The "blankie" is the plague … no … the absolute albatross, of American corporate performance! That's right — the "BLANKIE" is killing corporate performance, profitability, and prospective.
The "blankie" calms young children, making them feel comfortable when nothing else can pacify, often providing the only hope a parent has to keep them quiet or get them to sleep. In fact, Mom and Dad probably have several copies all over the house, cars, etc, just in case of unforeseen flare up.
The corporate "blankie?" … bloated performance management: hyperactive metrics, measurement, analytics. To understand the issue, just take a stroll through the corridors of most companies, even many small ones. You'll likely find the walls plastered with charts, metrics, etc., many contradicting and few the typical employee can tie directly to stated organization imperatives.
When irrelevant metrics and performance measures proliferate, the beacon for the organization becomes defective. Unconnected metrics dull the impact of deficient performance on critical ones. Once dashboards, etc., are built that incorporate the extraneous, it becomes more and more difficult to chart the actual course being taken.
Five Proven Steps to Fix It
- Use Metrics Exclusively and Uniformly. Make sure every organization member's performance is assessed only on critical activities or outcomes that support enterprise imperatives, then retire unconnected metrics — period.
- Identify Metric Interactions and Causal Relationships. Map cause-and-effect associations for metrics. Classify each as leading or lagging and track their relative proportion at all levels of the organization.
- Keep Metrics Fresh and Relevant. Align the entire corporate life-cycle to tangible metrics, reflecting changes in strategy, vision, and imperative.
- Ban Usage of Rogue Metrics, Charts, Reports, Etc. If desired, allow personal, unofficial use, but forbid their usage in general performance reviews or other standard business meetings.
- Automate Standard Metrics to the greatest degree, exclusively if possible.
This takes guts and certainly won't be accomplished overnight. A company with enough determination can do this alone, but sustainable success is most likely with an experienced, objective, highly-skilled external partner.