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Photo courtesy of Nan Palmero

Imagine you’re the head coach of a basketball team and you get ejected during a really important game.  The good news is you can coach from the locker room.  The bad news is you won’t have access to the scoreboard or any data.  Did your job just get tougher?  Absolutely.

Or picture a plane flying from London to New York City.  A couple of hours out, way over the Atlantic Ocean, the captain announces, “I’ve got bad news and good news.  The bad news is only one of our plane’s gauges is working, and not only are we hopelessly lost, but I have no idea how much fuel we have left.  The good news is the speedometer is working, and boy, we are making great time!”

Nobody would want to be in either of these situations, yet this is exactly the kind of situation in which we place ourselves when we attempt to build a Smart and Healthy company without a scorecard.

Most organizations are flying with a woefully inadequate number of gauges to help them understand:

A- where they are,

B- how their critical functions are performing versus expectations/design/normal/plan, and

C- the best path to get them to where they want to go.

And scorecards are not just for senior leadership.  Great scorecards ensure that everyone is on the same page with regard to what is important and should not only be measured, but improved upon.

To build a great scorecard, there are some “scorecard truths” you must understand.

1. What gets measured, gets done.  Numbers create accountability. Enough said.

2. Managers must inspect what they expect.  It’s tough to inspect or improve what cannot be measured.

3. Everyone must have a number.  It’s one of the golden rules of building and scaling a smart & healthy organization.  People need to know what numbers they are responsible for if they’re going to understand what their role is in achieving the company’s vision.

4. We live in an age of transparency.  Assume everyone knows what is going on.  Scorecards enhance our ability to make sure we are all seeing, and talking about, the same thing because numbers cut through murky subjective communication between managers and their direct reports.

5. Trust, but verify.  Of course you trust your employees.  But, as one of my first bosses used to say over and over, “People are no damn good.”  He didn’t mean that we are bad (i.e., evil,) just that we are human; we over-eat, we forget, we get distracted, we make mistakes, etc.  “Trust, but verify” is just another way we acknowledge the human side of business.

6. Numbers create team work and healthy competition, so publish and share your scorecards.  To illustrate the power of this truth, I refer to a story related in Dale Carnegie’s book How to Win Friends & Influence People.

A gentleman named Charles Schwab ran Bethlehem Steel back in the early 1900s, and he had a mill that was badly under-performing every other mill in the company.  He felt the mill manager was capable, but he just couldn’t seem to figure out how to help him.  Schwab met with the manager late one afternoon and after having a relatively unsatisfying discussion, he asked the manager for a large piece of chalk, walked over to one of the workers, asked him how many heats they would have made at the end of the shift.  When the worker told him it would be six, Schwab chalked a big “6” in the middle of the floor and left.

When the night shift came in, they saw the big six in the middle of the floor and asked what it meant.  The day people shared that the big boss wrote it down after asking how many heats the day shift made.  The next morning, Schwab returned and found the “6” rubbed out and replaced with a “7”.  When the day shift returned they, too, saw the “7” and decided they would show the night shift a thing or two; they left an enormous “10” before they went home.  It wasn’t long before the mill went from last to first in production company-wide.

7. Scorecards tell your story.  Think about how much easier it would be to convey your story if you could share a two or three-year long chart showing the week-by-week progression of two or three key metrics for each of your core processes (e.g., sales, production, client service, etc.).

8. Embrace accountability.  Only one person really owns the scorecard, and only one person owns each of the key metrics.  If more than one person is accountable for something, no one is accountable!  One person must own the scorecard, and that means making sure every component is updated on time so the scorecard can be published on time.  Remember, per truth #3, everyone owns at least one key metric (e.g., sales owns the “new clients on-boarded” metric).

9. Scorecards must be current.  Numbers help you solve problems faster.  The most effective scorecards are based upon weekly numbers.  Who wants to wait until the end of a month or a quarter to find out that something is off course?

10. They take time.  Our experience in working with hundreds of companies has been that it takes three to six months to create a great scorecard, but it’s worth the effort because it helps us better see, communicate, and understand what we are doing.  Consequently, they take time to create and refine because they inherently help us get smarter with regard to how to look at and measure what’s important.  And they make us healthier as they help us all get on the Same Page with regard to who, what, where, when, why, and how.

11. Great scorecards make for great vacations!  Imagine sitting on a beach, looking at your weekly scorecard, and being able to relax knowing everything is humming.  What’s that worth?

12. Scorecards are a never-ending journey.  They change, just as everything does, and the metrics you’re measuring must be reviewed and revised, as necessary, on a regular basis.  Add “Review Scorecard” to your quarterly planning/review process.

13. Scorecards take work, but they are worth it.  Hopefully, truths 1-12 show why they are one of the critical components associated with building and scaling a Smart and Healthy organization.

Enough said.

Until next time, may you build with passion and confidence.

Photo by Daniel Oines

For months now, I have been writing a series of blogs describing the basics associated with getting the “People Stuff” right. The People series followed another series of blogs describing the basics associated with getting everyone on the “Same Page.” Today’s blog marks the begging of a new series on the basics associated with getting and sustaining “Traction®.”

At the risk of stating the obvious, I wrote the Same Page series first because we have a better shot at attracting and retaining great people if we are offering meaningful work that is compelling and rewarding. People Stuff came next because getting and sustaining traction is a lot harder to do if you aren’t getting the people stuff right, and because traction without direction often leads to really crummy progress to energy ratios.

With regard to the “Traction Stuff,” over the next several weeks, I am going to write about a host of topics, including highly effective ways to capture and leverage data; how to become world class problems solvers; a simplified approach to creating consistent, dependable and scalable processes; and a bullet-proof meeting system that will consistently earn ratings of at least 9 out of 10 from every participant.

As always, I will endeavor to make each article timely, interesting, and actionable while building on the insights, tools, and disciplines we’ve already covered.

Until next time, may you build with passion and confidence.

What really distinguishes A Players, B Players, C Players, and D Players?

Generally speaking, and there are always exceptions, it’s skills and experiences versus passion.

A Players are not only great at all facets of their roles, but they tend to love them all.

B Players are generally really good at their roles and like them, but they aren’t as passionate about getting better or being the best.

C players are typically OK at best, but their indifference tends to bring down the energy within their organizations.

And as shared in a prior posts, D Players should never have been put into their roles in the first place.

The reality is, for most of us, we are in positions comprised of roles we love, roles we like and roles to which we are somewhat indifferent at best.  Yes, the truth is, even the best of us are part A Player and part B Player or worse.

That said, over time, as we rise through organizations, our goal should be to delegate and elevate ourselves into seats (aka positions) comprised of roles we are great at and that we love owning. Yes, it is very rare to love everything we do but we tend to flourish when we get ourselves in positions where at least 80% of our time involves doing things we excel at and love.

I have also found that the above skills and experiences versus passion model is a powerful tool when incorporated into one’s performance review and developmental feedback sessions.  My experience suggests that employees and managers are far more likely to agree on the placement of each of the seat’s roles into one of the 16 quadrants than they are to see eye to eye during a less focused, broader ranging, conversation regarding performance (note: no need to label the quadrant with letters).

I find it even more productive if managers encourage their employees to come to the meeting prepared to share a self-assessment based version of their review form (click here for a two page feedback form I share with my clients), especially if it includes allocating each of the specific roles associated with the seat to one of the 16 quadrants.  These self assessment based sessions tend to not only reveal that employee and manager are mostly on the same page but focus the conversation on the areas where there may be a difference of opinion, including where the manager perceives the employee stronger than she sees herself.

Finally, I am a huge believer that employees and managers should sit down at least once every quarter for at least an hour and share updated performance discussion forms.  One year is way too long to wait for a manager to provide, or for an employee to solicit, feedback.

Until next time, may you build with passion and confidence.

Photo by Joao Trindade

Business is math. By that, I mean that if we really wanted to, we could create a mathematical model to depict almost every aspect of a business and then connect those models to build projections and assist with performance analysis. Realistically, most of the work associated with building such models doesn’t generate enough value to justify the investment, but even rough mathematically-based models can be highly informative. One of the areas where this comes into play is in analyzing supply and demand in terms of homegrown talent.

Last week, I wrote about A Players as well as B, C and D Players, and shared my definitions of each:

• A Players do their job exceptionally well and add energy to the organization,
• B Players do their jobs well, but don’t consistently add energy to the organization,
• C Players may or may not do their job well but they always drain an organization’s energy, and
• D Players never should have been in the job in the first place.

I also noted that in my estimation, both A and B Players, using EOS® terminology “GWC™” their role; they “Get it, Want it, and have the Capacity to do it.” Finally, I proposed that leaders should think carefully through the consequences of having an organization comprised solely of A Players before they set out to build one.

The consequences of employing A Players only

Remember that A Players are high-energy, driven individuals who will do whatever it takes to progress to the next level. With that in mind, consider this: if you had only A Players and your business reached a stagnant phase, how long do you think it would be before you started to lose talent? Could you calculate the probabilities based upon your current accountability chart and your expected rate of growth?

The answer is relatively easy to determine, especially if you buy into the broader theory associated with time span capacity and the time spans associated with each layer of an organization. Allow me to drill a little into the math…

• For the most part, if you truly had all A Players, your first layer of talent (assuming those are “grinders” who are in jobs that require time span capacities of less than three months) will give you no more than a year before they want to move up or get out.
• Your second layer of talent will be sitting in “minder” (manager/supervisor) seats that require time span capacities of 3 – 12 months. These seats take a little more time to learn, so these A Players will likely give you 12 – 18 months before they want to move up or get out.
• Your talent at layer three (minders in jobs typically requiring time span capacities of twelve to 24 months) will probably give you no more than 30 months before they start heading to the hills.

And so on (see my Time Span Capacity in Management post for the time spans associated with each layer in an organization).

The truth is when you have an organization comprised of all A Players, you have to feed these “learning animals” continuously with challenging opportunities for growth or they get bored and leave. If you truly want an organization of all A Players, then you must commit yourself to growing fast.

If you cannot imagine growing as fast as the math suggests, you may be better off with a mix of A and B Players. B Players can GWC a seat and are much more likely to be happy sitting in it for a longer period of time. But be careful; if you surround yourself with too many B Players, you can be less likely to attract A Players, because A Players don’t like to worry about B Players blocking their path to the top.

Until next time, may you build with passion and confidence.

For several weeks now, I have been drilling into the notion that to get great people for your organization, all you need to do is get the right people into the right seats. Easy, right? (Yes, pun intended.)

Last week, we went beyond looking at the individual and what makes him or her appropriate for a seat – i.e. that he/she clears your cultural bar and GWC™’s the role – and started to drill into the layers or strata of your Accountability Chart. In summary, I suggested that time span capacity is the predominant characteristic separating one layer from another; specifically, that even the largest organization should have no more than seven layers with the following time span capacities associated with each of the layers:

1. Layer (L) one (1) has a time span capacity of less than three months,
2. L2 equals 3 months to one year,
3. L3 equals one to two years,
4. L4 equals two to five years,
5. L5 equals five to ten years,
6. L6 equals ten to 20 years, and
7. L7 equals 20 to 50 years.

Assuming you generally buy into the broader notion of time span and its applicability in terms of delineating one layer from another, you probably won’t be surprised to learn that research shows that both managers and subordinates tend to suffer if their time spans are not adjacent (i.e., L3’s should manage L2’s). The evidence suggests that over time, a manager operating at L3 will become frustrated managing someone whose time span is an L1, and vice versa.

Typical manager issues include:

• Lack of patience
• Feeling like they are being held back
• Feeling like they are not being given the opportunity to use their full potential capability in their work so they can progress toward the next level

Typical subordinate issues include:

• Lack of attention
• Inadequate development
• Feelings of inadequacy

Consequently, if you want to maximize the effectiveness of each of the layers of your organization, you should make sure your right people have not only the appropriate skills (e.g., a CPA) and experiences (e.g., management), but also the capacity (e.g., mental, physical, emotional and time span capacity) to effectively lead and manage his or her direct reports.

As I wrote about several weeks ago, one of your roles as leader and a manager is to make sure that you are putting the right people into the right seat, and that means making sure the seat is neither too big nor too small, but just right for both the manager and the subordinate.

Until next time, may you build with passion and confidence.