Quick: what’s the most important determinant of a company’s success?
Did you say Culture? Leadership? People? Something like that?
If so, good for you. You’re onto something.
Now, here’s your challenge: since people do what gets inspected (not expected), and what gets inspected is what gets measured, you’re going to have to fight a torrent of pressure pushing you to solve financial problems with financial solutions… not because people think financial solutions work, necessarily, but because those are the ones that we can measure.
Never mind that they got us into our current financial crisis. The power to focus on what gets measured is simply that strong: here are homepages from BusinessWeek, The Wall Street Journal, and Fortune. All of them, on May 10, contained stories entirely focused on financial metrics. We’re still very much an economy driven by dollars and finances.
(Kudos to Fortune for having a “management” tab… even though the stories on that page were a bit… light.)
Just because we cannot measure the value of human behavior—and let me be clear, by “measure,” I do not mean with a Myers-Briggs test—does not mean that human behavior does not have a critical impact on our financial well-being. Denying the impact of leadership, culture, people, etc. due to lack of measureability would be like denying the health benefits of blueberries due to the inability to measure the impact of antioxidants. Logically, that makes no sense!
Even if you don’t deny the benefit of blueberries and their antioxidants, you still have a problem when putting together nutrition information boxes: if you can’t measure the value of antioxidants, you can’t put that information in the nutrition info box, and if you can’t put it into the box, then others can’t use the info to make a decision.
It’s a tough spot.
Unless you have the creativity to spot causal relationships and the courage to stand by your convictions, you may find yourself trapped once more by the same-old-same-old quarterly earnings pressures.
When you do, just remember that when I asked you what the most important determinant of your company’s success was, you answered people.
Stay focused on what’s most important, and you’ll be fine.
Jason – great post! I have always felt strongly that what gets measured gets done. No need to establish lofty goals and objectives that don’t “move the needle” for the organization. Aside from quarterly earnings which are very important) there are lots of important goals that are not tied to revenue at all. Great post!
Jason, I think you’re confusing “measurement” and “countability.” Supervisors all over the world measure behavior and performance when they set expectations and then follow up to see if what was agreed to is what’s happening. Like Browning, they say, “Here you miss or there exceed the mark” and everybody knows how they’re doing.
Jason –
I agree! I’ve been trying to come up with a meaningful “dashboard” for leadership development, leadership, training, and/or HR. It’s tough, but we can. However, no matter how creative we get with our metrics, nothing seems to carry the clout of financial metrics like revenue, earnings, costs, market share, etc…
Of course what gets measured gets done. But what gets rewarded gets done well. How nice would it be if you could measure recognition? Even better if you could use metrics the CFO/CEO care about — increases in performance and productivity, especially against the company’s strategic objectives.
Impossible you say? Not at all. The answer lies in how you structure the program, the metrics you use, and the data you collect (nothing new there). Much more on how to do this (including a detailed white paper) available here: http://globoforce.blogspot.com/2009/05/measuring-recognition-building-business.html