Bernard Marr must be a believer in my theory that catchy headlines promote increased readership. How else to explain that the long-time performance management guru resorted to the titillating title “Performance Anxiety” for an otherwise solid article on the potential perils of poorly implemented performance systems? Bernard observes that “performance management initiatives were often so…
Archive | Culture
Measuring (Lack of) CRM Usage
One of the most common complaints about customer relationship management (CRM) systems is that individual reps don’t use them. This isn’t very surprising to me, as many CRM deployments are designed to give visibility to management or to streamline the ops person’s ability to forecast, rather than to add value to the individual rep. Organizations try…
Bad KPIs, bad behavior
I received the following email about my Love/Hate Boss post: Your recent comments about relationship between boss styles and KPIs really hit home but in a different context than you described. My boss is currently developing KPIs for me and my team to judge our 2008 performance and he asked me for input. When workers…
Love or Fear the Boss
Should you love or fear the boss? In a Harvard Business Review article entitled Love and Fear and the Modern Boss, Scott Snook writes: Five hundred years ago, Niccolò Machiavelli posed the question of whether it is better for a leader to be loved or feared, concluding that if you can’t be both (and few…
A Sustainable Performance Lesson from the Grinch
With the arrival of the holiday season comes the inevitable onslaught of television classics, including “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “Home Alone”. While each are good movies in their own right, I wonder if the latter became a holiday staple largely based on the sheer number of times it was repeated in the first few…
The Danger of Increased Efficiency
One of my most common rants is to try to dispel the notion that efficiency is the same thing as effectiveness. While the words sound similar and are often used interchangeably, they mean something different. From my performance management perspective, efficiency is doing work in the right way while effectiveness is doing the right work….
Performance Management Saves Lives
You can always count on Bob Hanson of Sarasota County for a good performance management story. Here’s one that I heard him tell recently: The Parks and Rec department struggled with recruiting and retaining lifeguards for the public pools. People viewed being a lifeguard as only a summer job, not a career, so job satisfaction…
Measuring Employee Satisfaction
In the traditional depiction of a Balanced Scorecard strategy map, the four perspectives are stacked up on top of each other: learning & growth at the bottom and financial at the top. Sometimes, people think this implies employees are the least important perspective but a better interpretation is that employees are the foundation of a successful…
Revisiting Dirty KPIs
Based on my blog statistics, one of the most popular performance management articles I’ve ever written is Dirty KPIs: an article is about the challenges of using a metric based on activity rather than outcome. During one of my workshops, I recommended that an attendee use the outcome measure ‘% reduction in complaints about street…
Dirty KPIs
At a recent performance management workshop, I asked an attendee for an example metric he was using to track performance. The attendee, who worked for a city’s public works department, immediately replied “# of miles of streets cleaned.” Before I could ask any questions, he proudly added “and we cleaned more than 1000 miles last…