We've all seen performance targets that work and ones that don't. They can motivate teams to make big-step improvements or they can manipulate teams into behaviours that sabotage other important results. So should we get rid of targets? Or can we do something else to make them work?

Having performance measures or KPIs is not an end in itself. If we’re not constantly returning to the reason why we measure, we risk losing the motivation and momentum that’s really needed to implement great measures. (more...

Culture is a word we use to describe the interplay of values, beliefs, attitudes and behaviours within a group of people. In organisations, workplace culture is one of the hardest things to measure. But we want to measure it, because we want to influence it.

Imagine there is a universe of measures. It's the all-encompassing collection of anything an organisation happens to measure. Navigating through the universe of measures, to decide how, when, why and whether to use each of them, is a massively overwhelming task.

Measuring performance isn't about ticking boxes to say you've implemented your strategy. It's much more about continually improving the results that are currently most important to your organisation's success. So when you find resistance to performance measurement, often it's because there isn't a continuous improvement philosophy.

Often in measuring performance we ask a question too soon: so, how do we measure that? As soon as you answer that question, you're tumbling down the rabbit-hole toward a world of silliness and subjectivity. The characters you're surrounded by are pretentious goals claiming to be too complex to measure, and confused goals draped in trivial counts and milestones.

Measure Up reader, Paul O, asks: How do I educate my clients (and win new ones) in SMB of the power and ROI behind great KPIs? (more…)

We all want a high-performance culture in our organisations. We want people to be results-oriented, to act with a scientific curiosity, to be relentlessly solution-focused, and to have a continuous-improvement mindset. And we want it now.

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".

There isn't a single and universally applied definition of the word 'goal'. And so many different things pretend to be goals. One messy consequence is that when we try to measure our goals, we can end up with very trivial and useless measures.