Reason 1: Because you’re supposed to.

We’ve been told to have performance measures by our managers. The Strategy Office expects us to come up with some KPIs to go in the KPI column in the business plan. Everyone else seems to be measuring stuff so we probably should too. Let’s just get it done and over with as quickly as we can. What data do we have? Maybe we can throw a few KPIs together real quick…

It’s little wonder then, that to many people performance measurement always feels like another corporate hoop to jump through that takes up time they should be spending on their “real work”.

Reason 2: To CYA (cover your arse/ass).

Show you’re doing lots of work, doing good things, getting heaps of stuff done. Then maybe managers will stop changing things on you all the time, or stop putting pressure on you to work harder, work smarter, streamline this, reengineer that.

All you have to do is to find a few measures that always have positive trends and show how well things are going. Measurement drives behaviour, so where do you think people will prioritise their time and attention when they measure the things that are easy to improve?

Reason 3: To manage staff performance.

Everyone has some KPIs in their performance agreements. And targets. That should make it a lot more objective to work out who’s performing and who isn’t.

And so staff quickly adopt Reason #2 for measuring performance. What happens to overall company/organisational performance then?

Reason 4: To negotiate for more resources.

Demonstrate how worthwhile your outputs are, how capable your team is, how super things could be with more funding. No-one likes having their budget cut. Think of all the cool projects that you won’t get to do if you lose resources.

Funny though, when we give more resources to things that are working, and deny resources to things that need help to be improved.

Reason 5: To monitor strategy execution.

Make sure that the strategic initiatives are being implemented as planned. We have 57 strategies, and they all matter. We need to be sure we get them all done.

Perhaps this is why so many organisations have so many of what I think is a completely useless type of performance measure: “the milestone”. But people will argue until they’re blue in the face that reaching a milestone for a project or initiative means that performance must be better. How so, exactly?

Reason 6: To achieve targets set by the strategy.

Focus on how far current actual performance levels are from targeted performance levels, and using cause analysis and process improvement techniques to find good ways to lift current performance levels until they “hit the targets”.

When most people in a company or organisation have this reason for measuring performance, I’d describe it as a continuous improvement or results-oriented culture. It could be a very energising place to work.

Reason 7: To continually improve capability to achieve the organisation/company vision.

Every performance measure has a line of sight to the results implied by the mission or vision. Targets are set to guide resource allocation, but innovation means the targets are often exceeded. Business experiments quickly identify the best ways to achieve or exceed targets. Organisational learning and systems thinking ensures people are focused on the most elegant ways to improve performance.

Imagine turning up to work each day, knowing that virtually everything you and your colleagues were going to do was verifiably contributing to making the world a better place?

Reason 8: ???

I’m under no illusions that there are only seven reasons people associate with measuring performance. Who knows how many there are? But I am very interested in YOUR personal reason for measuring performance. Let me know by commenting here on the blog post for this practical tip.

TAKE ACTION: It might be a good conversation to have with your colleagues: why do you measure performance? What are your reasons? Why do you bother? What value comes from doing it? What value should come from it? How can your approach to performance measurement improve, so it can better fulfil this purpose?

IN THIS EPISODE:

Upcoming Events: Free Webinar – Is Your Strategy Strong Enough to Measure?
Practical Tip: Why do YOU Measure Performance?
How-to Resources: How to design useful and usable performance reports…
Your Questions: Andy asks – Do you keep measuring after reaching your goal?
Getting More: Reach For The Sky! (Target Setting), KPIs Should Make You Feel Uncomfortable!, Using Targets to Set Your Success Trajectory

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Key #1: Start small

Zoom in on a single goal or performance result and work to only measure that. They say a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, and I say a measure you can use right now is worth dozens you’re putting off until later.

Key #2: Commit

Lock it into your diary the tasks to choose that single goal or performance result, to design its performance measure, to get the data and graph it, to use the measure to improve performance. Keep a reminder close to your person at all times about why it matters (a note, a picture), so your commitment stays true to real performance improvement and you don’t just jump through performance measurement hoops for the sake of having a measure.

Key #3: Find those who know

Make a list of all the experts or specialists or authors or colleagues who have succeeded to measure the right things and improve performance. Learn from them, take their advice, model their approaches so you don’t waste time reinventing wheels or falling into traps.

Key #4: Build gradually

Start with meaningfully measuring a single goal, and when you’ve succeeded at that, continue with two goals, and when you’ve succeeded at those, continue further with four goals. Practice takes multiple iterations of action learning: select an approach, try it out, learn from the results, improve the approach.

Key #5: Make mistakes

Make mistakes, but make new ones. Don’t repeat the mistakes that others have already shown you how to avoid. If you’re stuck on how to do something, then design a little experiment and try it out. Learn, whether it fails or succeeds.

Key #6: Balance, not sacrifice

Yes, you’re super busy. Yes, your colleagues are super busy. That’s not a reason not to measure performance. It’s an excuse. The idea is to take the time you can get. Give 15 or 30 minutes to design a better measure this week, rather than delaying for months until you have a full day to design 10 better measures.

Key #7: Have a support system

Form a Measures Team of four to six volunteers in your business or organisation and meet weekly or monthly to share the performance measurement workload. Grow a network beyond your organisation of fellow performance measurement practitioners for sanity checks and inspiration. Find and use templates that save time. Be organised so you always make the time.

Key #8: Blinders on

People have more objections to performance measurement than just about anything else. They’re very well practiced at saying why it doesn’t work, why it fails, why they can’t do it. Don’t let anyone’s objections get into your head. Hold on to your beliefs about why measuring matters, how it can work, what the true value is in doing it.

Key #9: Enjoy it

Stay connected to the reason why we measure performance – ongoing improvement and excelling at what our organisations exist to do. Rise to the challenge and enjoy the success of making things fundamentally better. Experiment with ways to inject fun into performance measurement tasks.

TAKE ACTION: Is there just one of these nine keys that resonates with you, that feels like improving it would make a noticable difference in your performance measurement success? Give it a two-week focus, thinking about it each day, coming up with ideas to strengthen your ability to do it, testing those ideas. Aren’t you tired of waiting for the planets to line up before you make some real-deal performance measurement progress?

IN THIS EPISODE:

Upcoming Events: October’s Performance Measure Blueprint is *Online*
Practical Tip: 9 Ironman Tips For Performance Measurement Success
How-to Resources: The 4 Most Practical KPI Templates
Your Questions: Yevhen asks “How do you make people use KPIs?”
Getting More: Five Principles For Performance Measurement Excellence (Lessons From Running), KPIs Should Make You Feel Uncomfortable!, My Measurement Success Mantras

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Bad Habit #1: Brainstorming to come up with KPIs

When you brainstorm KPIs, you end up with too many, not enough, things that aren’t really KPIs and a very shallow understanding of exactly how you will measure them. Instead, you need to design KPIs deliberately so that they are convincing evidence of the goal or result you want to measure.

Bad Habit #2: Measuring because you can, or already are

The reason to measure something isn’t that you have the data and can measure it easily. The reason to measure is that you need to know something very specific about how well, or to what degree, you are achieving a particular goal or performance result. Only measure what you should, can and will do something about.

Bad Habit #3: Trying to measure effectiveness, efficiency, productivity, sustainability, etc…

Embarking on the task of finding the right KPI to measure effectiveness will be a frustrating journey into Weasel World, that place where words lack meaning, or mean 17 different things to five different people. Don’t try measuring any goal or performance result that is written with weasel words until you talk about what those words specifically mean in the Real World.

Bad Habit #4: Saying “that’s not measurable”

If you think a goal or performance result isn’t measurable, then there’s a good chance it also isn’t observable. If you can’t observe in some manner or form whether or not a goal has been reached, then you don’t have a goal. Goals are about changing the world in some way, and if you can’t define that change in observable and measurable ways, your goals need more work before you should bother about measures.

Bad Habit #5: Not measuring something because you don’t have the data

How will you ever get the data you really need, the data about the goals and performance results that matter most, if you keep refusing to measure something because that data doesn’t already exist? When you separate the act of designing the right measures from the act of deciding how feasible those measures are to implement, you give yourself the chance to see that often the data is easier to get than you first thought, or at least worth the effort.

Bad Habit #6: Setting milestones as KPIs

Milestones are statements about having completed something by a particular time. They’re very appropriate in project management, but next to useless in performance management. Just getting something done isn’t evidence that it produced the desired result or that performance is improving. Just because you implemented a new inventory management system doesn’t guarantee that inventory management costs have reduced.

Bad Habit #7: Measuring to monitor people’s performance rather than process performance

More people complain about being measured than rejoice. And it’s either because the measurement is being done poorly or the real purpose of measurement is poorly understand. Until you have a culture where performance measures are used to improve performance without blame – and using measures to improve process performance is a great way to establish this culture – measuring people will always cause more problems than it solves.

Bad Habit #8: Measuring too many things

If you have too much of anything, it overwhelms you. Too many things to do and you’re exhausted and don’t do any of them particularly well. Too much to think or worry about and you’re stressed and emotionally burned out. Too many KPIs or performance measures, and your attention is fractured and no area of performance will improve significantly, if at all. Once more, only measure what you should, can and will do something about.

Bad Habit #9: Ignoring measures that aren’t perfect

While it is important that your KPIs don’t mislead you, most people still tend to err on the side of caution and not use any measures that are based on data that isn’t perfect, or measures that don’t tell the full story. As long as the measures aren’t severely biased, their reliability can be far less than perfect and still provide you with actionable information, particlarly information about trends or shifts in performance.

TAKE ACTION: Do you know how to change a bad habit? You find a habit to replace it with, and you practice that new habit everyday for at least 30 days. By then, the new habit will replace the old one. You might like to choose one of your bad KPI habits and decide on something simple and practical you can do everyday to break it and establish a far better one.

IN THIS EPISODE:

Article: Are Your Goals Measure-Worthy?
Q&A: How do you measure services that are not necessarily quantitative?
Quick Tip: Practice using sensory-rich language.

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Here you go, I’m gonna share some of them with you:

Mantra 1: Success loves speed.

I didn’t make this one up, but I can’t remember where it came from. It means that the faster you move, the faster you fail; the faster you fail, the faster you learn; and the faster you learn, the faster you succeed. Don’t waste time over-planning. Do more action-learning.

Mantra 2: Patterns, not points.

Often I’ll add a second part to this one: “Signals, not noise.” It’s about our obsession with comparing this month’s performance to last month, or the same month last year. How do you know last month or the same month last year were normal? Two points of data do not contain any signals about whether something has changed. We need to look for patterns in our performance measure’s time series, because that’s where we’ll find the true signals.

Mantra 3: It’s a process, not an event.

Performance measurement is not a brainstorming session squeezed into the last day of the annual planning workshop. Treating it as an event like this causes most of the problems we have with measurement. No, performance measurement is a process, a series of steps that involve selecting meaningful measures, bringing them to life usefully, and then using them to guide decisions about performance improvement.

Mantra 4: Buy-in, not sign-off.

Buy-in is when someone has taken their hand to helping create something. When you do that, you invest some of yourself in that thing. It’s the same for performance measures: when people help create them, they feel a stronger sense of owning them. That’s the way to get people engaged in bringing measures to life and using them to improve performance. Sign-off doesn’t even come close.

Mantra 5: Results before measures.

“So, what should our measures be?” Wrong question. The right question is “So, what results are important for us to achieve?” Then you should ask “How will we recognise those results happening?”, and thusly “What are some sensible ways to measure those results?”. Measure design is a deliberate procedure, not a creative brainstorming session.

Mantra 6: Should, can and will.

How many measures should you have? I don’t know. But I do know that the only results worth measuring are those that you should, can and will do something about. If it’s not an important performance result, then you shouldn’t do anything about it. If it’s a result outside your circle of influence, then you can’t do anything about it. If you just don’t feel the passion for it or haven’t got the time for it, then you won’t do anything about it.

Mantra 7: Practical, not perfect.

One of the biggest delays in the flow of the performance measurement process is procrastination. We procrastinate on choosing measures because our goals aren’t yet clear enough. We procrastinate on performance reporting because our measures aren’t spot-on yet. We procrastinate on performance improvement because the measures aren’t complete enough or accurate enough. Some information is better than no information. And success loves speed.

TAKE ACTION:
Does one of these mantras stand out for you or for your organisation? Perhaps you could walk around the office or sit in meetings reciting it out loud, over and over again until someone asks you what on Earth you’re doing or have you gone mad? It might turn out to be a usefully different way to start a conversation worth having.

IN THIS EPISODE:

Article: My Measurement Success Mantras
Q&A: How do you get people to adopt a KPI mindset?
Quick Tip: As-is versus should-be performance measurement.

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If it was always that easy to turn the KPI cynics into KPI advocates, then the world would be a radically different place on account of all of us easily measuring exactly what mattered. But that ain’t the case, is it?

There are a few signs that your progress toward the right KPIs is being held up by people feeling cynical about the whole deal. Here are some of the things you might hear them say, and some tips for how to respond in a way that starts their journey toward KPI advocacy.

We’ve been doing okay without performance measures in the past, so why start now?

Rather than answering their question with a list of reasons to start measuring performance now, try a different tact. Challenge the assumption they’re making that the past was okay, or that okay is good enough today. Try something like this:

“I absolutely agree that we don’t want to change for change’s sake. We just don’t have time. But if we keep going the way we always have, it won’t stay good enough for long because as you know, the market is rapidly changing…”

The hidden agenda is that management are going to start hitting people over the head with the measures, demanding more from us, and cutting jobs.

There’s a bit of mind-reading going on here. Don’t bother trying to placate them with promises that their greatest fears are unfounded. You need to reframe that the measures are for them to use, not for the managers. Try something like this:

“Not if we beat them to it. Our plan is that the measures you guys come up with are for you to use to improve your processes and demonstrate objectively to management what support you need from them to achieve targets. You won’t be reporting the measures to management for them to use. You’ll be engaging them in a discussion about how performance improvement will happen.”

We have “real work” to do.

Poor time management isn’t the problem here. And better time management is not the solution. The problem is the belief that performance measurement isn’t real work. Raise this assumption and explore its implications. Try something like this:

“If performance measurement isn’t part of our real work, then that implies that checking if what we’re doing is adding value isn’t part of our real work. If we don’t believe we’re responsible for adding value through our work, what are we getting paid for exactly?”

TAKE ACTION:
Listen out for the objections that your managers and colleagues and staff offer up against performance measurement. What assumptions are they making that you can raise, and through some genuine questions, test the validity of?

IN THIS EPISODE:

Feature: How to Handle the KPI Cynics.
Q&A: Should you avoid picking the cynics for your Measures Team?
Quick Tip: Questions are sometimes better than answers.

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