“Measure. Measure. Measure. What you can’t measure, you can’t improve” –Fusion Marketing Partners
Shouldn’t the same apply to your employees and teammates?
As much as we emphasize delivery in the tasks, projects, and meetings we “complete,” we often miss the mark on the most important element of every role: performance.
How are we performing? Are we deliver outstanding results? How’s your team performing compared to other pods or even compared to themselves the year before?
As all industries and companies become more data rich, I believe in the near future we could shift to performance-based evaluations for nearly every role within and for the vendors and business partner.
Not only have studies found this to be great for ensuring they have strong talent in the right roles, but having strong work culture has also been tied to better overall employee performance across all divisions within.
The power of this is three-fold:
- Managers could begin to attach true impact to the work of project managers, developers, customer support reps, and other more traditional, support roles
- Urgency or “stakes” will be created and eliminate the low productivity that runs rampant within big company
- Both corporations and startups could begin to hire more effectively and seek out high performers who’ve met similar metrics in other companies and roles
So where do you start if you’ve never measured for performance? Here are 4:
- Set monthly & quarterly Objectives & Key Results (OKRs) for each team member
- Have weekly checks to understand how performance is going
- If performance is below target, have them define a plan of action
- If performance is still below target, have them shadow a high performer
Do you lead a team? How do you review and make sure they’re top performers?
Please comment below or share with a manager, friend, or mentee who could find this valuable.
~JK
One response to “Performance Trumps Delivery: Measuring Individual Success on Any Startup Team”
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