This article is a follow-on to my previous article: http://www.leadershipsolutions.co.za/articles/how-to-decide-what-to-track-and-monitor-focus-on-the-field-of-play, which you should read before this one.
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Too often, with my coaching clients, we have to address the problem that the team is resistant to the way their activities are measured. Perhaps they see their weekly activity report as admin – so they “tick the boxes”, telling their managers what they think they want to hear (or, in this case, read). Perhaps they just don’t agree with it, so they don’t bother to do it at all – or they have to be nagged 90 times before they do it. And, again, they do a shoddy job. They may or may not also tell you that they find it a waste of time. Or they may say nothing, and just give you the teenage eye roll!
The reasons for the resistance are some combination of:

• They don’t get it – meaning they don’t see these measures as important drivers of their results;
• They don’t see the value and they treat the process as admin;
• They don’t like the way the measures are recorded or reflected;
• They see it as micromanaging (which most people resist).

What you really want is the following:

• The team absolutely agrees that these measures represent their 20 mile march – they definitely drive achievement against the KPIs;
• The team has participated in setting the targets (or the target ranges for these measures);
• The team has been involved in designing the scoreboard – this is the document on which their performance (collective and individual) is reflected;
• They find the process of recording and reflecting on their team and individual performance motivating;
• They love the way the scoreboard looks and what it tells them and they get excited about reviewing their progress.

Agreeing on What to Watch
You will need to have one or more discussions in your team with a view to answering the following questions:

1. What are the behaviours or activities that drive each one of our KPIs?
This can be quite a rich discussion. There may be many drivers of your KPIs, but your objective here is to identify the clear performance markers that deliver achievement against the KPIs for your team. You must be able to set lower and upper limits for performance. These performance markers must be within the team’s control to achieve. They must have an appropriate timeframe – long enough to be able to manage them, and short enough to have an impact.
Settle on no more than 4 performance markers per KPI. It must not be a shopping list or tracking it will become a burden.

2. Set the lower and upper range of acceptable performance.
The key here is consistency. You do not want people to shoot the lights out on good days and do nothing on bad days (or weeks or months). You want them to do between the low mark and the high mark every day, week or month (or whatever time frame you choose). Using the language of the 20 mile march, you want them to march between 14 and 20 miles every single day, no matter the weather. You do not want them marching 40 miles on one day, then collapsing with exhaustion for the next 2 days, and being unable to go out on the 3rd day because of bad weather. 14 to 20 miles every day.

3. Design a Scoreboard
The team should decide on what the scoreboard should look like. It must be fun to update and use. You should be able to update it as close to real time as possible. It should also connect input measures (the behavioural drivers) with the KPIs. That means you should be able to see how performance against the behavioural drivers actually contributes to performance against the KPI.

I did an internet search using “how to put team metrics on a scoreboard” and came up with some exceptional guidelines.

Your team’s scoreboard may no doubt undergo a few iterations before the team is completely satisfied – and that is fine.

The scoreboard you settle on will meet the following criteria:

• The team will love how it looks
• It will be easy to update
• It will be updatable in as close to real time as possible
• The team will love updating it and reviewing their progress
• Individuals will be able to use it to motivate themselves

All of this speaks to the power of instant feedback. The best example of this I have ever seen is in the advertisement for bottled water: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GimoLDYI_JE.

4. Agree on the Rituals and Routines
Rituals and routines are those things that are done regularly and in a disciplined way in order to ensure that you and your team are paying attention to the important issues regularly enough.

Rituals tend to be interpersonal exchanges – meetings; coffee sessions; tele- or videoconferences. Examples of rituals include:

• The Monday morning meeting (teleconference/videoconference) to discuss priorities for the week;
• Your daily walk around the office or plant to take the pulse of the team;
• The team brown bag lunch session held once a month;
• The weekly scoreboard review;
• The monthly review of past performance and planning for the coming month.

Routines are activities that take place consistently. Examples of routines include:

• Checking yesterday’s performance every day before 9.00am and noting down any required follow up;
• Updating the Scoreboard or Project Tracking Boards;
• Making your appointments for next week every Thursday afternoon;
• Updating your activity records after (or during) every customer meeting

The team needs to agree on the appropriate rituals and routines that will keep them on track as both a team and as individuals. What will they do? What will you do? How will the scoreboard be updated? How often will you meet as a team to review progress and troubleshoot any issues? What is your agenda for that meeting?

So think about this:
What will you do with your team in order to reach agreement on the behavioural drivers, the targets for each one, the design of a scoreboard, and rituals and routines to be implemented?

Managing the Rituals and Routines
The Manager of the team us ultimately responsible for ensuring that the team is absolutely consistent in taking the 20 mile march. This means that you need to monitor whether the routines are being observed – is everyone consistently taking the agreed actions and inputting their own information? You also need to ensure that rituals are consistently observed – that the weekly meeting takes place every week at the same time regardless of who may be absent; that the meeting is short, lively and forward moving; that there is agreement on who will lead the meeting when you can’t be there.

It is also important to review the effectiveness of your rituals and routines every so often with your team. Here is a review agenda which you can modify to suit the situation:

1. What did we set out to achieve?
2. What did we actually achieve? What did we not achieve? What happened that we did not expect?
3. What worked?
4. What did not work?
5. What are the lessons to be learned?
6. What do we need to do now?

Those hours of walking gave me pause to think about 2020 and to review what happened and how effective I have been. My personal review is not the topic for this article. Believe me! It is a mixed bag! This is more about the art of the review.

I call it art in the same sense as my previous article "The Art of Conversation". A review is also a kind of conversation, even if you are doing a personal review. The best and most flexible process for a review is one I came across in a book called "On Being a Supervisee: Creating Learning Partnerships". The authors, Michael Carroll and Maria C. Gilbert, quote a review process used by the American military called the After Action Review - or AAR. After any military operation, small groups of soldiers gather with their commanders. The basic ground rules are that:
1. Nobody will be penalised in any way for anything they contribute to the discussion;
2. No blame or fault is acceptable.

The discussion has 6 questions:
1. What did we set out to do?
2. What happened?
3. What worked/went well?
4. What didn't work/went badly?
5. What have we learned?
6. What will we do differently next time?

These 6 questions can be used in slightly different wording across a wide range of situations. Here are some examples:

A. Project/Strategic Review
1. What were our goals?
2. What did we achieve? What actually happened?
3. What worked/went well?
4. What didn't?
5. What have we learned?
6. What do we need to do now?

B. Progress Review (on a Project or Strategy)
1. What are we trying to achieve?
2. What is actually happening? What progress have we made?
3. What have we done well?
4. What have we not done well?
5. What lessons must be learned?
6. What do we need to do now (to get things back on track)?

C. Personal Review
1. What were my goals for this year?
2. What have I achieved? (And what have I not achieved?)
3. What did I do well?
4. What did I not do well?
5. What have I learned?
6. What am I going to do now/What are my new goals?

D. Performance Review
No matter what the admin process is around formal performance reviews, the actual conversation is along the same lines:
1. What did you set out to achieve in the last x months?
2. What did you actually do?
3. What went well?
4. What did not go well?
5. What have you learned?
6. What do you want to do now? PLUS And how can I support you?

I have used this process in various contexts many many times and have never failed to be enthused by how inspiring and rewarding it has been for the participants. I love that the questions are asked in a way that does not brook blame or fault. When people know that the purpose of the review is to learn rather than to apportion blame, they are willing to be quite frank about their experiences - and this is how one creates a learning organisation. Simple! Not necessarily easy though.

Every team has what I like to call “vital signs” which the Manager of the team needs to keep an eye on every day. If we use our medical analogy, the nurse checks the vital signs of the patient in order to ascertain if there are any problems that might need attention. If the patient’s blood pressure, temperature or pulse rate are either too high or too low, these are indications that the doctor may need to obtain more information (perhaps in the form of tests) in order to diagnose and treat the problem.

So too does a team have vital signs. These are indicators that the team is doing what it should be doing in order to ensure that it delivers the results by which its performance is measured. The principle is as follows:
If the team does enough of the right things at the right time and in the right way, then it will achieve the results it seeks.

In the book “Great by Choice” (Jim Collins and Morten T. Hansen) – which I highly recommend – the authors talk about the 20 Mile March. We live in an economic environment that is Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous (VUCA), and one of the 3 habits that sets the outstanding performers apart from the businesses who fail or only just survive is that of “Obsessive Discipline”. This means that there is absolute clarity on what must be done in good times and in bad times. Achieving the daily 20 Mile March requires “hitting specific performance markers with great consistency over a long period of time.” These performance markers drive the results that the team is looking for.

Let me give you a really simple example from the world of truck sales to illustrate the point:
You have to see enough customers every day, in order to write enough quotations
every week, in order to sign up enough offers to purchase every month, in order to
deliver enough vehicles in order to achieve your monthly target.
So the vital signs in truck sales are:

• Customer contacts
• Quotations
• Offers to Purchase
• Deliveries

This means that on at least a weekly basis, a Sales Manager needs to actively monitor what is happening with each Sales Executive in order to know where and how to support them. If your Sales Executives are reaching or exceeding their targets, then they will need little from their Manager other than being available on request and checking in with them in a periodic one-on-one. However, if a Sales Executive is struggling, then looking at their vital signs will give you an indication of what support they need:

• Are they seeing enough prospects? If not, what will assist them to see more prospective buyers?
• Are they seeing enough prospects but not writing enough quotations? If so, how are they conducting their contact conversations and what can they do differently to increase the number of quotations they are asked for?
• Are they seeing enough prospects and submitting enough quotations, but still not getting enough signed Offers to Purchase? In which case, how can they improve their closing skills?
• And finally, are they getting enough signed Offers to Purchase, but still losing some of these sales? What might be happening that is getting in the way of Offers to Purchase resulting in Deliveries?

Tracking these vital signs closely and often with Sales Executives who are not achieving their targets puts their Sales Manager in a position to do some remedial coaching early on, resulting in greater success – which ultimately impacts on the overall success of the team.

I’ve used a commercial vehicle sales example because it provides really tangible drivers of performance – anyone can identify with these even if they are not in the same field.
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So think about your own area of the business:

1. What are the KPIs in your part of the business? These are the Output Goals.
2. For each KPI, identify the behaviours, actions or targets that comprise the Input Goals – that is, the achievement of the Input Goals is what will deliver the Output goals.
3. How can you track and monitor the Input Goals? Come up with some tentative ideas for a dashboard that focuses on the Input Goals.
4. For each of the Input Goals, identify what could be going wrong in the event that those goals are not tracking.

In the next article, I’ll write about how you could get the team on board so that they are excited about a Scoreboard – rather than resistant. You don’t want them to treat any of this as admin! So process is everything.