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There’s a running joke around our office that says if my colleague Meghan and I drive separately to the same client meeting, she will beat me there by more than 10 minutes every time. I’m basically Miss Daisy before she had a driver. We laugh about this regularly, and as human ecologist nerds, we also dissect why this happens.
Upon reflection, we realized I drive slowly, taking side streets simply because I like looking at stuff. The slower pace allows my brain to relax and think more on my drive. Meghan, our highly competitive statistician, values winning. She likes to check her GPS’s estimated arrival time and find a way to beat it.
For me, that approach is amazingly stressful; for her, it’s a bucket filler. We found that understanding our individual values and a shared vision of success is key to making it work. One person’s way is not right or wrong, as long as we meet the goal of showing up on time.
Once we’ve established a shared understanding of success, we can all align our behaviors toward our common goal. Defining success metrics is valuable in many situations for three reasons:
1. It fosters clarity and minimizes confusion and competition that can arise when individuals have conflicting values, behaviors and needs.
2. It highlights the common struggles people face and assists them in adapting behaviors to meet strategic goals.
3. This understanding brings a sense of unity, knowing that we are all on the same page.
A concrete example of the first reason played out recently with a municipality client. Municipalities, in general, are complex entities because they serve a vast range of stakeholders. Within municipalities, individual agencies serve different functions, from renting a park shelter to handling criminal activity to processing utility bill payments and beyond. It makes sense that each department develops its own policies and behaviors to achieve its unique responsibilities. Different departments also have leaders with different behaviors, values and leadership styles. Simple policies like public hours and whether the agency accepts cash payments vary.
As you can imagine, this was rather frustrating for residents of that municipality because the system was hard to navigate. While agencies might understand why they operate a certain way, residents only see inconsistency and experience confusion. Ultimately, aligning success across the municipality regarding how it wants to serve residents is key to meeting each department’s unique responsibilities.
Once we understood the shared success metrics across all agencies, we could begin working on the second task: modifying behaviors to honor the municipality’s overall definition of success. For example, agencies agreed on a standardized time to be open to the public. That didn’t mean all employees in every agency were required to be present at those times. Agencies just needed to work together to cover the standardized time. That process could look a little different at each agency.
A group needs to know its success metrics in order to benchmark over time whether it is achieving them. These metrics don’t always have to be quantitative—they could be qualitative (but that’s a concept for another column).
Back to the drive for Meghan and me: Our measure of success was showing up on time. However, we could have defined our success other ways. It could have been getting the most time to work at the office before the meeting. In that case, I would have had to adjust my behavior and either show up at the office earlier that day or change my approach to driving. We could have also measured success by our ability to create recovery time for our brain before a big meeting. In that case, Meghan might have needed to find a quiet place to sit in the office for 10 minutes before she got in her car to drive to the meeting.
Whatever the primary goal—for example, to have a great meeting with our clients—we need to establish smaller achievable success metrics along the way, such as starting by showing up on time.
While this might seem simple, we must remember that everyone walks around on Earth with different life experiences that shape their values, behaviors and needs. If we don’t talk about common measures of success, we create a lot of room for failure that can easily be avoided. Brené Brown, a favorite of ours, says being unclear is unkind. In this case, unclear success metrics are unkind to the organization.•
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Julka is founder of Indianapolis-based DORIS Research, which uses design thinking to organize workspaces.
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