IN THIS EPISODE:

Article: How to Rebut 3 Common Objections to Measuring Performance.
Q&A: Does linking salaries and rewards to performance change people’s attitudes and behaviour to ensure effectiveness?
Quick Tip: What to do when you don’t have the buy-in to start measuring performance.

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It will be a torrent of ‘yeah-buts’ – basically, objections to giving time, money or effort to performance measurement. Are you going to sit back and take it, or do something about it before it even happens?

OBJECTION 1: Performance measurement hasn’t worked in the past.

What’s happening with this objection is that the person is assuming that because there has so far been no successful approach to performance measurement, that means there can’t be a successful approach in the future. Your focus should be on raising and challenging this assumption, and offering an approach to performance measurement that acknowledges the causes of failure and show how that approach solves those causes.

A constructive response: “You’re absolutely right that performance measurement has had problems – we’ve got too many measures, people don’t find the measures useful, they don’t align to our strategy and staff are spending too much time collecting data for these useless measures. So if we want performance measurement to succeed, we obviously need to take a different approach, and an approach that deliberately solves and prevents these kinds of problems. Here’s how my proposed approach does that…”

OBJECTION 2: We don’t have time for performance measurement.

At the foundation of this objection is the assumption that everything people are currently doing is of a higher priority than performance measurement. We already know that people spend a lot of time on urgent things that aren’t in alignment with strategy or that are rework resulting from ineffective or inefficient processes. You simply need to highlight how good performance measures can reduce the time wasted on these kinds of activities, and therefore is of a higher priority than these activities.

A constructive response: “I agree – it seems like we’re all getting busier and busier and the last thing we need is something ELSE to try and squeeze into our days. And yet I can’t help noticing how a good proportion of the things we do can be done so much easier and quicker. For example, [insert some well-research examples from your organisation]. I truly believe that it’s better to risk taking time out from some of these urgent-but-not-important activities, in order to prevent them from continuing to happen in the future.”

OBJECTION 3: We already know what matters, performance measures won’t tell us anything new.

The assumption propping up this objection is that just by looking around or relying on our experience with the work we do, we can see and know everything that matters. But the truth is, we all have biases caused by our values and moods and what we notice and what we don’t notice. And these biases prevent us from seeing objectively the patterns and trends that data can show us more quickly and easily. It’s not hard to demonstrate this with a few examples of how data has led people to surprising and valuable insights they otherwise would have missed.

A constructive response: “Our people have a fantastic knowledge of the work they do and a very strong commitment to doing their best. Our job is to empower them, so they can more easily focus on what will produce the best results. We can’t expect them to simultaneously watch the big picture as well as what’s right in front of them. Performance measures are great for showing them what’s happening in the big picture, quickly and easily, so they can make the best choices about what’s currently in front of them. For example, [insert some examples of how performance measures have produced insights that no-one noticed from just looking around].”

Be prepared, respectful, honest and focused on the big picture.

Handling objections to performance measurement requires that you dig a little deeper to understand the assumptions people are making that lead to their objections, raising those assumptions so everyone realises they are there, and then stimulating some dialogue to move beyond the objection.

It’s not about being a smarty-pants or winning a debate with the person who voices the objection. It’s about elevating the dialogue to a constructive level, so you can all get a better understanding and movement forward.

TAKE ACTION:
Which of these three objections is blocking your path to better performance measurement? Take pen to paper for 15 minutes and prepare some well-informed, respectful and constructive responses to the ways you expect this objection to be expressed by your managers or colleagues.

IN THIS EPISODE:

Article: 3 Things You Need On Every KPI Graph.
Q&A: How to get Executives understanding different methods of reporting performance results.
Quick Tip: How to choose the right graph type for your KPI or performance information.

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IN THIS EPISODE:

Article: 5 Steps to Simple and Actionable Customer Surveys
Q&A: How to measure customer satisfaction WITHOUT using surveys
Quick Tip: 4 questions to include on the most concise customer survey questionnaire you’ll probably ever see.

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Download mp3

IN THIS EPISODE:

Introduction: The motivation and purpose of this Measure Up podcast.
Article: Do Universally Perfect KPIs Exist?
Q&A: How to use KPI’s for performance improvement not traditional training KPI’s
Quick Tip: Where KPIs or performance measures fit into your strategic or operational plans.

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http://www.staceybarr.com/measure-up/56-how-to-get-buy-in-through-socialising-your-performance-measures/ http://www.staceybarr.com/measure-up/56-how-to-get-buy-in-through-socialising-your-performance-measures/#comments Tue, 19 Oct 2010 05:38:42 +0000 Stacey Barr http://www.staceybarr.com/measure-up/?p=318 Our typical approaches to get people to take ownership of performance measures or KPIs don’t work very well, do they?

Measure Gallery

Invitations, not agendas or meeting requests.

In our haste and eagerness to get people involved in measuring performance, it’s easy to fall straight into typical organisational or bureaucratic protocol and schedule a meeting. But protocol makes people feel a sense of obligation or expectation to attend, even if they don’t want to or don’t have the time.

Obligation and expectation get in the way of buy-in happening, because they are a ‘push’ approach to measurement. True buy-in can only happen when people feel pulled or compelled toward measurement. It’s okay if not everyone wants to be involved, and it’s absolutely okay to wait until they decide they want to be involved.

TIP: When you socialise your performance measures, it’s better that people take part because they chose to, and that they give the time they can afford to give.

Dialogue, not presentations.

Death by PowerPoint is no joke. When you give a presentation to suggest a suite of performance measures to people, what you’re killing is their engagement, and any chance that people will feel a personal sense of ownership of those measures.

Dialogue is a different tack, and it means that people aren’t expected to passively accept a set of measures but rather talk about what performance measurement really means, which performance results are really important to measure, and which measures are useful or not.

TIP: When you socialise your performance measures, give tonnes of time and space for natural and unforced dialogue to happen.

Involvement, not consultation.

Ask for honest and constructive feedback about existing performance measures, and really mean it. Normally an email might get sent around to stakeholders asking them to provide some feedback about an attached measures report. Don’t bother. That won’t generate any kind of buy-in at all. It will smack of a cursory attempt to consult (but ultimately ignore) people’s input.

Instead, get people physically involved where they can ask questions and talk about the measures with each other. Better still, shelve your existing measures for a while, and let people come together to design the measures they believe are best, and feel excited about.

TIP: When you socialise your performance measures, make it clear that nothing is set in concrete and everyone’s ideas are worth exploring.

Standing, not sitting.

This might seem like a strange idea: to encourage standing when you discuss performance measures as opposed to sitting down. Again it’s about breaking off another chunk of that bureaucratic casing that stifles buy-in.

Hang your existing measures (and the goals or strategy or objectives they monitor) on walls in a meeting room and invite people to come along, whenever they like and for as little or as long as they like, to discuss the measures and share their ideas and feedback. If you remove the chairs from the meeting room, you’ll find people will move more freely and that means they’ll think more freely and discuss more freely.

TIP: When you socialise your performance measures, do it in an open space for people to mill around and come and go as it suits them.
So basically, socialising your performance measures means using a social process that acknowledges that people are people and that buy-in is not something you can get, it’s something you have to let happen by removing the typical obstacles.

TAKE ACTION:
Who would you like to engage in performance measurement in your organisation? Why not arrange a casual ‘gallery’ style event around your performance measures, and invite them to come in and share their feedback for making those measures more meaningful?

I don’t profess to know what they all are, but through running training with my coach, I’ve learned a few that mean a lot to me. I hope they can help you too, in your endeavours to lead your organisation to excel through measuring and achieving what matters.

Principle 1: Run the kilometre you’re running right now, not the kilometres you’re yet to run.

A weekly training session in my running program is to do a series of 1km intervals, as fast as I can. I started out having to do 5 of them, on an interval of 6 minutes and 30 seconds. If I finished the kilometre in 4 minutes 30 seconds, then I had 2 minutes to recover before starting the next one.

When you’re running flat out for a kilometre, it absolutely and positively DOES NOT help to think about how many you have left to do. What happens is that in your head you’re running the kilometre your legs are running right now in addition to each of the other kilometres you have left. It feels many times harder and sometimes even impossible. That’s why my coach Rina says, ‘Just run the kilometre you’re running right now and focus on nothing else.’

Overwhelm and premature defeat in establishing a powerful performance measurement system in an organisation is caused by a similar problem: you’re thinking about how much there is yet to do, or how much different things should be to how they are now. To pursue excellence, you’re better off focusing just a few smaller areas first – perhaps one team or one strategic goal or one business process at a time. Then you’ll keep building on those smaller successes, to bigger and faster successes.

Principle 2: Be bold and push yourself: you’ll be surprised how far outside your comfort zone you can go and you’ll still be okay.

My coach Rina calls those 1km interval sessions the ‘vomit sessions’ because the idea is to push yourself to the point of almost throwing up, where you’ve hit your lactic threshold. Rina says that most people don’t get faster because they’re scared to push themselves hard enough. But because our bodies, like any adaptive system, have the default set at degenerate, we have to keep giving it challenges, pushing its boundaries, to shake the default and ask it to achieve new levels of performance.

I’ve nearly thrown up several times during these 1km interval sessions, but it was more than worth it to now say that my average times have come down by 20 seconds over 3 months. But I had to trust that I’d be okay if I pushed myself where I’d never gone before, and that my body would handle it just fine.

If we want organisational or business performance to shift to new levels, we have to do the same. We’ve got to push the boundaries, push the threshold of what feels possible, be bold enough to go into uncomfortable territory. Nothing will truly change otherwise. Usually, for performance measurement, this means pushing the social boundaries, pushing the misbeliefs and limiting attitudes people have about measuring.

Principle 3: When your goal is backed by an action plan, it’s all downhill (so to speak).

If you’ve ever done any kind of sport or exercise, you’ll remember times when you woke up in the morning and thought ‘Good grief, I just can’t do it today,’ and rolled over and went back to sleep. I used to do it too! The difference now is that I have a goal, to run 10km in 45 minutes this year, and it’s backed by the training program Rina writes for me each month. I don’t have to think about it, I just have to do it. (And it doesn’t hurt that I want Rina to keep taking me seriously!)

When you know exactly what to do, when to do it and why you’re doing it, it’s so much easier to get it done. So even though I know some of my running sessions will be very hard and have me doing uphill surges, it still feels downhill because I don’t have to think about how far I’ll run or where I’ll run or how hard I’ll work. I just follow the plan.

Too many organisations take an ad hoc approach to performance measurement, not realising that to get it right, and get it right quickly, there is a deliberate process to follow to select the best measures, implement those measures and make it easy to use those measures to improve performance. To pursue excellence in performance measurement, you need a deliberate action plan to design and execute your measurement process, so each week you know what to focus on, what to aim for, and why.

Principle 4: Be your goal, be the success you aim for, not just while you’re running but all the time.

Rina moves fast every time I see her, not just when she’s running. She seems to throw herself into whatever she’s doing and I love being around her energy. Have you noticed that about other high achievers? World champion ultra distance and mountain runner Lizzy Hawker says “Looking back… I was ‘training’ in the raw each and every day of my life. Endurance for me is a way of life rather than a sport.”

For me, I can now see that to achieve my running goals, I need to act right now like the person who achieves lots of goals, the person who is always getting better at something, who loves pursuing goals. It keeps me in a mindset of possibility, and strangely, a mindset of enjoying the journey even more than the destination.

My business coach, Robert Gerrish, said something like this once: “A leader, a REAL leader, is someone who leads ALL the time, is inspiring ALL the time, is empassioned ALL the time – not just turning it on for 60 minutes. It’s on ALL the time.” That’s how we need to be as performance measurement practitioners. We have to always be that person who loves pursuing excellence in performance. And soon, others just won’t be able to resist that infectious energy and spark.

Principle 5: Surround yourself with the best support team you can muster.

Luck did play some part in my being able to hire an Olympic athlete as my running coach – Rina lives in my town and is a personal trainer these days. But that shouldn’t discount the fact that hiring her was a smart move. I want the speed, I want the endurance, I want the fitness – more than I was going to ever achieve on my own. Rina knows what she’s doing – her achievements are testimony to that – so I confidently do what she tells me to do.

Trusting my coach takes a huge load off my mind in pursuing my running goals. I don’t have to research running training techniques, I don’t have to work out what’s right for me or what’s not right for me. I just focus on doing the best I can at what Rina tells me to do. And that makes the hard work heaps easier. And the same goes for the physiotherapist and masseur and I regularly visit – I trust the work they do on my tired and strained legs and feet.

You won’t be able to single-handedly lead excellence in performance measurement in your organisation. You’ll need a team too, of people who believe in your vision, who each bring an important capability to make that vision a reality. You might even need a performance measurement coach, who can guide you out of ruts and around potholes so you reach success much sooner.

All in all, pursuing excellence in anything – performance measurement especially – often requires a change in who we are being and how we are thinking, more profoundly than what we are doing.

TAKING ACTION:
Does one of these principles resonate with you today? Reflect on why it resonates with you, check if there’s an area in your pursuit of performance measurement excellence that feels a little flat, or is falling short. What’s the advice you’d give yourself to pop up out of the rut, or more nimbly avoid those upcoming potholes?

Performance Measurement Process breaking down?

So when you understand how the fundamental performance measurement process works, you have a better model for how to start fixing your performance measurement process, and start producing more meaningful performance measures and KPIs.

Start by flowcharting, just simply, your existing process for performance measurement. Flag where your biggest problems are in your performance measurement process. Then examine each step in your process that needs fixing, and decide what different thinking is needed, what different approaches are needed, to remove the root causes of those problems. Yes, we’re talking standard process improvement here.

Let’s look each phase or stage of a typical performance measurement process:

STAGE 1: Selecting Your Performance Measures and KPIs

How do you select your performance measures? When do you review and choose your measures? Who selects them? How do you align them to goals or strategy or processes or functions?

There are two major root causes for why we end up with too many of the wrong kinds of KPIs and never enough of the right kind. The first root cause is the pursuit of measures without a clearly articulated business strategy that is results-oriented rather than action-oriented. The second root cause is the use of brainstorming or other feeble methods of choosing performance measures.

STAGE 2: Capturing the Data For Your Performance Measures and KPIs

How do you identify and capture the performance data your measures need? Who designs the data collection processes? Is data collected manually or is it automated? How do you decide when to stop collecting data? Where is performance data stored? How is data extracted from systems for analysis and reporting? Who does it?

Two big root causes mean that measures don’t get implemented, or why we end up with 12 versions of the same measure, or completely the wrong calculation or data being used. One is that we are too casual about defining our performance measures in enough detail, and the other is that we fail to involve the right people in the decision making about what gets measured and how.

STAGE 3: Analysing and Reporting Your Performance Measures and KPIs

How do you turn the data into your performance measures? Is this analysis automated or manual? Who does it? What questions drive the analysis? How often are measures reported? What kinds of reports are produced? Who produces them? Which parts of the reporting process are automated or standardised? How are the reports structured or designed? Which reports go to which audiences?

One big root cause continues to ensure that performance reports and dashboards distort the truth and encourage the wrong responses to our KPIs. It’s simply that people don’t understand how to visually display quantitative information to reveal true signals, instead defaulting to poor graphics like silly dials and gauges and pie charts.

STAGE 4: Interpreting and Using Your Performance Measures and KPIs

How are your performance measures interpreted and used? How are the signals in measures highlighted or flagged? What are the rules that are used to decide when performance has changed or needs attention? Where and when are performance measures used? What role do they take in decision making? How are actions or responses decided and executed? How are strategies and initiatives to improve performance tested?

A fundamental root cause that the majority of organisations don’t even know they have leads to consistently missing important signals until it’s too late and not reaching targets. It’s a failure to understand and appreciate statistical thinking and instead relying on very dangerous interpretation methods like ‘this month to last month’ and other two-point comparisons.

To get better KPIs, we need to change our thinking.

If your organisation is like most, you’re not going to find the answer to better KPIs and performance measures by looking within. You really need to open up to different approaches to performance measurement, to proven techniques that are designed to specifically solve those common problems by eliminating the root causes. Remember Einstein’s wisdom: “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

TAKING ACTION:
Learn more detail on how to improve your performance measurement process in a free webcast recording you can listen to or download immediately, by registering for free at http://www.staceybarr.com/fixyourkpis.html

It can be useful for you to diagnose where your own performance measurement process might be in most need of attention, and can also provide a discussion point to get your colleagues and staff to start thinking differently about how to make measurement work.

Here’s my checklist of 36 most common symptoms of a performance measurement process breaking down:

Performance Measurement Process breaking down?

2. the measures don’t align to strategic direction or team or individual goals or purpose

3. not knowing what to measure

4. struggling to measure seemingly immeasurable goals

5. not seeing the need to measure, or to have different measures

6. have too many measures or KPIs

7. a focus on financial measures and ignoring non-financial measures

8. manual and time-consuming data collection

9. the performance data that is collected is inconsistent, incomplete and inaccurate

10. performance data is not gathered in a timely enough manner to make decisions

11. not enough investment in data collection

12. too much time gathering data and not enough time to analyse it

13. difficulty in getting performance data out of data systems

14. disparate data sources don’t communicate with each other

15. not enough investment in data organisation or management

16. people do not capture the data the organisation needs them to

17. not finding meaningful formulas for measures values and data analysis

18. different groups measuring the same things different ways

19. lack of guidelines about how to report the measures and how often

20. reports are time consuming to produce

21. reports are cluttered and hard to use and navigate

22. targets are based on opinions

23. jumping to conclusions based on a month to month difference

24. misusing trend information

25. not knowing what actions to take in response to measures

26. people cannot say how they would act differently if the measure showed a change

27. people fear the measures showing poor performance

28. not clear who should take action based on the performance results

29. not using the data the organisation does have to improve processes and quality

30. no time for discussion about why the measures are important and what people can do to influence and improve the measures

31. people can not influence the performance results their measures track

32. lack of interest by people who aren’t directly involved in choosing and implementing and using the measures

33. perception that measuring takes too much time and effort

34. not knowing how to start

35. not getting the buy-in or engagement from people to measure

36. not maintaining the commitment to measure

I’m sure if you were to have this conversation in your organisation, you’d come up with a few different symptoms to those listed above, but the majority of them would overlap with those on this list. The power in knowing what problems your performance measurement process has is that when you’re conscious of them, you can do something about them.

And when you understand how the fundamental performance measurement process works, you can figure out how you can do something about them. Part 2 will give you a framework for how to start fixing your performance measurement process.

TAKING ACTION:
Which of the 36 performance measurement process problems have you got right now? Do you have any others, not listed in this article? Note them down, and stay tuned for Part 2 of this article, so you can start diagnosing which parts of your performance measurement process need improvement.

Want to know how to boost your authenticity?

What do you BELIEVE about performance measurement?

Why do you believe we should measure performance? What do you believe a performance measure really is (and is not)? Do you believe it’s more important to measure people, or processes? Your authenticity comes from well grounded beliefs, not just adopting someone else’s views (not even mine!).

A sample of my beliefs about performance measurement are:

• the purpose of performance measures is to focus us, to give us feedback and to be a fulcrum to leverage faster performance improvement
• milestones, like “implement Project X by December 2011″, are not performance measures
• measures are tools to help people improve performance, not tools to measure people’s performance

What do you KNOW about performance measurement?

How many of the popular performance measurement frameworks do you have a working knowledge of, like the Balanced Scorecard or Performance Prism? What are your favourite performance measurement resources, which you look to regularly to grow your knowledge? Do you know what the most common struggles are that people have with performance measurement? Who are the authors that have most influenced your views of performance measurement?

For me, I relentlessly continue to grow my knowledge about performance measurement. In fact, that’s one of the reasons I love my Measures & More Mastermind Program so much – I get to personally interview and learn from the world’s thought leaders on performance measurement and related subjects.

What are your SKILLS in performance measurement?

Do you know how to make a seemingly immeasurable strategy or goal or objective measurable? Can you design meaningful performance measures when it’s not obvious what the right measures are? Can you define the details needed to ensure that a performance measure is implemented as it was intended to be? Can you design engaging and sensible reports and dashboards?

Much of my own performance measurement skill developed through an eclectic mix of training and experience, including post-graduate study in statistics, quality management and process improvement, neuro linguistic programming, testing and experimenting. These are the roots from which PuMP and the Performance Measure Blueprint have evolved.

What is your EXPERIENCE in performance measurement?

Have you got a journal where you record your personal learning and insights in performance measurement? How have you tailored other people’s approaches to work better for your organisation? Have you got some measurement stories or anecdotes from your personal experience that you use to share performance measurement learning and insights with others?

I create my own mottos, which distill some of the most important lessons I’ve had in performance measurement into simple, shareable reminders:

• patterns, not points (don’t compare this month to last month)
• useful, not just interesting (don’t measure it unless it really matters)
• engagement matters more than excellence (a perfect measure is useless if no-one owns it)

What is your PASSION for performance measurement?

Why do you care about performance measurement? Do you feel compelled to make a real difference in the world? Do you love to help people get focused on goals that matter? What’s your personal vision for performance measurement in your organisation, or in your career?

My personal passion for performance measurement comes from a love of clarity and focus, an intense desire to know rather than assume, a disdain for the waste that comes from uninformed decisions. And my vision is to professionalise the Performance Measurement Practitioner role so we can work together to make performance measurement a natural part of doing business.

Authenticity = Beliefs + Knowledge + Skill + Experience + Passion

When you’re authentic, people are drawn to you. They listen to you, they seek your advice, they ask for your help, they do what you suggest. Authenticity is of paramount importance to every Performance Measurement Practitioner.

TAKING ACTION:
Where could you deepen your own performance measurement authenticity? Pick one thing, do it, and see how you feel, and how others respond to you.