Hey, this is Chris attacking your leadership on today's discussion on employee engagement. I want to talk about a quote that I heard on a podcast that I thought was really profound. I've been thinking about it a lot for the last few days and how it impacts how it has impacted my own engagement in jobs that I've had over the years, and how it will continue to impact employee engagement across industries. The quote was, we intend to measure what we care about, but end up caring about
what we can measure. And it was like this like kind of like brain like you know, the meme of the guy with the exploding head, you know that it was one of those things when I when I heard it, It's something that I think that on some level I've thought about and I've always known, but I've never heard it said so succinctly and accurately in this kind of you know, this kind of back and forth or kind of a mishmash of words that kind of puts itself
on its own head like that. And I think about the times when I've been asked to do things in my career that seem to fly in the face of whatever the North star experience. Goals are of either the organization or my team or or whatever it is. And I'm asked to do things while being sold a bill of goods that this is in spirit of that, And in my mind, I'm thinking, not only is it not in spirit of it, it goes it's exactly the opposite
of that. And if I think about those instances, it comes down to trying to care about what is measurable, because sometimes measuring what we care about is really hard to do.
Yeah, I think it's on the surface it seems so easy, but if you get to the core of what are you actually talking about in measuring what you care about? To your point, it requires a lot more nuance. It requires a lot more kind of I would say intuition, uh, observation, Like a lot of things to understand, like are we are we doing what we say that we're doing? Are we are we impacting the way that we say we
want to impact? And yes, like the ultimate measurement of whether or not as an organization or as a company you are down the right path is that people vote with their dollars and they spend their money. So like you can look at an outcome like revenue or growth or whatever and say, okay, well, clearly we're doing something right here because people are wanting to buy our products or our services. But many times within that, there's an
impact that you want to have. There's a there's a use case that's out, there's a lot of things that matter to you. And especially as you've now had some success from a from a from a sales standpoint or dollar standpoint, you're now kind of tuning into how can we refine what we do and how can we make sure that what we want to add or adjust or or build is going to be you know, taken the
right way or accepted in the right way. You're going to have the You're going to have a lot more higher level to focus on, you know, some of the ways in which you want to measure things that you care about. And I think that it's something that, again, on the surface, it seems simple, but it's very very deep, and it's very hard in many cases to be able to actually with only data, be able to figure out whether or not what you're trying to do is having the impact you want to have.
Right right, So I remember a YouTube clip that I saw, Oh, probably it could be ten or fifteen years ago. Now, it was a YouTube clip that showed a police officer telling these two young kids that they couldn't have their lemonade stand on the corner and actually taking it down with them and issuing a fine to the parents for
having the lemonade stand there to begin with. And and technically, is there a law in the on the books for wherever that location is that says that you can't sell food without a license to sell food or whatever like? There's there are things in place to make sure that the public is safe and healthy and that you can you know that you're audited with for the Health inspector
all those things. Yeah, of course there is. But but I'm I promise you the person who who implemented those laws, they weren't thinking we want cops to go stop nine year olds from selling lemonade on the corner, right, That's not what they were thinking. But that's what ends up happening. And so this to me, this is a really similar thing here. So the the we intend to measure what we care about that is the strategy, that's the strategy put in place by someone or a group of people somewhere.
The strategy is what we care about is the safety and health of our public to make sure they're not getting food poisoning or illness with they go out to eat somewhere. That's what we care about. That's a that's a noble goal. What we measure is the amount of businesses that are operating without a license, right, and that's what's measurable. So that so we end up caring about that instead, and then you have nine year olds being
fined for selling lemonade. This is the same thing. There are a lot of organizations out there who put out a good strategy on its surface, this is what we care about, go at it, you know, make this happen.
And then you have individual leaders who either a have a really difficult time interpreting that into something that is measurable, or b they are they go the expedient route, or they're they're they're they're lazy, and they don't want to put the effort into actually measuring the things that are cared about because it takes time and effort and and watching your people, you know, visually, and supposed to just
looking at an Excel spreadsheet. Like all these things happen in the middle that change it from a being able to measure what you care about to caring about what you measure, And there are things that as a leader, when you do this, it really hinders employee engagement because your employees see through it. They see what's going on, even if you don't in the moment or you think
that they don't. So what I want to go through is some things that you can do as a leader to make sure this is less likely to happen, and that the things that you're doing are in spirit of whatever that broader strategy is where you're actually measuring what you care about. But first, let's get up for one
of our sponsors. All right, If you're a leader of people and you're trying to lower the likelihood of you know, inadvertently switching from measuring what you care about to caring about what you can measure, then the first thing is is to make sure that you fully understand what the strategy is and the ways that it should be measured. The person who's telling you the strategy, whoever your boss or your boss's boss is, whoever implemented that strategy. There
are ways that they believe this can be measured. Find out what those are. Find out what they believe those ways are of measuring it, it is very very likely those ways of measuring it are accurate. They are ways of figuring out of measuring what you care about how it gets interpreted is where it can become the expedient or easy way out, where you can just look at a scorecard somewhere and caring about what you can measure.
So find out from the source what the correct ways are of measuring whether or not you're being good at the thing that is being presented to you or the strategy that is being presented to you. If no one is able to offer that to you, then it might
not be a well thought out strategy. But if it is a well thought out strategy, there will be ways that they will say and the ways that they will tell you will likely be ways that require more effort and more work than just opening up an email and looking at an Excel spreadsheet to see what the numbers
look like. The numbers are great for validating, but they're not you have to be careful on the causal relationship between one and the other, because they're not great at looking at an individual's performance on a very short period of time. And so if you're looking at making your employees better at doing something. A scorecard is the worst way that you can do to go about doing that
on a short period of time. Actually watching them do their job might be the only way to get this done, and that it takes more time and more effort and it's more difficult, but it's necessary if you sign up to be their leader.
Yeah, I think it's it's important because I think that there's always there's always a measurement of how people get work done. And it's very easy sometimes from a scale standpoint to look at and say, okay, well, here's how we measure efficiency, here's how we measure productivity, here's how we measure whatever we're measuring. And we have an average. So if we just we don't tell anybody about it, we just measure it. Here's the average. Now we can say, well,
who's above the average, who's below the average. We can make all these assumptions that then we have these top performers, we have these low performers. What ends up happening is that as you check in on the nuance, you start to realize that maybe some of the top performers aren't doing it the way that you want them. To do it, maybe they found ways to appear more productive or more efficient, or yes, they're getting the work done, but it's not
the quality that you want. And then on the flip side, you've got those that maybe show that they're less productive or less efficient, but they're actually getting a quality of work done at a much higher rate. There's more satisfaction from what they deliver, Like there's a lot of nuance in the space. So it's both, like they will always say, like it's the art and the science of utilizing both. But to your point, where a lot of leaders fall into this trap is when it becomes about you're caring.
You're caring for what you measure way too much, Like it's becoming about the measurement and not about the behaviors, the observations, the approach, like all these types of things, Like you're not spending time understanding how they are getting the measurement. You're just simply looking at the measurement and then saying like up as good, down as bad, or
vice versa. And so long as we're moving in that direction, I'm fine, and I'm going to assume that these things are getting better versus actually spending the time to make sure that I am you know that I am measuring what I measuring, like what I care about, which is like, are my people getting better? Do they understand the larger vision? Are there?
Are they?
Are they creating and being productive in ways that have longevity, not to your point, like you know, kind of like the in the short term. Are they Are they understanding of the importance of this work And even if it's harder, they're they're taking the route that they know is the right route to take to get the work done at the level that we want to get it done. So it requires a lot more time and effort and intention to validate that. In fact, what you care about is
being cared for. And then the measurement aspect is a piece of this, and it's a help it's a helpful piece of this, but it's not the only piece of this.
Yeah, I like that a lot. I think you said something at the beginning there that you said very quickly, but I I want to really stress this because I think it is I think it happens far too often, and it happens in a lot of places. This idea that that you if you if you attempt to validate
the scorecard or whatever it is. By watching the behavior, by looking at what the employees are actually doing, then you might see that some of your top performers aren't doing it in the way that they should be doing it. They found a way to either gain the system or to you know, to have the numbers look good on paper right now. But it's at the expense of whatever the client or customer experience is in the long term
that you'll you'll find that happening. And I think in a lot of a lot of companies, the the the leadership doesn't they intentionally avoid validating those things because because they almost subconsciously are afraid of what they're going to find. They don't want to validate the behaviors of the top performers only to find out that the top performers aren't doing it correctly, because then they have to do something
about it. Otherwise they are complicit in it. They need they'll they kind of it's a different thing now then versus just hey, this is a person's doing great, and I have plausible deniability. But if you don't do this, then it could go no other way that the employees that are looking at these results of the person that's being hoisted up on the pedestal and saying look at this person, look how great they are, or these people, this is the benchmark, this is the goal to hit,
this is the expectation, this is what's possible. Those kind
of things. The people who are being expected to rise to that level, if they are committed to doing it in the right way, then they won't be able to hit it because they won't compromise their own values or whatever it is in order to get there, and they will either burn out and leave thinking this is not the right job for them, or they will eventually fall the same way and they will compromise their values and do things the wrong way to get to that number,
because that's what the expectation is, and they don't want to lose their job or or be performance managed because of it. And so I think a lot of leaders will they don't want to know. They want to put their head in the sand, and they accept the great numbers and they go, yay, this is amazing. But the quicker that you can do it, and the more often you can validate the behaviors, the more likely you are to have a good representation or a good picture of
what is possible. What does good look like? Because the people who are doing the behaviors the best consistently, whatever their results are, are likely what is possible. The person who's at the top, they might be doing everything great and that's fine, but they might not be, and so figure that out so that you are not holding your people to a standard that starts with the result you're looking for and works backward, but rather it starts with the behavi you're looking for and uses the result to
validate it. Thank you all for joining us in this episode. Join us again next Thursday and we'll continue talk about employe engagement. You have a great day.