Metric Mania

Shellye, can you share with us effective leadership strategies to measure performance?

You know, this one I think is always evolving because there's no -- I've yet to find metrics that are, I’ll call, perfect metrics. You always have to be careful because some have unintended consequences, et cetera. To me, the key with metrics is really looking at one, making sure they actually measure what you're trying to measure. So, let's take this one, let's say you have a sales team and the sales team is measured solely on sales revenue, solely on sales revenue. Then you have a deployment organization and they're measured on profitability. And now when the two teams try to work together, there’s probably going to be a problem because I'm actually going to fight for selling as much as I can mostly sell and I don't care if we're actually giving away margin or not. And then my support team has to come in, right, implementation team, to actually deliver. They end up not having much margin to work with because I sold it for a price that was too low. So, now they're fighting and now we end up with internal debates and meanwhile the customer is like, is anybody going to help me? I mean, it's making sure that there's actually alignment on what you're trying to do across the organization.