Growing High Performance Teams with Dashboards

The greater the uncertainty about the future, the greater the intensity to quantify it.

As this economic crisis shows, a strict reliance on numbers alone is short-sighted, and completely misses the point of what key performance indicators (KPIs), metrics and ratios were originally created for to begin with.

Measuring interprocess efficiency, collaboration, and giving teams the opportunity to own their performance and shared results matters most. Infusing ownership of results is far more important than the flood of figures that many dashboards have.

Why Searching for ROI Is Relative

Return on Investment (ROI) is the Holy Grail of metrics.

Ironically so many companies chase it for their dashboards yet so few can find the cause-and-effect relationships in their companies to make it relevant. ROI is no change agent; but a dashboard that infuses task ownership and accountability is. Anyone can create a portal or Intranet site that is populated with a series of KPIs, metrics and ratios, yet it takes a real leader to make all this data matter. Especially now with fear running rampant through so many companies, resistance to change based on measuring performance is running at an all-time high.

Metrics That Deliver Are All That Matter

There are hundreds if not thousands of KPIs, metrics, and ratios that can be chosen from in creating dashboards. Many industries and companies create their own to match specific process areas, like the entire set of processes in e-commerce for example.

What distinguishes the dashboards that excel and serve as a motivator for those responsible for their metrics? Using only the least amount of metrics that can be tied back to cause-and-effect matter most.

There is an analytics addiction going on in a few of the manufacturers I've met with and visited over the last few years. Their dashboards are impressive yet don't connect with critical teams and employees, serving as the fuel they need to keep accomplishing, keep collaborating, keeping looking for new approaches to get to their goals.

A New Mindset is Needed

Re-defining dashboards needs to start with an entirely new mindset. Think of dashboards as a motivator for those that can make the greatest contribution to your company's performance.

Here are a few take-aways from work completed on dashboards:

• For each KPI, metric or ratio clearly define who owns its performance. Call it Return on Accountability (ROA), the top performing companies practice this religiously. They give employees an opportunity to compete against themselves in terms of measured performance. Some may consider this Draconian or even Big Brotherish (1984) yet of the examples I've seen, employees who have a clear line of sight and accountability for a metric crush their objectives regularly. It is all in how the dashboard is created and rolled out. Giving employees the chance to define this metric and how they are measured is a very strong catalyst. Let them own it.

• Using a dashboard to micromanage is an insult to your employees' intelligence. Don't use a dashboard to regularly berate and humiliate your employees if they are not on plan. It's time to step up and be a coach, not a critic. Dashboards drive amazingly high levels of competition within employees who own the metric and strive to beat their own best performance levels.

• Assign an owner to each metric and continually ask for feedback on cause-and-effect. High performing marketing, sales, product management and product development teams continually watch the cause-and-effect behind the metrics of their dashboards not just the trending of the figures. They constantly focus on how cause-and-effect is changing, and by what levels. Doing this just infuses ownership further.

Bottom line: To grow a high performance team let them own the KPIs, metrics and ratios on dashboards, and be a coach, not a critic. Dashboards become a means to motivate, and in so doing become alive with relevancy in an organization.

Courtesy – Louis Columbus at Perfect CEM