Playing the Scoreboard

When I moved to my current city 30 years ago, it was for a job on radio and television. That was what I did for my first couple of years living here. When my contract at a specific network ended, I considered taking a position working on-air at the Home Shopping Network. I remember going to the studio to view my prospective future “office”.

In one of the studios a host was selling some kind of garden tool. I don’t remember much about the product because my attention was elsewhere. I was mesmerized by the bank of screens in front of him but behind the cameras. They showed graphs and charts of every color and a type. As the host started a particular line of patter about the item, I could see changes in the displays. Incoming calls went up or down, fluctuations in purchases, dollars, colors of items, inventory— every moment had corresponding numbers, colors and lines of measurement. And although it looked like the host was focused on the camera, I could see what he was really watching —the numbers.

Measurement at Work

In yesterday’s newsletter we looked at he proliferation of metrics in business today. Given the explosion of available data, both individuals and enterprises are inundated in numbers that may or may not be critical “health” indicators.

Employees are consumed with succeeding at those metrics –or perhaps more frequently– consumed with the possibility of failing at them.

Even when they aren’t trying to hit targets, they are actively measuring, entering data, revising analytic reports, having meetings to review their “numbers” and attempting to develop their performance in service of hitting quantitative goals.

This isn’t just conceptual.

The Job of Data Hygiene

One of my client companies is a very high-growth start-up in the biotech industry. Other than the physicians and scientists on staff, most of their hires come from analytic backgrounds. The head of marketing came from a big-5 consulting firm and the CEO was in finance. They have cultivated the company’s data-centrism —and so, they measure everything.

Having worked with them on the development of their strategic plan , I am intimately familiar with the source of their balanced scorecard. A scorecard is meant to be balanced insofar as it measures the KEY initiatives on the?strategy and then looks at the interim results of those projects.

But balance is a relative concept. And what I think is balanced may feel sparse to someone else. In this case, most people would not see “balance”. They would see obsession.

If a strategy map has (say) 30 items on it —including goals, processes, initiatives, skills and financial outcomes —there should be no more than 40 individual metrics. Yes, 40 is a lot. But, those 40 should present a representative view of the entire organization’s progress. And most people will only look at some rather small subset of them.

Strategy or Surveillance?

But our scorecard had even more boxes on it than the strategy map, because the CEO was so consumed with the granularity of each individual metric. So, although ideally, each item gets one specific metric, ours had more.

Since the creation of the scorecard, they have added OKRs and KPIs as adjuncts to the strategy. These aren’t just for the overall company but for each team. They have also drilled down to add team measurements of aggregate and individual performance.

Individuals are assessed on both their component competencies in their jobs but also their progress across a range of specific skills including communication, leadership and management behaviors. HR measures employee growth as well as assessing management and 360° feedback reports.

Moreover, all initiatives have multiple measurements of their progress and the aspects of the projects considered to be leading and lagging indicators.

And, there are even more….

Every specific function in every department has its own metrics: sales pipeline measurements, engineering sprint and roadmap planning, digital engagement, retention and lead generation.

Finally, because the company is in biotech, there are also compliance and regulatory issues to measure, manage and report.

Stand Still Until the Dizziness Abates!

With this deluge of metrics and the level of attention and data input required to populate all the scorecards, intranets, SaaS platforms and HR instruments, employees claim that they spend upward of 19% of their total working time attending to these issues. That’s the quantitative investment of time that they must make in measurement-related activities.

Every sales call requires more than a simple update of the CRM with the nature of the call and the movement on level of likelihood to close that it may represent; it also demands providing copious detail about when the call took place, who scheduled it, how long it lasted, what medium it took pace on, and about 50 additional individual toggles within the CRM.

This isn’t just more work for the individual rep who must do this data entry task after every call. It’s also additional work on the part of the sales operations team who must configure and reconfigure the CRM and all of the reporting functions it produces.

The Qualitative Cost

If employees spend almost 1/5th of their time actually performing tasks related to data and metrics production, how much psychic energy do they spend on it? By psychic energy I mean emotional, cognitive, and psychological resources. Those expenditures may take the form of worry, anxiety, anticipation, distraction, comparison, as well as talking to their peers and managers about their performance as measured by these devices. They feel as though they are being judged, quantified, and assessed from every possible perspective. And they’re right.

On the Field

Yesterday I suggested that we consider the difference between a scoreboard and the soccer game it is describing. On the field, players are doing tons of things that do not ultimately get represented on the scoreboard. If they do them all well, then the score reflects the goals they have made.

On the field, players don’t look at the scoreboard much. They are busy playing the game. In fact, they likely look to the clock far more often than the score, because the clock informs moment-by-moment tactical decision-making. Should I try to run the ball up the pitch or pass to a teammate? If there are only 30 seconds left in the period, passing may be necessary.

But imagine the scoreboard had more than just goals and a timer. What if it also had on it meters run, meters passed, kicks on goal, fouls by player, and a dozen other metrics that are available about the game. Players could become as distracted by the numbers populating the scoreboard as they are by the attack coming in from the left.

In an organization, how much time and energy can an employee spend playing the game if they are preoccupied with scoreboards and stats?

Getting the metrics right and ensuring that your team is working at their highest possible level of presence and energy is part of Beyond Better’s consulting service. Schedule a call with me to chat about how we might help your team massively accelerate your organization’s growth!