KPI

Lawn Activities, Yard Outcomes

Performance management continuously invades my personal life, whether it’s on airplanes, during mentoring, or at Thanksgiving dinner. Here’s another example:

Not long after I moved into my previous house, a friendly neighbor came over to welcome me to the block. Amidst advice on local stores and restaurants, he pointed out that my front lawn wasn’t up to the neighborhood standards – in fact, it was mostly brown and barren. I needed green grass.

Wanting to keep up with the Jones’, I hired a landscaper who produced incredibly detailed designs, brought in a wide variety of equipment, and kept my front yard in shambles for three weeks. When he was done, I had lawn, hedges, flowers and a bill much higher than I had expected. But I had a yard to make the neighbors proud.

Read the full blog post here

 

Stop The Traffic Lights

While I’m a performance management enthusiast, I’ve often cautioned against using the traditional red/green/yellow traffic lights to represent performance. The simplest argument is that three states may not provide enough granularity to distinguish between levels of performance. When a driver approaches an intersection in a car, there are only two potential outcomes – proceed or stop – represented by green and red. While the extra yellow state provides the additional information that the light is about to turn red, it doesn’t add another potential outcome. On a yellow light, most drivers proceed through the intersection — albeit with a little more caution than if the light was green. (more…)