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Because KPI mastery doesn’t come naturally, here are three things that can help start to build measurement maturity.

Michael is a Strategy Manager working in the Australian public sector, and he wrote to me asking a very good question. It’s a good question because it’s one that every leader should ask, if they just don’t have meaningful KPIs:

“What are the 3 most effective ways to start to build organisational measure maturity?”

Most of the approaches that organisations take to performance measurement are ad hoc and time-wasting, they generate distracting rather than meaningful KPIs, and they do more disengaging of people than engaging.

Organisational measurement maturity is exactly the opposite!

Of course, measurement maturity doesn’t materialise overnight. Or at the end of a KPI project. Or after engaging a big consultancy firm to fix it for you. It takes years to reach mastery. But great things start to happen immediately, once you get your organisation onto the best path toward measurement mastery. And that path begins with three things…

#1 Find enough people that care about measurement maturity.

Because measurement in most organisations carries the stigma of blame and judgment, you might find that not everyone is ready to trust it can be better. In addition, it also means that ‘making’ people get involved will only set you further back.

You can find out who is ready to try for better performance measurement by inviting them. If they accept, great. If they don’t, no worries. And a great format for making that invitation has four simple parts: why it’s needed, what it looks like, how it could happen, and what you want them to do. See examples of how you can build such an invitation here.

#2 Measure your measurement maturity right now.

With a newly formed group of measurement maturity champions (or whatever you want to call them), a great warm-up activity is to introduce them to what measurement maturity truly looks and feels like. It’s likely they’ll have a few ideas already, but it’s vital that they reach a point where they have a unified shared understanding.

A brilliant way to arrive at this unified understanding of measurement maturity is through a discussion we call the PuMP Diagnostic. And it produces a Performance Measurement Maturity Score for you. Download the instructions and resources to calculate your Performance Measurement Maturity Score here.

#3 Choose an approach to measurement and roll it out organically.

You don’t master golf, motorcycle riding, sponge cake baking, crocheting, spray painting, or project management just by making it up as you go. You need a deliberate approach, one that the masters that have gone before you have already proven.

Find another deliberate performance measurement approach if you prefer, but one powerful example is PuMP. We haven’t found any other performance measurement approach that is a truly comprehensive and practical methodology as PuMP. You can learn more about what a methodology needs here and learn more about how PuMP works here.