You Can’t Manage What You Don’t Measure
If you are anything like me, you’ve likely been “gently” reminded of this adage, “you can’t manage what you don’t measure,” more than once in your career. If business leaders such as Peter Drucker are to be believed, success happens only after you define and track goals, after you have accomplished some result. Not being able to measure the effect of a given set of actions would make it impossible to know if we should be doing more or less of those actions — or if we should be doing them at all.
If you want to shed some pounds, you use a scale to measure your progress from your starting weight — so that you can manage your weight-loss approach. If your company needs to hit higher profitability, you might measure and track sales growth, cost of sales as a percentage of revenue, or revenue by product line — so that you can adjust and improve your sales strategy.
In a world teeming with data and a million technologies to capture and slice it, today we have more ways to measure more things, and faster, than ever before. Customer service calls or chats can be analyzed for sentiment, revealing real-time customer satisfaction levels. HR teams can quickly send and gather pulse surveys, getting fast insight into employee engagement. With these tools and other like them, managers can course-correct to avoid costly events like contract loss or high employee turnover.
Measuring Team Performance
What’s especially exciting today is the emergence of technologies and tools to measure once-invisible team dynamics. As more and more work is carried out collaboratively — some studies estimate that today’s workers are on twice as many teams as they were five years ago, and spend 80 percent of their time on on collaborative tasks — assessing team strengths and vulnerabilities becomes even more important to bottom-line results. Essentially, no matter what role you fill at work, the activity of building better teams is likely very important to the success of your organization.
So what are the most important metrics to know when you’re assessing the strength and well-being of your team? At RallyBright we believe there are five essential dimensions for the collaborative success of a team: direction, connection, alignment, performance and attitude. By collecting and analyzing data on more than 600 high-performing executive teams, we’ve identified that the levels of these five attributes are what make or break team success.
When teams are hitting on all five cylinders, they have a lot going for them. They’re clear and unified on their purpose as a team. They’re connected and committed to one other, and identify as team players who put the team first. They’re sensitive and responsive to customer needs. They consistently meet or exceed performance goals. And they’re filled with energy, optimism, and an eagerness to grow and learn transparently. Together these are a powerful set of behaviors consistently demonstrated by high-performance teams, by the top teams in their fields.
Leveraging our years of research into leadership teams at leading Fortune 500 companies, RallyBright has built an online toolkit to measure, diagnose and improve these team dynamics. Given the impact we’ve seen with our early clients, we’re excited about the impact we’re having on business performance. If you’re interested in improving performance by improving team dynamics, take a quick look at our explainer video and send us an email (hello@rallybright.com) to set up a time to see our full demo.
We’re on a mission to build better teams. Want to get in on the learning? Join our #TopTeams Group on Linkedin.
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Are you interested in measuring your team performance? Get an in-depth snapshot of your team’s key metrics that pave the way for long-term high performance. Sign up for a free demo of RallyBright’s Resilient Teams™ assessment.
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