Modern-day wisdom says that nothing changes without leadership from the top. And that's the excuse many give for not pursuing the changes they know are desperately needed. Performance measurement is one of these changes that is desperately needed, but rarely driven from the top.

Whether or not you're using the PuMP Measure Design technique to design your measures, you'll do yourself a favour to note these common traps people fall into when designing their measures. Avoid them!

What's the real role of performance measurement? To serve the bureaucratic machine? To keep an eye on employees? To hold executives accountable? Does the role change depending on whose measuring and what they're measuring? I don't believe so. I believe that performance measurement's role is universally comprised of three specific things.

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...

As a thought leader with a message that I desperately want to share with the world, reaching out to as many people as possible is critical to success. No point shouting from the rooftops "hey everyone, measure what matters!" because few people pay attention to rooftops, actually. I have to find other ways to reach out, but I've been failing...

Measure Up reader, Srini, asks this question: "Is there a set of KPIs limited to 3-6 which can help ALL businesses and non-profits?" Most people ask questions like this when they're just getting started with measuring performance. So while you take the time to also learn the process of designing the best measures for your organisation, here's my sug...

Slacklining is the skill of balancing, walking and executing tricks on a thin strap of webbing that is suspended between two fixed points. It's a bit like tightrope walking, except the webbing is about an inch or two wide, and it has some stretch or 'slack' in it which makes it wobble and bounce as you move on it.

Annual planning has a few drawbacks that result in unachieved targets, wasted time, and exhaustion in the end. We set the goals and targets for the end of the year, but that feels so far away that we often delay our start, fail to respond as the world around us changes, and consequently lose momentum and interest.