The Best-Run Businesses Run SAP

At our recent annual user conference, I caught up with another senior executive who told me about a new technique his company was using to motivate employees. The idea was to go beyond traditional motivational techniques to cultivate passionate employees who believe in what they are doing with an almost religious zeal. Passionate employees, he claimed, are more likely to do a good job.

Given my performance management background, I wasn’t convinced that passion necessarily leads to better results. I agree passionate employees are usually motivated to work harder which can improve activity metrics. But if the passion is misdirected, employees might be working on the wrong activities and become less productive. In the language of the logic model, passionate activities increase outputs but don’t necessarily lead to the right outcome.

Passion or productivity? Apparently I’m not the only one to wonder about this trade-off. Read full blog post here.

While I was teaching a performance management workshop, I asked an attendee for an example metric that he was using to track performance. The attendee, who worked for a city’s public works department, immediately replied “# of miles of streets cleaned”. Before I could ask any questions, he proudly added “and we cleaned more than 1000 miles last quarter; up 10% since the previous quarter”.

I’m no maintenance worker but 1000 miles and up 10% both seemed like good performance. Therein, however, lies a common problem with metrics: lack of context. The attendee had sat through most of my workshop and was trying to provide additional information about the actual miles of streets cleaned by comparing it to the previous quarter’s actual value. Clearly, an increase of 10% is easier for me – as a non-expert – to understand than the raw number.

Read the full blog post in Managing by Walking Around.

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…)