Leadership Keys: Measuring What Matters in Leadership

By Mats Kallmyr | Kallmyr.com

Leaders are good at talking about direction and bad at showing whether anyone is getting closer to it. A vision tells people where you are heading. A measure tells everyone, including you, whether you are actually moving. This article is about the keys that turn good intentions in leadership into something you can follow up, without turning people into numbers.

A metric is not yet a goal

Counting something is easy. Leading with it is harder. A measure starts to work as a leadership tool when it is tied to a clear purpose, has a target value and has a time frame. George Doran described this logic back in 1981 when he argued that management objectives should be specific, measurable, assignable, realistic and time-related (Doran, 1981). Note the word assignable: someone must own the result. Doran also pointed out that not every objective can be quantified at every level of the organisation, so the point is clarity, not counting for its own sake.

Why a specific target beats “do your best”

The strongest evidence comes from goal-setting research. Locke and Latham summarised 35 years of studies and found that specific, difficult goals consistently led to higher performance than simply asking people to do their best (Locke and Latham, 2002). Their explanation is simple: “do your best” has no external reference, so everyone defines it differently. Two conditions matter, though. People must accept the goal, and they need feedback on how they are doing (Locke and Latham, 2002). A target that nobody believes in, or that nobody reports on, is decoration.

Do not watch only one dial

Kaplan and Norton made a related point for organisations in their 1992 article on the balanced scorecard: no single measure gives a clear picture, so leaders need a small set that looks at the business from several perspectives (Kaplan and Norton, 1992). They proposed four: the customer, internal processes, learning and improvement, and finance. They also warned against measure overload and argued for keeping the set short. Optimising one dial in isolation tends to damage another, for instance when cost goes down and customer satisfaction follows it.

What this looked like in practice

In The Vision Nobody Asked For I described a contact centre with a customer satisfaction score of 3.1 out of 5. The vision, to be the best of eight, gave people a reason to care. What let the team see whether it was working was following the same result over time, together with recognition for solving hard calls and real influence over how the floor was run. Within a year the score had moved to 4.3. The number did not create the pride, but it made the progress visible to the people who produced it.

Five keys for your next leadership goal

1. Name the purpose. Which business or people outcome should this change?
2. Set a target and a date. Replace “improve engagement” with a value and a deadline.
3. Give it an owner. One person is accountable and reports on a fixed rhythm.
4. Balance the set. Pick a few measures across customers, process, people and results, and review them together.
5. Close the loop. Share the result with the team, talk about what it means and adjust. Without feedback a target does not drive anything.

A word of caution

Measures describe leadership results. They do not replace trust, presence and judgement. Use them to start the conversation with your team, not to end it.

Your turn: which one measure would tell you whether your leadership is working? Share it in the comments.

References
Doran, G.T. (1981) ‘There’s a S.M.A.R.T. way to write management’s goals and objectives’, Management Review, 70(11), pp. 35-36.
Kaplan, R.S. and Norton, D.P. (1992) ‘The balanced scorecard: measures that drive performance’, Harvard Business Review, 70(1), pp. 71-79.
Locke, E.A. and Latham, G.P. (2002) ‘Building a practically useful theory of goal setting and task motivation: a 35-year odyssey’, American Psychologist, 57(9), pp. 705-717.