The time of year when goals are most discussed is at the turn of the New Year. We get fired up and motivated to achieve new personal New Year's Resolutions for our health, our hobbies, our spirituality and our businesses.
However, the motivation can easily wane if we lose focus on our goals, if we feel overwhelmed by the effort it really takes to achieve them, or if we don't see immediate results on our first attempt.
So it's important to realise that these New Year's resolutions are just the same as any other goal we set. If we treat them like real goals, they'll more likely become real!
Step 1: Have no more than 3 really important New Year's goals.
Too many goals means too much scattering of your attention. If you've struggled to achieve all your goals in the past, then ask yourself: "Is it better to have a lot of goals and achieve none, or have a couple of goals and achieve one?"
Step 2: Make each goal super-specific.
No pie-in-the-sky wishes (Santa should have taken care of them already). Make your New Year's goals so detailed that you can create in your mind the exact experience of them already being achieved. "I want to be fit and healthy" is a pie-in-the-sky wish. "I will attain and keep my weight at 55kg" and "I will comfortably run 5km in under 25 minutes" are super-specific goals.
Oh, and write them down in this super-specific language, somewhere you can see and read them every day.
Step 3: Check there are no problems associated with having each goal.
It's called systemic thinking, when you ask yourself questions like "what if?" or "what else?", and these are important questions to ask about any goal you set for yourself. Will achieving the goal be all good, or are there some nasty side effects that could mean it's better to rethink the goal, or abort it altogether?
Step 4: Measure each goal!
Having a goal without measuring it is like watching a movie with your eyes closed. You will need regular and ongoing feedback about how fast you're dropping the pounds or what your average 5km run time is week on week.
And because there will always be ups and downs, measuring makes certain you stay objectively focused on the overall trend.
Step 5: Know what you're going to do differently to achieve your goals.
"Action! Nothing Happens Until Something Moves" is the title of a book by Robert Ringer, and they are wise words. You will not achieve your goals without making some distinct (and usually uncomfortable and challenging) changes in what you do each day. It's not fun saying no to a chocolate cupcake, but you must. And yes, especially if you don't feel like it, you have to put on your running shoes and start moving.
Each of these steps requires discipline. Are you prepared to give the discipline in return for achieving your goals? If not, perhaps you have the wrong goals. But if so, there's no time like right now to get started!
Thursday 3 January 2008
#75 Eleven Powerful Measurement Insights
The greatest management thought-leaders in the world insist that measuring the performance of your business or organisation is essential to its succeeding. There are no qualms about that. If you want to improve the performance of your business (or anything), you must measure performance.
Fewer and fewer managers are struggling with this premise, that you have to measure performance to manage it. But what they do struggle with is how to do measurement properly. These eleven insights will guide you to improve how you do go about measuring performance.
Insight 1: Only measure what you're going to do something about.
Don't measure just because you can, just because you always have, just because you've got the data, just because someone says to. Measure only the results you are going to give your time to improving, by "working on the business, not just in it".
Insight 2: Measure drivers, not just outcomes.
It's great to know how profitable your business is, or how well you've kept to budget, or how happy your customers are. It's at least as important to know also what operational results have the most influence over these outcomes. It's those drivers that you can do something about, to get the outcomes you want. You can't influence outcomes directly. So find the drivers, and measure them too.
Insight 3: Measure not what you can control, but what you can influence.
No-one really has control over anything other than their thoughts. We do have a lot of control over what we do, but even extraneous factors can limit that control too. If we only measured what we could control, we'd be measuring useless things. So expand your thinking to what you can influence, and you'll find yourself measuring much more meaningful results. Remember, your target doesn't have to be 100%.
Insight 4: Measures impervious to change are useless.
Why do call centres continue to measure the number of calls received? It's not a performance measure - it doesn't measure how well the call centre is performing. It just tells them how many calls they're getting. And even if they could change this number in some way, what kind of change would reflect an improvement anyway? Measure only the results you know you can (and should) change for the better.
Insight 5: It is essential that your measures conflict with one another.
Everything is about balance. Cycle time versus quality, profit versus customer retention, employee satisfaction versus productivity. These things are in conflict with one another, and that's how it should be. Management is about balancing the conflicts that are important, so if your measures aren't in conflict with one another, then you're missing essential information to manage.
Insight 6: Think like a marketer to engage people in measuring.
What do great marketers do? They capture people's attention, they get the right message across, and they influence people to act in a way consistent with that message. Traditionally, we think of marketers as selling products or services. But why can't we use the same process to sell performance measurement? Consider collaborating with your marketing department, or learning more about marketing yourself, to increase the engagement your colleagues have in performance measurement.
Insight 7: There is no "set it and forget it" with measuring performance.
There is no set of industry standard performance measures you can buy off the shelf, bolt onto your organisation or business, and then sigh in relief that you've "done performance measurement". Performance measures are a reflection of the things that matter most, and the things that matter most are a reflection of what's going on in your business and it's environment. And in case you haven't noticed, this is constantly changing!
Insight 8: Reward people for local results AND organisational results.
Reward people just for local results, and you'll be encouraging them to compete internally with other departments and teams and individuals, or cause unintended consequences for them. Reward people just for organisational results and you'll be frustrating them with the expectation to influence results they can't directly influence. Reward people for both local results and organisational results and collaboration across traditional organisational boundaries toward common goals is what you'll get.
Insight 9: Use data and not opinion to determine causality.
Sitting around the meeting room table to discuss an increase in error rates (or cycle time or costs or whatever), everyone's got an opinion about why. We're so quick to find solutions that we often forget to define the problem properly. A proper cause-effect analysis has to involve scoping potential causes and using data to determine which are the most influential causes.
Insight 10: Measuring performance is not a tool, it's a way of life.
If you've been interested in performance measurement for more than a few months, you've probably already discovered that it's not all about numbers and data. Mostly it's about culture, a culture of results-orientation, feedback, learning and continuous improvement. It's not enough to learn the tools and steps of performance measurement, you need to live the philosophy.
Insight 11: Performance measurement requires humility and transparency to work.
Ego, fear, arrogance, carelessness and sloppy thinking lead to performance measurement attempts that fail because bad results are swept under the rug, data is manipulated, only good results are measured, and any kind of objective evidence is ignored in favour of intuition and experience. Those who are humble will learn from the valuable feedback measures offer, and those who aren't afraid of transparent feedback will turn their performance measures into performance improvement.
Fewer and fewer managers are struggling with this premise, that you have to measure performance to manage it. But what they do struggle with is how to do measurement properly. These eleven insights will guide you to improve how you do go about measuring performance.
Insight 1: Only measure what you're going to do something about.
Don't measure just because you can, just because you always have, just because you've got the data, just because someone says to. Measure only the results you are going to give your time to improving, by "working on the business, not just in it".
Insight 2: Measure drivers, not just outcomes.
It's great to know how profitable your business is, or how well you've kept to budget, or how happy your customers are. It's at least as important to know also what operational results have the most influence over these outcomes. It's those drivers that you can do something about, to get the outcomes you want. You can't influence outcomes directly. So find the drivers, and measure them too.
Insight 3: Measure not what you can control, but what you can influence.
No-one really has control over anything other than their thoughts. We do have a lot of control over what we do, but even extraneous factors can limit that control too. If we only measured what we could control, we'd be measuring useless things. So expand your thinking to what you can influence, and you'll find yourself measuring much more meaningful results. Remember, your target doesn't have to be 100%.
Insight 4: Measures impervious to change are useless.
Why do call centres continue to measure the number of calls received? It's not a performance measure - it doesn't measure how well the call centre is performing. It just tells them how many calls they're getting. And even if they could change this number in some way, what kind of change would reflect an improvement anyway? Measure only the results you know you can (and should) change for the better.
Insight 5: It is essential that your measures conflict with one another.
Everything is about balance. Cycle time versus quality, profit versus customer retention, employee satisfaction versus productivity. These things are in conflict with one another, and that's how it should be. Management is about balancing the conflicts that are important, so if your measures aren't in conflict with one another, then you're missing essential information to manage.
Insight 6: Think like a marketer to engage people in measuring.
What do great marketers do? They capture people's attention, they get the right message across, and they influence people to act in a way consistent with that message. Traditionally, we think of marketers as selling products or services. But why can't we use the same process to sell performance measurement? Consider collaborating with your marketing department, or learning more about marketing yourself, to increase the engagement your colleagues have in performance measurement.
Insight 7: There is no "set it and forget it" with measuring performance.
There is no set of industry standard performance measures you can buy off the shelf, bolt onto your organisation or business, and then sigh in relief that you've "done performance measurement". Performance measures are a reflection of the things that matter most, and the things that matter most are a reflection of what's going on in your business and it's environment. And in case you haven't noticed, this is constantly changing!
Insight 8: Reward people for local results AND organisational results.
Reward people just for local results, and you'll be encouraging them to compete internally with other departments and teams and individuals, or cause unintended consequences for them. Reward people just for organisational results and you'll be frustrating them with the expectation to influence results they can't directly influence. Reward people for both local results and organisational results and collaboration across traditional organisational boundaries toward common goals is what you'll get.
Insight 9: Use data and not opinion to determine causality.
Sitting around the meeting room table to discuss an increase in error rates (or cycle time or costs or whatever), everyone's got an opinion about why. We're so quick to find solutions that we often forget to define the problem properly. A proper cause-effect analysis has to involve scoping potential causes and using data to determine which are the most influential causes.
Insight 10: Measuring performance is not a tool, it's a way of life.
If you've been interested in performance measurement for more than a few months, you've probably already discovered that it's not all about numbers and data. Mostly it's about culture, a culture of results-orientation, feedback, learning and continuous improvement. It's not enough to learn the tools and steps of performance measurement, you need to live the philosophy.
Insight 11: Performance measurement requires humility and transparency to work.
Ego, fear, arrogance, carelessness and sloppy thinking lead to performance measurement attempts that fail because bad results are swept under the rug, data is manipulated, only good results are measured, and any kind of objective evidence is ignored in favour of intuition and experience. Those who are humble will learn from the valuable feedback measures offer, and those who aren't afraid of transparent feedback will turn their performance measures into performance improvement.
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