How do you manage and report on executive metrics?

Executives often don’t meet their objectives because the people doing the daily work don’t understand their role in helping to achieve the metric. Paramount to meeting strategic goals is getting employee buy-in and clearly communicating each and everyone’s participation as teams and individuals.

At our company, executive metrics work because we limit the number of OKRs to 3 or less, and we evaluate them on a quarterly basis. Having this be high level and manageable is important to keeping everyone aligned, as well as not overburdening execs with reporting.

While most organizations that I worked in used SMART to set goals, the most effective goals I was ever given were far more simplistic. We needed to hit our income targets and outside of that, I was charged with "promoting good and stopping stupid". At the end of the year, I had a list of each of these items and the simplicity provided an easy to remember compass. Granted, it was one position. As long as goals are limited to 3-5 things, goals can be manageable. More important than the goals are the frequency of feedback and the acknowledgment of where performance stands versus them throughout the year.

In these rapidly evolving times, it is important to perhaps add a fifth perspective, innovation. All organizations should consider measuring the creative and innovative culture, the ideas, and the conversion to value driven projects. To remain competitive, ideation should stem from the “cold face” of businesses, at the operations level. By adding innovation as a metric, each individual, section, and division actively senses their environment, and the competitive landscape for any threats to react to, or opportunities to enhance the business value to customers.

We start with company OKRs per quarter that then cascade down to OKRs per team and then individual KPIs for each team member. This is important for employees to understand how their individual performance ladders up to their team and company goals.

Artificial intelligence will ultimately make this step fluid. Human intelligence may make this reporting too complex. Run strong correlation tests to external events to discover externalities affecting your progress.

Using standardized systems like Looker can be hugely valuable to making sure all the data is the same for those measuring metrics across an organization. It is also important to note that you should time base reporting - for example if your company tracks revenue Sunday to Sunday, everyone should track the same window because it could be different and inaccurate if you report on a different window.

If you have the right data system (for example Looker), you can build out amazing dashboards that can get very personalized for the individual employee. This gives them ownership over their performance as well as granular insights into what they can do on a day to day basis to implement change. I can’t say enough about how when we immersed ourselves in data it made a change for the company.

First step to set / define KPIs and update the status on regular basis to stakeholders by using dashboard or PPT. Monitor risk assessment to address the root cause and resolve, RASIC Matrix to be fixed with stakeholders and track the progress and highlight the importance of achieving mutually beneficial objectives on regular basis