When we are aware of measurement’s immense value proposition, including the insights that great measures bring to strategy execution, we want to create space and time to meaningfully engage those responsible for the achievement of their organization’s strategy. What sets measurement conversations apart from others is that measures are both (1) technical and mathematical in nature (which can drive black and white thinking), and (2) surrounded by many unspoken emotions that employees may have felt in the past, including feeling judged and inadequate.
Join me in exploring four ways to invite leaders and teams into more engaging measurement conversations and, as we do, notice what you might change in your current KPI approach.
Invitations in the workplace are powerful. They open a door to connection and an increased sense of belonging and capability. Invitations allow choice, and choice evokes empowerment. If we want people to be more enthused about measurement conversations, we must create the environment that allows them to shift from behaviours that are currently not serving them, to a new way that ultimately produces better knowledge, insights, and learning that drives organizational achievement.
Invitation #1: Encourage Inquiry vs. Advocacy
Take-away: Invite team members to inquire about what others are thinking rather than advocating for their own beliefs.
Workplaces often have a culture of advocacy, where people rise to the top through successfully advocating for their own opinions, ideas and agendas. There is a place for advocacy, but the problem is that it doesn’t invite other perspectives, thoughts and knowledge into the conversation. In fact, advocacy often shuts dialogue down and creates hidden frustration where people refrain from offering their own experience and skills. Genuine inquiry does the opposite.
Peter Senge smartly defines genuine inquiry as “the ability to ask questions which we do not have a pre-conceived answer to”.
In your next measurement conversation, practice coming from a place of being authentically curious, which means you are not formulating a response in your mind as others speak, but instead, moving to a clear mind, wondering what others are thinking, feeling and learning through the conversation.
When discussing designing measures for a strategic goal, inquiry might sound like this:
- Do you know why we have this strategic priority? Does it mean the same thing to each of us?
- Are you wondering, like me, why the word “innovation” is used in this goal?
- Why do you think this action is important? What do we want to achieve by doing it?
- What are some examples of evidence that might indicate if we are improving or not?
- I wonder if a percentage might be a better statistic than an average for this measure. What do you think?
But watch for this: The shift may not feel equally as easy for all participants. Notice what changes in the conversation and ask people how they are feeling about their participation.
Invitation #2: Give Permission to Question
Take-away: With the intention of creating a learning environment, we invite members to question anything that they are not sure about, may not fully understand or even wonder if there might be a better way.
Have you ever had a question in a business meeting, but for some unspoken reason you didn’t feel comfortable asking it? You are not alone. If you want to make the unspoken, spoken, overtly give permission by saying that questioning is encouraged today and then demonstrate it in your behaviours.
When you formally invite people to question, the mere act of saying questioning is allowed releases uncertainty, softening people’s inhibiting emotions such as anxiety, shame and fear of “not being enough”. When people are willing to openly share and test their perceptions, intentions, and theories against the current reality (then learn from the discrepancies) we are creating a learning environment that is guaranteed to drive the value of your measurement system.
In a culture where questions are valued because of the learning they produce, people are not afraid to question the formulas or the theories that gave rise to the numbers. The intent is not to be difficult or negative. The intent is to invite deeper conversation and exploration that will produce the best possible measures and ultimately, produce valuable insights for decision making.
In your next measurement conversation, give participants permission to question. This means team members should not be afraid of being judged by what a meaningful measure is telling them. In fact, they celebrate knowing what performance is doing, no matter if performance is improving or not.
In an environment where learning from our measures is valued, you might hear questions like these:
- What does this measure really mean?
- Do we know what process was followed when this measure was selected?
- Do we know what formula we used to generate these numbers?
- Where is the data coming from?
- Could there be any ulterior motives for selecting this measure over others? If so, what might they be?
But watch for this: It can be a big change for some people to shift to open-ended questions, and you may notice that some people may create questions that are advice or advocacy cloaked as a clarifying question. Gently encourage them to know the difference.
Invitation #3: Grant Permission to Experiment
Take-away: Invite members to get beyond black and white thinking and instead embrace the act of testing and experimenting, where we live in the “grey” for a bit. This opens the team to what is possible.
Have you ever watched a baby who is figuring out how to crawl? They have never done it before, and so they struggle to get up – over and over again – while people around them cheer them on. What the infants are doing is known as “trial and error”. It takes them many tries before they finally get their arms, knees, legs all working together well enough to lift their body from the ground and move forward. But then, off they go! Yet we seem to forget that their success came from their testing and experimenting, which built their muscles and their know-how.
Why does this power of experimentation get lost in workplaces?
What is holding us back? Is it because we think we are supposed to have all the capability and knowledge already? Is it because we think it takes too much time? Are we scared of failing? For whatever reason, few managers realize how powerful the mere act of trying to make a strategic priority “measurable” can be. Even if the team never actually collects the data, the discussion of attempting to define a new measure can be a transformational learning experience, which will greatly improve their strategy execution.
In your next measurement conversation, give participants permission to test the ideas they are coming up with. Encourage them to treat potential measures as a hypothesis where many outcomes may exist. Encourage them to reflect on the unintended consequences that may exist that have not surfaced.
In an environment where experimenting and testing is valued within measurement conversations, you might hear this:
- We have one idea of a potential measure for this strategic result. What else might we see, hear, feel that would give us evidence of the goal improving?
- Could there be any unintended consequences from using this measure? What might they be?
- Our potential measures for this goal all seem to be using a percentage. Can we test if there is there another statistic that might be a better fit for what we want to know?
- Do we know if the data for this measure will come in the way we think it will? Could we do a test first to see what happens before we decide it is the best measure?
- It seems that we all think we need more money to close this performance gap. Do you think there are improvements we could make to the work process instead?
Watch out for the traditional black and white thinking that often comes with measuring strategy, especially when people are saying “we can’t measure this”. If we don’t try, then these seemingly “hard to measure” strategic priorities will be poorly managed and rarely achieved. Giving permission to allow teams to test, fail, learn, then test, fail, learn again, until they test and succeed, gives people permission to learn, improve, grow and ultimately transform.
Invitation #4: Give Permission to Learn through Interactions
Take-away: Invite members to see the perils of working alone and invite them to embrace the benefits of working and learning together to leverage Group Genius, ultimately for better results.
It is common for organizational measures to be “delivered” to employees in one-way directions such as presentations, documents or Q&A sessions. They are told what their measures are, and it pretty much becomes an “accountability” mechanism. This approach, with little to no interactivity or discussion, discourages ownership and encourages distrust and avoidance – sometimes even worse – they game the data to “look good”.
This is not what measurement was intended for. What we need is the complete reverse. We want our employees to be driven towards excellence in strategy execution and excited by measures that tell them important things about how they are doing. We want them to work together in high-performing teams where they have permission to develop and use “group genius” to test, modify and adjust (just like the baby learning to crawl). They can then succeed in closing the performance gap from where they were when the strategy was designed, to where they are now in the better future that they were all hoping for.
Encourage discussion that invites Interaction with questions like these:
- Is this measure telling us anything important?
- Do we have enough data points to draw an accurate conclusion of what performance is really doing?
- Does this measure accurately reflect what is most important to our stakeholders?
- Are we missing an important measure that better reflects what we are trying to achieve with the mission of our organization?
- How often is the data collected for this measure? Is annual (once a year) frequently enough to draw conclusions about how we performed over 12 months? What are we missing?
It is not important for everyone in an organization to be able to interpret sophisticated statistics, but it is important for people to feel safe enough to discuss and challenge “the numbers” as well as the measurement process. It should never be acceptable to blindly adopt quantitative measure as a reality.
The thing is: measures are numbers and statistics, giving them the appearance of instant credibility, even if they are terribly wrong. This is why we must create a culture where people are not intimidated by numbers, but instead feel empowered to question the numbers, both financial and non-financial.
Sidebar to the Reader: If we want to transform our measurement cultures, we must manage ourselves first. We need to show up with the mindsets we want our teams to adopt. Learn how to create space for measurement conversations where together we can all learn to crawl, walk, then run during strategy execution through the lens of useful measures!
Louise Watson, Adura Strategy Inc. is licensed by Stacey Barr as the PuMP Partner for North America for training and consulting. Find about our next training session here
(Special thanks goes to Dean R. Spitzer, PhD, Author of Transforming Performance Measurement, 2007 for his generosity of knowledge and thought within the measurement space and with his permissions with Adura Strategy Inc.) Thanks also to Stacey Barr, the Founder and Creator of the PuMP® Performance Measurement Process and the Evidence-Based Leadership program.
