Measuring Performance

The Center for Management & Organization Effectiveness describes the effectiveness of scorecards to establish individual accountability.

Scorecards serve as a good summary for monitoring expectations, but without the critical component of clear documentation of expectations, scorecards do not fulfill their potential.

I once heard an analogy about typical management practices. The illustration depicted a bowling scenario in which the employee was rolling the ball at the pins. Management would stand in front of the pins with a blanket. The ball would roll under the blanket and knock down the pins. Management would keep the blanket up and look at the pins and try to tell the employee how many were still standing, etc. The employee has to keep rolling the ball and try to knock down all of the pins without eer seeing them.

I see this type of scenario playing out often in the 'real world'. You have a conversation with someone describing some outcome and defining the tasks required. Without clear, written instructions it is almost inevitable that two people in a conversation like this will walk away with two different ideas of what the end product will look like. Then you end up with the employee doing what they think is needed and the manager being unhappy because the end product isn't exactly what they envisioned.

Clear documentation for business processes and responsibilities is a sure-fire way to bypass this disparity and drop that blanket so employees know what their targets are and what management expects from them.