“How many of you know whether your organization is truly advancing, treading water, or losing ground?” I asked that question at a presentation I gave a few weeks back on the future of leadership. Not one hand went up. If you ever watched sport, then you know the power of the scoreboard. With a glance at the jumbotron we can see all the metrics of the big game clearly communicated. We have a way to tell in an instant whether our team is ahead, tied, or behind. And with that information, coaching staff have the ability to react. To be sure, our work and sport are different beasts, but the concept of being able to gauge our relative position at any given time is still important. There hasn’t been one organization I have been employed by that has created a scoreboard of any kind that measured anything. Why? We are starved for context. We want to know how our daily work fits in to the bigger picture. One way to produce context is to measure what matters and then regularly share the results with the team.
With your teams, don’t get out of the way, do this instead
"Get out of the way!" I often hear some version of this sentiment when talking about building a culture to incentivize high performance teams. "You have to find the right people, equip them, and then get out of the way." People who talk about getting out of the way...