Are you holding back from better performance measurement because your leaders aren't open to it, or because your colleagues are too busy, or because your organisation isn't ready for it? What's really holding you back is YOU and not them...

Guest author Jerry Stigall, Director of Organizational Development at Denver Regional Council of Governments, has written a guest post on what to say when they say "we're not measuring that because it's outside our control".

If you don't have time to measure what matters, poor performance will continue to use up more of your time. Here are 5 strategies to give a higher priority to measurement.

We want people to be engaged - or have buy-in - to performance measures so they will support the implementation of those measures, and use them to improve performance. But dragging them to KPI meetings and presentations, and loading them with lists of measures to review, rarely gets true buy-in. Solution: the Measure Gallery.

Measure Up reader, Kenneth, works in a hospital and has this measurement challenge: "Different people want to follow up on different things. The nurses, for example, think it is crucial to follow up on how many phone calls they answer. I reckon it is because they want evidence to show management how they spend their time at work. But I do not think this is a critical KPI or success fac...

Many of us struggle to get the support and buy-in to establish a proper and deliberate performance measurement methodology in our organisations. The timing just isn't right, or you just don't have a compelling enough case yet. One way to get started is to practice your own advice, personally.

The best and most meaningful performance measure in the world can be rendered utterly useless if no one is clear about who should interpret and use it. (more…)

If your KPIs suck, even though you've long wished for better ones, it's likely that something is holding you back. That 'something' could be a very good reason, or it could simply be an excuse that you're mistaking for a reason.

Particularly in larger organisations, not much organisation-wide change can happen (and stick) without executive support. Implementing a new performance measurement approach is particularly hard without executive support. But there is a way to win executive support for KPIs. A way that consistently works...

Using a social process is a very natural way to engage people in measurement, and it works so much better than presentations and meetings. That's the topic of this Harvard ManageMentor video with Stacey Barr.