Measure What Matters
Stop Measuring What You CAN Control!
You’re going to get far more improvement, far more learning, much faster progress toward your goals if you start measuring the results outside your complete control, the results you only have some INFLUENCE over. Here are 3 reasons why.
Reason 1: What you can completely control is trivial.
What do you really have complete control over? To a great degree, you can control what you think about it. To a lesser degree, you can control what you do and how you do it.
About these things, no-one really cares. Changing these things makes little difference to results that are bigger than yourself. What you can completely control is inside the boundaries of your comfort zone and what you already know, so any change is only incremental and small.
The important stuff is important BECAUSE it’s outside our circle of control.
Reason 2: Performance is more than just personal.
Improving what you have complete control over reduces down to improving your own skills and knowledge and competence. In business, performance is about much more than that. Everyone having more skill, more knowledge, and more competence does not guarantee business success.
Performance that matters is mostly about the business results (like profit, stakeholder value, customer loyalty) and the processes that produce these results for the business (like sales, customer support, recruitment). And no one person has complete control over any of these. It’s a team effort.
Reason 3: You are creative enough to stretch beyond control.
If you never stand face to face with a result you are passionate about but feel you can’t control it, and ask yourself the question “how can I make this possible?” then you are denying your innate creativity.
Why not at least ask this question of one important result outside your control? How can you make it possible? How have others made similar results possible? What ideas do others have for making it possible?
Another implication: reward people for influencing, not just for achieving.
One of the main reasons so many people feel compelled to measure what is in their control is the fear of personal loss if they don’t achieve their measures’ targets. So they choose easy measures that have very easily attainable targets. This is just jumping through performance hoops, and not about the true purpose of performance measures (to improve important performance results).
So what if you could start rewarding people for how much they try to influence results that aren’t inside their control, even if they don’t get all the way to the target?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Stacey Barr is the Performance Measure Specialist, helping strategic planners, business analysts and performance measurement officers confidently facilitate their organisation to create and use meaningful performance measures with lots of buy-in. Sign up for Stacey’s free email tips at www.staceybarr.com/202tipsKPI.html and receive a complimentary copy of her renowned e-book “202 Tips for Performance Measurement”.
Team Lead at A Software Company
Performance Measure Specialist
Something being outside your control does not necessarily directly correlate with it being inside someone else’s control, like another department or team. There are some results that several teams may contribute to, but it’s not clear which team should own it. It doesn’t matter who owns it, but that they monitor the result (with KPIs) and ensure collaboration happens to achieve the result.
There are also the kinds of results that do naturally belong to a team, but they still feel they don’t have control over it. Like a policy team that owns the result of how well the policy achieves its intended results. Those who implement the policy have a huge bearing on this, so the policy team don’t have complete control. But they do have influence, in the way they have designed the policy and it’s implementation recommendations.
Log in to post comments.
Interesting Article. I must admit, i have only ever measured the results that are within my control (i.e. My Team).
In a big organisation, with various departments/teams integrated to achieve goals, I find your idea challenging. Firstly getting a measure in place for another team/department, then influencing the greater team/department seems like an impossible task! And one will also then ask the question, why should i do this, focus my energy on something outside my control and end up wasting a whole lot of time.
However, if successful and if it brings through great business benefits, then i can definitely see the reward being high.