People can feel very threatened by performance measures, when they feel the measures are judging them personally. That's the topic of this Harvard ManageMentor video with Stacey Barr.

How do you feel when you hear the word 'target' at work? Nervous? Anxious? Excited? Motivated? Competitive? That's the funny thing about targets: we often have an emotional response to them, based on whether or not we believe we can meet them. Is that healthy?

Many people say they don't have the support to do performance measurement, that their leaders or colleagues don't see the value in it. What you need to do is take a different tack, and hook into what your leaders and colleagues *do* see value in. Make it about fixing a problem, not measuring performance.

Certainly one of the biggest objections to measuring performance is the amount of time and effort it takes to do it properly. Executives, managers and staff alike somehow believe that it should be fast and easy, a trivial task they can just 'get out of the way' and go back to their 'real work'. It's because they believe in the same BIG lie.

The following case study is an excerpt from my book, Practical Performance Measurement: Using the PuMP Blueprint for Fast, Easy and Engaging KPIs. It's about how a team in the Federal Aviation Administration in the United States used a simple performance measure to dra...

Much of the time and effort that goes into measuring performance is rework. We rethink why we're measuring, we rethink what we're measuring, and we rethink how we're measuring. Sometimes this rethinking is important. But most of the time it's complete waste.

You'll get better quality measures when you start to deliberately choose the best way to quantify your measures. It's too easy to default to counts and percentages. Instead, learn these five basic quantification formulae so you can make better choices in the future.

Some people love targets and many people hate them. They will avoid locking in targets, they will set them low enough to be within their known capability, and they will make excuses about why they don't reach them. Hardly the kind of behaviour that drives performance improvement.

"You'll get square eyes!" my mother used to warn me when I was a child, and she thought I was watching too much TV. It's not true, but it is true that what we look at most does certainly influence our sight. How is our sight influenced by looking at short-term targets?

In performance improvement, a few important terms are often confused or misused. So, exactly what are benchmarks, baselines, targets and standards? (more…)