You get what you manage and reward for

What gets measured gets managed. If you are looking at your goals, your KPI‘s, and your micro measures, then you will be able to manage when those numbers aren’t aligned with what you were expecting. If you are not looking at them, then there is no hope that you would know where you are regarding your expectations, and you could not lead your team towards the success you want it to be. There are many different kinds of measures that you can manage. Some are numbers related to the business. And some information is just really about understanding yourself and how your team works. Did you hit every milestone in your deadline? If you are constantly not getting the final product to the client on time, then you could start looking at this measure so you would know how to manage it better.

What gets rewarded gets repeated. And you should reward for excellent measurements, not activities that don’t provide value to either the bottom line or client/employee satisfaction. If you have a sales team, and you are giving them incentives and bonuses for the number of calls they make, then you are going to get a sales team that makes a lot of calls and brings in a lot of leads whether they are qualified or not. Another scenario is if you give everyone a standard bonus on your team for the job that they do, but you have a talented terror on the team that you have not managed properly who receives the bonus, too. Your other team members are going to feel that it didn’t matter if they had done well or not, they would have gotten it anyway. There are many activities in your business that you want to see happen over and over again. Figure out ways to track those activities and reward for the behavior you want to see. Be very careful about incentivizing and rewarding activities that can be detrimental to the bottom line of your business. Think through the chess game of the activities of your team and see if any of those reward mechanisms can get played. While it’s important not to micromanage, and we thoroughly express the importance of utilizing transformational leadership over transactional leadership, paying attention to the metrics that you want to see happen over and over again and rewarding those, can be beneficial in both the short and long term.

See the rest of our philosophies about how we run our business!