As a leader, you can gain a new perspective on measures if you realize that measures are like taxes.
And like enlightened governments, we should be able to justify the “individual cost” the way governments justify taxes: Take responsibility for your share, and you’ll reap the benefits every day.
In the last post, we walked through the importance of a guidepost statement that the team looks to for guidance, in the absence of clarity.
The next step in our journey to creating a modern set of measures is to make sure you have a set of “guiding principles.”
Guiding principles are the foundations you set as you build the measurement framework for your team. These guiding principles help you select the measures by which your team judges the success of their collaboration, processes, and initiatives.
Notice I said how “your team judges its success,” not how you judge them. That leads me to the first guiding principle I find especially effective in motivating teams to do great work: Measures are for teams, not managers.
What do I mean by that?
Over the last few months, we’ve been working with a number of organizations that are fundamentally re-thinking what they should measure, and why. I’m amazed that, time and time again, organizations try to measure success with metrics that don’t align with what they’re trying to accomplish.
This often happens because the underlying issues you want to solve depends on what you see. Some people call this perspective; I like to think of it as your lens.
Phil Verghis
When our team works with clients on data-driven continual process improvement, we examine their teams and processes through a variety of lenses to gain a multi-dimensional view of how well they work together and how they function within the enterprise. That’s how we uncover unexpected truths.
As leaders, we have grand plans: those that will help our organizations, our customers and dare we admit it—our own careers. Unfortunately, we don’t have much time to translate strategy into practical projects for our operational managers to implement. So, we end up with statements like: Here’s what we need to do by X date, …