So what really does happen when someone performs brilliantly? Or really poorly? How do they feel? What changes? What causes them to change? How much of it do you control or teach? How much of it is just “in their wiring” ?

All of us have very really sophisticated and effective measurement frameworks, right?. Our KPI’s hang together like those beautiful little Ukrainian eggs that fit nicely inside of one another. Management knows what’s important. Workgroups know what drives the corporate KPI’s. Even the individual worker has his nifty little set of indicators that ultimately link his performance to the corporation’s. Right up that neat little hierarchy we call the performance management architecture or framework. Yeah right !!!.. Dream over.

For a moment though, I want you to assume you have all the basics all down pat. KPI’s are developed and aligned throughout the organization just like I described in my above dream state. Now ask yourself what would happen if someone (an individual, a workgroup, or the organization as a whole) really hit the ball out of the park. Or what if they put the organization in the tank? Would people really “own” their success or failure? Is the organization and its culture really accountable?

While much has been written on the subject of performance measures and reporting, the culture of management accountability gets very little press. We confuse it with everything from compensation and reward systems, to job retention strategies. But even the best of all of these is no substitute for the old fashioned characteristic of accountability.

In its most basic form, accountability means “owning” the results of your actions. It is entrepreneurial in many respects. People with accountability have an “inner voice” that resonates when performance targets are met or come up short. They know their part, and own it. It’s rarely a blame game. They look at what went wrong, what their part in it was, and work diligently to fix it. I see it as an innate human characteristic, and while I believe just about anything can be learned, I just not sure about this one. What I do know is that when its there, it looks like all of the above. And you don’t have to wait for performance breakdowns to find out if it’s there or not. You’ll see it in everyday life. That is, if you’re looking.

So as you navigate your performance management activities, work hard to build the right frameworks, goals, measures, and reward systems. Teach your team how all of this fits together. But remember that there are always those unlearned, innate characteristics that are the seeds of your culture. Without those seeds, accountability will never grow and thrive. Look for those characteristics in the people you hire and grow your staff. With enough of those seeds in place, you’ll start seeing results before you know it…and in time that culture of accountability we all aspire to.

A man drives down the highway each day on his way to work. On Monday he gets a flat tire. Like anyone else, he takes his lumps, changes his tire, and moves on.

One month later, almost to the day, the same darn thing happens. Just his luck. Only this time, its raining and he is forced to return home after changing his tire because he had gotten his new suit filthy in the process.

Convinced that he’s hitting a string of rotten luck, the man buys a good raincoat, and develops a faster routine for changing his tire (not bolting his spare down in the trunk, keeping his tools out and available, and keeping the raincoat close at hand). Next month, almost as predicted, same thing happens. Only this time, he gets into a fender bender trying to get over to the right shoulder to repair the flat. Talk about the life of Job!

Nevertheless, it doesn’t take long for him to go back to the well for another creative solution. No more wrecks trying to change a flat tire- nope, not for this guy. He’s figured out that its always the right front tire. In response to this keen observation, he’s now decided to always ride in the left lane so that if (sorry, I mean when..) he gets another flat, he can more quickly glide over to the shoulder, avoiding risk of accident on his way to another speedy tire change. He also decides to keep his speed lower than normal so that if (when) another blowout occurs, he’s not endangering too many people. That is, until a highway patrol officer pulls him over for clogging up the left/ passing lane of the freeway. Back to the drawing board he goes.

One of these days, that poor guy is going to figure out that it might just be his wheel alignment that is causing the problem. But not this time. Instead, like many of us, this man is trained to react to symptoms rather than taking the time analyzing the root cause.

A big problem with our performance measurement systems is that they provide us too much information on symptoms, and not enough feedback on our core system breakdowns. Does your management system tell you when you tire has gone flat? Does it measure the speed with which you change the tire? Or does it alert you that your vehicle is pulling to the left, outside of its normal control limits? The former is clearly reactive, responding only to a plethora of symptoms. The latter is proactive, and will lead your more quickly into a mindset of real problem solving.

I’ve seen this play out all too often in the workplace. Take a call center, for example, whose performance management focus is on getting better at average speed of answer, abandon rate, cost per call, and the many other indicators that are all too common in that industry. But how many companies look at the volume of calls per customer served? Is it higher than it should be? What if we do something to reduce the VOLUME of calls in the first place. Ahhhh….now we’re getting somewhere. Would you rather reduce the cost per call by 10% (something that I guarantee you is envied by EVERY call center manager out there), or eliminate the call entirely by fixing the process (something that is valued by every SHAREHOLDER out there!).

Reactive or proactive? Symptom or problem oriented? Activity or process focused? What approach does your performance management process favor?

But teach him how to fish…well, that’s a different story. That man will eat for life.

We’ve all heard that adage before. Yet few of us in the performance management arena put this simple principle into practice. In fact, this was so much of a frustration to me, that it was one of my main drivers for forming ePerformance Group, the company I co-founded nearly five years ago. We built an entire business on the simple premise that executives and managers do not need more data or performance reports. They, and their staffs would be far better served by tools that enabled them to more quickly glean insights from the data, and begin putting the information to work. That shift in thinking led us to develop a host of valuable products and services aimed at achieving this end. And with practice, that change in thinking can help you do the same thing.

Give some real thought to the value you deliver to the organization. I’m not being rude, believe me. I’m just trying to help you do some real introspection into what value you’re adding to the process of performance management. How much time do you spend preparing data? Formulating reports? Answering data questions? Telling management what they already know?

Now ask yourself how much time is spent on putting the data to work? Acquiring and sorting through best practices? Correlating data to glean insights? Observing trends and performance drivers? Driving implementation? Those are better questions, but we’re still not there yet.

Now, ask yourself how much time you spend enabling management? Helping them see the insights themselves? Come to conclusions quicker? Implement faster, smarter, and cheaper. Now we’re getting somewhere.

Management does not want to be spoon fed. And even if they did, spoon feeding them isn’t really going to get them past their next meal. Instead, make sure the services you provide go well beyond just reams of data. Provide meaning full analysis. Pose critical questions. Let the data tell a compelling performance story. Help the executive see different ways of looking at the data. Provide different views of the information that will highlighting different insights from the same data, by observing it from different angles. That’s value in the performance management world.

Some would say that’s working ourselves out of a job. I say, it’s the best test of whether you’re actually doing your job! Executives aren’t stupid. They will see and value your efforts to enable their leadership. Most likely, you’ll be rewarded heartily for it. If not, you’ve acquired a valuable career skill…one that you should be able to use in an organization that values performance over the production of “administrivia”.

So let’s become teachers, rather than reporters of data. You’ll not only enable your customers, but you’ll really make a dent in creating a real culture of performance management.

Data rich, information poor? There’s no doubt you’ve heard these four words before. Most performance managers work their you-know-what off to overcome this problem. Yet it still remains one of the most systemic problems in business- managers who are overwhelmed with data on everything from their staffing levels and productivity, to the price of rice in Southeast Asia.

Good performance managers are obsessed with fixing this problem. They try everything from reconfiguring management reports to the sexiest of graphical interfaces. They work to improve data quality, reliability, and validity. They work to deliver the most polished of presentations. But all to often, they fail to ask the most important question of all- SO WHAT?

I once worked for an executive who ran a brewery in South Africa. In one of our conversations, he relayed that every morning when he walked into the production facility, he would ask a series of questions, all targeted at providing 5 critical answers- answers that would populate his “mental dashboard” of performance, providing the indicators he needed to manage that day’s business. The questions ranged from the previous day’s production volume to that day’s temperature and weather forecast. To this day, I’m not even sure what the latter indicator was all about (probably because I’m not a beer executive). Maybe it related to how happy his employees were likely to be if they though they could play golf that weekend- who knows.

The point is that HE knew. These indicators were his most vital source of information, and for that day, his most prized possession. He made decisions based on that information. What’s really important here is that he kept it simple. Five indicators, not fifty. Indicators that could be easily captured, not ones that needed a complicated ERP extract to produce. Ones that could be easily understood and acted upon. Instead of calling them his KPI’s (an overused term that has come to refer to the most complicated of management reports), he referred to them as his DIPI’s (Damn Important Performance Indicators).

Some might see his approach and commentary as over simplified, and maybe even a little trite. But the point is he USED the information he acquired. How many managers in your organization really use the information they get from you? Ask yourself what can you do to create your little set of DIPI’s. Then start putting that data to work!

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If you read my column recently, you’ll notice that I appear to be stuck on a certain metaphor. Read what you want into it, and you’ll probably be right. While I find these images familiar and identify all too well with them, I do find solace in knowing that I’m not alone. But the reason I mention them here is not because I’m some type of masochist, but because they strike big chord for me in improving the performance management process. Stay with me, and I think you’ll see the connection.

Ok- here’s the scene- you’ve all probably seen the commercial. The guy gets on the scale, weighs himself, then runs around the gym for about 10 seconds, and weighs himself again. The commercial ends with the overweight gentleman expressing complete and utter frustration that he had not lost any weight. After all, he’s exercised for a whole 10 seconds! I’m not sure why we find these types of commercials amusing, but it’s probably because if you’ve ever battled to lose weight, you’ve probably done the same thing.

How does this apply to the workplace you ask? Take a look around you. Where have you seen that compulsive cycle of wasteful effort? (Hint: it’s not in your boss or your co-worker’s weight loss program). How about on your balanced scorecard? Or in your management incentive plan? Measures like ROE, or Share Price, or CapEx? OSHA or related macro-level Safety indicators?
While we should all be measuring these things, we must be smart in how we apply them internally.
And that’s the message for today. Look hard at what you’re reporting, to whom you are reporting it, why you are reporting it, who you’re holding accountable for changing it, and how often you could reasonably expect a significant or meaningful change in the indicator.

All to often, we report indicators to people that either have little control over them, or whose ability it affect performance has a “change cycle” well beyond your reporting period. Most people in the organization cannot change share price, ROE, or their safety record overnight, or even monthly. What they can do is manage the drivers of these indicators. Drivers that do in fact change daily, weekly, or monthly.

So before you publish another weekly or monthly performance report, ask yourself if you’re really reporting things your employees can manage on that frequency, or if you’re trying to manage a long term indicator that the organization has little immediate control over. The answer may surprise you.

-b

About the Author: Bob Champagne is Chairman and CEO of ePerformance Group International LLC, a privately held company specializing in performance management systems and solutions. Included in ePGI’s product portfolio are a wide variety of performance tracking, reporting, and benchmarking solutions delivered in an online and on-demand environment. ePGI’s services are utilized by over 50 leading edge companies across numerous industries and geographies, and are licensed by many high profile consultants committed to delivering world class PM solutions to their clients. Visit ePGI at http://www.epgintl.com or contact us directly at 973-343-2806.