A performance culture - including performance measurement practice - should be led from the top. But it doesn't always happen that way. When leaders won't lead KPIs, the best thing to do is be... courageous.

This is a digest of all that I've written so far on how to make intangible goals measurable. So if you have qualitative, intangible, vague, or any seemingly immeasurable goal, these tips will help!

by Mark Hocknell, PuMP Partner

Every organisation wants a productive workforce. But measuring productivity, which is critical to improving it, is a struggle. It's hard to make it tangible. In his book Smart Work, productivity expert Dermot Crowley gives us a clue about how to measure productivity using a very practical proxy.

Most organisations have lame corporate KPIs. They don't align to strategy, give evidence of impact, or offer actionable feedback. If they can't do these things, they can't really be called corporate KPIs!

Meaningful KPIs are quantifiable, able to be monitored over time, and are direct evidence of the goals they measure. This practical study of 50 organisations reveals just how many organisations do (or don't!) have KPIs that are meaningful.

The purpose of a KPI performance dashboard is to interpret quickly and accurately how an organisation's top priority performance results are doing compared to target, and initiate action to close gaps between actual and target performance. But there are some KPI dashboard design mistakes that derail this purpose.

The implementation of evidence-based leadership is iterative. It's too profound a shift to happen in one go. And it will never happen if we wait to thoroughly research our current state, detail a change management plan, save enough budget to resource it all, and delay until the time is just right and the planets have lined up.

Measurement is the most practical way to create a performance culture that is capable of taking the journey to become a high-performance organisation. But it won't work quickly enough, or nearly as well, if it doesn't start with the senior leadership team.

These are soft and subjective things... love, loyalty, trust, satisfaction, engagement, commitment, pride. They are feelings that people have toward other things, like our products or services or brand. So it's tempting to want a performance measure of these things, as evidence of our success. But I'm not so sure we should bother...