How Leadership Chooses to Measure Progress
You may have heard the phrase leading and lagging indicators. If not, let’s start there.
To define them for application in today’s lesson, let’s go with this definition:
Leading and lagging indicators are two measurements used to assess performance in a business or organization. A leading indicator is a predictive measurement. In workplace safety the percentage of people wearing hard hats on a building site would be a leading safety indicator. A lagging indicator is an output measurement, for example; the number of accidents on a building site.
The difference between the two can be viewed as a leading indicator that can influence change in the future, whereas a lagging indicator only records what has already happened.
You Can’t Move Forward While Looking in the Rear View Mirror
All too often, we concentrate on measuring results, outputs and outcomes. They are easy to measure and accurate.
If we want to know about monthly sales quotas, we count them. If we want to know how many accidents occurred on the factory floor, we consult the accident log.
These are lagging indicators. They are an after-the-event measurement, essential for charting progress but useless when attempting to influence the future.
Influencing the Future
To influence the future, we need predictive measurements.
To increase sales, we predict outcomes through strategic actions. For instance, make more sales calls each week or run a new marketing campaign.
We could make safety training mandatory for all employees to decrease accidents on the factory floor. Or similarly, mandate employees wear hard-hats at all times.
Measuring these activities provides us with a set of leading indicators or in-process measures.
Leaders and Measurements
Let’s take these principles and apply them to improve our workplace culture.
In most Purpose Statements, the Respectful Workplace Policy reads something like, “Here at ABC Company, every employee has the right to experience a workplace where they are treated with dignity and respect, free from harassment and discrimination.”
A noble goal.
But how do you measure the success and achievement of such a goal? And what is the path that we can take to get there? Often, people shy away from measuring. Measurement is cold, unsympathetic, and at times even harsh. It discounts effort and has no regard for interruptions or distractions. But measurement is helpful and useful. Without measurement, there is no way for you to know unequivocally if you are making progress.
Without measurement, there is no way for you to know what adjustments would be productive.
How can we reach our goals if we have no measurement to get us there?
Leading and Lagging Indicators to Lead a Culture Shift
To create a workplace culture shift, you need to know where you started, where you want to go, and what actions you will take to arrive. Measurements are the accountability tool.
The second shift in thinking is what are you doing day after day to change outcomes?
You have much greater control over your actions than you do your outcomes. Your outcomes are driven by your actions.
Creating a series of leading indicators, action items if you will, that can be measured and tracked is the only way to ensure that you will meet your goals.
Our Workplace Policy statement about how we want people to be treated won’t do us any good in their mailbox. The workplace culture we want to thrive in depends on a set course of daily actions. An email with a note saying, “please read the attached document” will not achieve the desired outcome. Sigh.
Action Items for a Deliberate Workplace Policy That Delivers Results.
So what would be such action items?
Here are some for you to consider:
- Define civility & incivility
- Create a Code of Conduct
- Leverage your organizational values
- Embed the concept of civility into your team
- Create a team filled with role models
- Coach and educate abrasive people
- Create team norms
- Deliver training
- Provide tools
- Measure and monitor these activities and actions
- Check-in with people ongoing
How we think about measuring and how we engage with it will ultimately impact the result or outcome. If you want people to be happy coming to and being at work and perform to their ability (and beyond), you will need to create that environment actively.
Too many managers and supervisors think about measurement as accountability. We will measure how the person performed, and that mindset creates dysfunction and needless barriers in workplace relationships.
Measurement is not accountability. It is feedback.
A Story to Illustrate
In 1979 a passenger plane carrying 257 people left New Zealand for a return sightseeing flight to Antarctica.
Unknown to the pilots; however, there was a minor 2-degree error in the flight coordinates.
This placed the aircraft 28 miles to the east of where the pilots thought they were. As they approached Antarctica, the pilots went down to a lower altitude to give the passengers a better look at the landscape.
Both were experienced pilots, although neither had made this particular flight before. They had no way of knowing with the 2-degree error that they were directly in the path of Mount Erebus, an active volcano that rises from the frozen landscape to a height of more than 12,000 feet (3,700 m).
Sadly, the plane plunged into the side of the volcano, killing everybody on board. It was a catastrophe brought on by a slight error—a matter of simply a few degrees.
The One in Sixty Rule
Experts in air navigation have a rule of thumb known as the 1 in 60 rule.
It specifies that for every 1 degree a plane veers off its course, it misses its target destination by 1 mile for every 60 miles you fly. This means that the further you proceed, the further you are from your target.
If you’re off course by just one degree, after one foot, you’ll miss your target by 0.2 inches. Trivial, right? But…
- After 100 yards, you’ll be off by 5.2 feet. Not huge, but noticeable.
- After a mile, you’ll be off by 92.2 feet. One degree is starting to make a difference.
- If you veer off course by 1 degree flying around the equator, you’ll land almost 500 miles off target!
The point is that small actions accumulated over a very long time make a huge difference.
Now that should get you motivated to start measuring leading indicators.
