If one person measures another, it rarely improves performance. These 5 conditions must be met to measure personal performance so it can and will improve.

When we measure individual employee performance, we see time and again that it rarely improves performance beyond the short-term, if at all. And it can too often turn performance in the wrong direction. I’ve called this the downward spiral of measuring people’s performance.

Self-quantification isn’t all bad, though. It can be quite empowering and useful in pursuing personal goals that matter to us, and reaching them with greater ease and speed. The problem with measuring personal performance has more to do with ownership. And ownership of personal goals – ownership sufficient to strive for those goals – is only possible when five conditions are met in our process for setting personal performance measures.

Condition 1: Your goals – not goals someone else sets for you.

Imagine if someone else set a goal for you, without your input or agreement. For example:

• losing weight
• getting fit enough to run a marathon in 3.5 hours
• becoming more trustworthy or dependable at work
• doubling your productivity
• reaching a specific quota (of sales, or project milestones, or whatever tangible or intangible widget you produce)

How likely would you be to own that goal, to take it seriously, and to be held accountable for reaching it? Not likely. There’s not much dignity in submitting to the goals that other people want of us, especially when those goals are not important to us. And without dignity, summoning the personal power to pursue, let alone achieve, such a goal is next to impossible.

PRACTICE TIP: The best personal performance measures are based on goals that a person sets for themselves. So be proactive, if you have a manager or other stakeholder that has expectations of you. Write your own goals, and write those goals well.

Condition 2: Your measures – not measures developed by someone else for you.

Whether you’ve truly agreed to a goal someone else set for you, or you’ve managed to set your own goal, performance can still be derailed by the measures chosen for that goal. Imagine these situations:

• You have a goal to lose weight, but someone insists you use skinfold caliper measurements, which erks you. You’d rather use the scales and a tape measure for your waistline.
• Your goal to double your productivity is tricky to measure, and you really don’t like your manager’s insistence that it should be the percentage of your work time spent at your desk.
• You want to achieve a goal of having all the skills necessary for your role, but you don’t believe HR’s recommended measure of number of training hours is going to help much.

If we don’t trust that a measure is telling us the truth about our goal, we won’t be able to bring ourselves to use it. To trust a measure, we need to understand its inner workings and be convinced that it is objective and direct evidence of our goal. The best way for that to happen is if we design and build the measure from scratch.

PRACTICE TIP: People feel more excited about measures they have created themselves, for their goal. So don’t wait for others to tell you what you should measure. Instead, design your own measures using PuMP’s Measure Design template.

Condition 3: Your monitoring – not used by others to judge you.

If there is one place in the personal performance measurement process that poses the greatest risk of driving performance in the wrong direction, it’s here. It’s when someone else judges us – and even rewards or punishes us – based on measures of our performance.

Judgement is felt as a personal threat and loss of dignity. It too easily tempts us into performance-sabotaging behaviours. We do desperate things to make a short-term gain:

• To lose weight quickly and not be judged as a failure, you eat too little, or throw up what you eat.
• So that your colleagues score you higher on trustworthiness and dependability, you limit our promises to them to very simple and easy things, and avoid the important things they might want from you.
• To increase your productivity, you cut corners, or let the quality of your workmanship slip, or work too hard and too long.

PRACTICE TIP: When measures are a judgement about us, they trigger the game to hit the numbers instead of improve the results. To avoid chasing numbers in desperation, be the hero in search of the root causes.

Condition 4: Your interpretation – not conclusions that others might draw.

The common practices of interpreting performance measures are dubious at best and completely wrong at worst. Those people who have a vested interest in any of our personal goals are more likely than not to draw the wrong conclusions from our measures. Like so:

• They look at how your weight is higher today than yesterday, and accuse you of eating too much over the past 24 hours. But you know that weight will naturally vary every day, even for skinny people.
• Your manager might rank you beneath most of your colleagues, based on 360 degree feedback scores. But you know that your scores have steadily increased all year, while some of your higher-ranking colleagues’ scores are staying static or dropping.
• HR says that you’re not hitting your training hours targets. But from the training you have taken, you’ve already gained most of the skill you needed to reduce your cycle time and increase your accuracy to that of a top performer.

PRACTICE TIP: If we react to other people’s interpretation of the measures of our goals, we’re just the blind following the blind. Instead, it’s up to us to show those people the real story and the real signals of change, using better methods like XmR charts.

Condition 5: Your improvement – not actions someone else mandates.

Well-meaning friends and supportive managers can be quick to give us the fixes to our performance limitations. Only when we’re at our wit’s end, or feel completely stuck, do we ever feel truly open to the solutions others shower upon us.

Until we’re at the end of our rope, it’s hard to follow the advice of others. It can seem like they don’t understand or appreciate the unique constraints on our personal performance. And it can go like this:

• Your skinny friends tell you just to eat less fat and exercise more. But you’ve noticed over the years that when you eat more carbs, no matter how much you exercise, the weight creeps up.
• To help you become more productive, your manager wants to send you on a time management course. But you’re pretty sure, being an introvert, that it’s the constant noise and movement in the office that shatters your focus a million times a day.
• Your running coach advises you to do a lot of long, slow runs to build your endurance. You’re pretty sure that you won’t be able to fit all this into your schedule, and you suspect that replacing a couple of long, slow runs with HIIT sessions might still work.

PRACTICE TIP: Nothing feels more futile than spending our energy and time doing something we don’t believe will work. Before defaulting to the mandates of those who feel they know better, design a few little experiments to test which solutions create the most improvement for you.

***

There is no real, lasting improvement in performance without complete ownership. These five conditions for measuring personal performance, if you hadn’t noticed, are fundamentally about getting full ownership.

To measure personal performance, the person must own the selection, implementation and use of the measures.
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