Jeff
I concur with your concerns with the obsession over measurement and the
confusion over measurement and management.
My observation is that focusing on the measures is the easy way out - how
many organisations engineer good staff morale survey results in full
knowlegde that reality is very different? All too often we get measure
serving bahaviours. the measures should be telling us how we are
performing against the requirements of key organisational stakeholders.
However, as you suggest, in most organisations measures fall siginficantly
short in assessing the two key drivers of performance - employee
motivation and the customer experience.
I find the employee measurement question particularly amusing. I have a
sense that what makes organisations truly perform is the abiity to inspire
and harness the passion, enthusiasm, commitment and energy of their people
in order to engage them. These factors are equally critcal to the success
of personal, social and family relationships - yet how many of us attempt
to measure the enthusiasm of our children or the passion of our partner -
just beacuse we don't measure it does not mean that we do not think it is
important.
I fear that what happens is that we create surrogate measures and then we
get the measure serving behaviour - rather than behaviour that serves the
goal of which the measure is meant to be an indicator. As a result the
measure and associated targets become the goal. For example, I have seen
people use the no. of sickness days and no. of improvement ideas generated
as measures of commitment. Neither is in any way an assessment of
commitment but what happens in practice is that the pressure is exerted
from on high to improve perfromance aganist the measures rather than to
engender greater commitment.
It is difficult to see how we can get a true shift in organisational focus
until we move away from considering financial returns to the shareholder
as the primary goal of the organisation. Fortunately, there are those who
are offering an alternative perspective. A number of firms (e.g.
Traidcraft, Body Shop) are now doing 'social audits' - annual reports
assessing their contribution to soceity. The RSA Tomorrows' Company study
in the UK encouraged business to consider a broader set of stakeholders
including customers, employees, suppliers and the community. Similarly
Robert Waterman in the Frontiers of Excellence suggested that
organisations should take a broader view of wealth creation to encompass
performance in addrssing social, education, health etc. problems and
challenges.
Rohit Talwar
--Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>