Use these 3 KPIs with a Pareto Chart to Transform your Managers into Leaders

Bringing Company-wide Daily Discipline to Your KPI Management Program

Peter Drucker famously noted that organizations face "friction, confusion, and underperformance," with everything else requiring leadership. With this in mind, we’re sharing our approach to embedding a daily KPI discipline across teams—one that’s efficient, transparent, and empowering for managers.

This method has helped our team—and our clients—develop strong time management practices and support managers in transitioning into effective leaders. Through over four years of daily application, we’ve found that this process, which takes around 15 minutes each day, offers major benefits in managing expectations and building accountability.

For those refining their KPI program, this is a quick-start guide to setting up a simple, ground-up KPI structure with the following three KPIs as pillars.

1. Customer Complaints

Jack Ma suggests, "Opportunity lies in the place where complaints are." This KPI assesses client satisfaction levels, signaling where processes can improve and helping prepare teams for constructive discussions. By regularly tracking both internal and external client feedback, you get essential insights into service quality. Teams should categorize complaints, noting the source, type, and details. Tracking complaints over time with bar and Pareto charts can highlight recurring issues and allow managers to address them proactively in team and client discussions.

Want to see how automating customer feedback can elevate your KPI program? Register for our free webinar on November 6 to learn how KPIConnect can help you bring real-time KPI tracking & Pareto chart reporting to life. Reserve your spot here!

2. Misunderstandings, Incidents, & Missed Commitments

This KPI evaluates communication effectiveness. It highlights incidents like missed deadlines or project cancellations that indicate process inefficiencies or potential conflicts. For every relationship managed, create an incident record with date, type, and notes. Using charts to track and analyze incidents over time can reveal underlying causes, like poor planning or unclear roles. This KPI helps flag areas for improvement and builds a foundation for productive conflict resolution and process enhancements.

3. Hours Spent Creating Value vs. Resolving Issues

Unlike the other two binary KPIs, this requires daily reflection on time allocation. Team leaders track how much time they spend on value-adding activities versus troubleshooting. This data is vital for optimizing contract negotiations, resource management, and identifying chronic issues. Examples include unplanned product downtime, project hours, or time spent fixing bugs. By capturing these figures daily, companies gain insights into where to improve efficiencies in client, vendor, and staff relationships, and better allocate resources.

Conclusion

Implementing these three KPIs offers a standardized, company-wide approach to relationship management and continuous improvement. The practice is straightforward but powerful: by dedicating just a few minutes at the end of each shift, managers can effectively monitor and improve daily operations, preparing for a more productive tomorrow.

Ready to take your KPI management to the next level? Join us on November 6 for our exclusive webinar on KPIConnect, where we’ll cover how to automate KPI tracking and empower teams with real-time insights. Sign up here!