepted without anyone asking why it happened, the decision was never actually evaluated. Only the outcome was.
In 2005, a competitor of ours was bought by a large blue-chip company, and the takeover disrupted their warehousing and distribution badly enough that their customers couldn't get orders filled. Those customers came to us instead, and our sales rose by 25% almost overnight. We treated the number as proof we'd smashed our targets through good selling, and revelled in it. Nobody asked how much of that growth had come from our own decisions and how much from a rival's supply chain falling over, or noticed that some areas barely grew at all while the average looked strong.