Measuring Success-An Ideal Approach
“Your success and happiness lie in you”- Helen Keller.
We often relate success, happiness, and fulfillment to each other. Success is associated with growth, development, improvement, and getting better. Think about the things that make you feel successful. Passing a difficult test? Waking up early in the morning on your own? Planning a trip and even going on it?
This being vague and generic, let’s focus broadly on engineering team success or professional success. Measuring success helps ensure productivity and satisfaction across our engineering field and life.
What is success?
According to the internet, success is accomplishing an aim or purpose.
A successful team grows in terms of clients and profits. It stands as an inspiration and motivation towards procuring more incredible things. Success gives you something to feel triumphant.
Have you ever worked so hard on a project and completed it on time with satisfaction?
Have you tried to impress someone and succeeded in it? Having success boosts our self-confidence and adds zeal to our life. Nothing feels greater than attaining a defined range of expectations.
Why should we measure success?
Success lies in the efforts of the beholder. Measuring success makes us proud of our achievements and motivates us to work hard. Likewise, it helps to paint a picture of an organization’s performance and ways of improvement. This is crucial for potential customers to review the organization and conceive a decision.
“Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.”
-Winston Churchill
Success doesn’t depend on the number of attempts we make to acquire it. The success achieved after a few mistakes should not be considered insignificant when compared to getting success on the first try. After all, Mistakes are a portal to wisdom and discovery.
Let us, for example, take two employees in a company. One person decides to just wrap up the work before the deadline with little regard for the quality of work. The other person jots down their previous work’s performance in terms of metrics and aims to improve it. Who will be more likely to get a raise or promotion if you were their manager? Who will add more value to the company?
Sometimes the road to our goal may be tedious. Traveling through it with consistency may be an arduous task. The success metrics act as a checkpoint here, ensuring that we are indeed on the right track and yield satisfaction on the path traversed.
Richard Branson is a successful entrepreneur. As a teenager, he started a small magazine which attained mild success. He never stopped there. He created Virgin Record groups (one of the successful record labels), hotels, retail stores, and even space tourism. He worked through his potential, took measured risks, and became successful.
Another notable personality who didn’t conclude with small-scale goals and worked with their strengths and weaknesses is Oprah Winfrey. Despite the initial criticism of her show, instead of giving up, she altered the format of her show and gained huge success.
Be it a small or a large scale purpose, measuring success leads us to be aware of our work and ways to elevate it.
How to measure?
This abstract question requires a conceptual solution. It means different to each of us. A similar mode of measuring can’t be applied to every organization, but a few generic ways are defined here.
· Financial metrics:
The revenue generated is a universally popular way of defining a company’s success. The profit earned shows how effectively the team worked.
· Customer satisfaction:
The main goal of any organization is to ensure that its client’s needs are fulfilled. The team’s success is measured through positive customer feedback and opinions.
· Team satisfaction:
The process of performing the work is as equally important as the result. Working in an environment where you enjoy and can do what you wish to do, increases productivity and happiness. Having a team with good coordination and work ethic is considered successful.
Success in profession and life is a crucial factor that elevates our “value” in society. It requires nothing special. Defining a clear goal and moving towards it with dedication is sufficient.
“Hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work.” — by Tim Notke.
As an ending note, understanding what success means is essential before measuring success. It involves a lot of processes like defining the parameters for success, focusing on progress, utilizing metrics to measure success, learning from failures, and focusing on long-term success.
An accomplished company helps in positively uplifting society. It is essential to benchmark what success means to us and measure it because pulling it off makes us feel content and pushes us toward attaining more.
