My early days with Magnatech Drive Products, a past client, were as memorable as they come.
I’ll never forget the first time I was given a tour of MDP’s main facility by the CEO and a few senior managers. Walking into the operations “War Room” left an indelible impression that still cracks me up to this day.
I stood there in silence, mesmerized by the vast array of performance charts, spreadsheets and data reports all around the room. It seemed that every inch of wall space was covered in printouts of numbers and graphs. Only the exterior glass wall had been spared—but just partly; because it too had a flipchart board at one corner, also plastered with more charts and metrics.
I could feel my jaw dropping involuntarily as I took it all in.
“This is bonkers!” I couldn’t stop the thought emerging in my mind. But I kept my mouth shut.
The CEO and a couple of managers proudly gave me summaries of some of the charts and performance data, while I nodded along and made the right noises.
It wasn’t the right time to say what I really thought.
A vital few things
In my first few days with any client, I try to avoid criticizing anything—especially in public. I prefer to soak up information and observations like a sponge, and ask lots of insightful questions; just as I was doing now at MDP.
Later on, as I sat with the CEO discussing the turnaround initiative I was brought in for, I asked him about all that data on the walls of the war room.
“We’ve got to measure the numbers,” he replied, before launching into a long, unimpressive spiel to justify the plethora of data being tracked and reported.
“But Mike,” I said, “if you were driving a car and you had to look at all those indicators as your dashboard, wouldn’t you have crashed the car by now?! Because then you’re not actually paying attention to where you’re going; there’re too many things in front of you that you’re looking at.”
I continued, “Yes, you need to measure the numbers, but you only really need to measure a vital few things.”
As I pointed out to him, they had been reporting all those numbers for ages, and yet the problems the company was experiencing were still there—and getting worse.
Measure the numbers, manage what matters
In my experience, this obsession with numbers is quite common in many teams and organizations; especially those that have lost their way.
It’s almost as if they think the numbers are the searchlight that will magically reveal the yellow brick road to organizational nirvana. Everything and anything that can be measured becomes a “KPI”, including how often the lizard nods his head and what time the birds start singing each morning.
Such organizations forget the wisdom in the expression usually credited to Einstein: “Not everything that matters can be measured and not everything that can be measured matters.”
And perhaps more importantly, the managers or executives who lead them mistake performance measurement for performance management—because of their flawed interpretation of the cliché “What gets measured gets done”.
Measuring performance per se does not give you performance success.
Success comes from having a solid grasp of the fundamental drivers of performance—the underlying things that give rise to the numbers—and doing something about those factors to achieve and sustain the desired outcomes.
It’s not rocket science, really. It’s just effective management (or leadership, as some would prefer).
Alas, the instruments of management we commonly use to run teams and organizations don’t often bring out the best in our teams and organizations—like MDP’s spectacle of numbers.
Agencies of success
The numbers are significant, but they are not the full story.
Many of the prime drivers of organizational capability and success are intangible agencies—like leadership effectiveness, employee motivation, talent, organizational culture, and individuals’ mojo: critical success factors that cannot be encapsulated in numbers alone.
Managers and leaders miss this insight because they suffer muddled thinking. It’s largely due to the societal or environmental influences that confront us daily.
Economic activity and most organizational endeavours are measured by numbers: gross domestic product (GDP), unemployment, sales revenue, profit margins, ROI, market share, and so on. So it is understandable that most managers end up viewing activities at work and measuring “success” purely by numbers.
But typically, these numbers are reflections of the past.
Whereas managing the crucial things that produce success are almost always about the present, and primarily revolve around people—including those who develop, implement or slavishly follow flawed processes, systems and tools.
Some of those crucial “people capability” management actions entail giving employees clarity of purpose and sound guidance; sparking their enthusiasm and engagement; feeding their energy and capabilities; holding them accountable and applying tough love when it’s appropriate; highlighting their contribution and accomplishments; inspiring and encouraging an ethos of esprit de corps; and fanning the flames of their mojo.
Leadership wisdom
Every iota of leadership energy spent on these elements is worth a million times the attention expended fixating on the numbers.
Effective leaders know this.
It’s what they do ceaselessly, and one of the hallmarks of high-performance organizations.
The numbers that mediocre leaders typically obsess over are in the realm of rationality, the domain of the thinking, logical brain, where two plus two always equals four. Yet the totality of the human spirit extends beyond this, to the realm of sensing and feeling the ineffable, the playground of the heart and gut, where two plus two often exceeds five, and emotional intelligence flourishes as a wellspring of leadership wisdom.
Organizations that remain at the top of their game appreciate that not every aspect of human endeavour or results can be measured in numbers.
They reflect this in their approach to leadership and how they get the best from their people. That’s how they avoid becoming slaves to the numbers while sustaining long-term success.
