Management and Measurement

Earlier this week I was in a supplier review meeting with a key customer along with a number of other suppliers – all delivering training or related products and services. It was a great meeting and all conducted in the spirit of true partnership and collaboration.

What struck me in particular was the transparency of the information shared, which resulted in an atmosphere of trust and openness. As well as an update on what was happening in the customer’s business we spent some time as a group analysing and discussing the detailed evaluation report on all the training delivered so far this year.

The report (produced by an external body) had ‘scores’ benchmarked against thousands of other management and leadership course delegates’ from a range of other companies and industries. We were all fascinated by the information provided and the trends shown by the stats. The trends were all showing improvement on the previous quarter and were overall good news, but there were some interesting anomalies.

My point, and I’m getting there ; ) is that because the meeting was set up in such a collaborative way all participants were open to discussing the messages from the measures. There was no defensiveness, only seeking understanding type questions; no competitiveness, only ‘how can we do even better’ type comments.

I was very impressed by the productive nature of the discussion. I have seen the opposite in many internal situations where teams have used such measures as sticks to beat other teams with and create an unhealthy competitive and political atmosphere.

How are measures used in your organisation – are they a help or a hindrance?

Margaret Burnside,
Director, Twitterer @CfPD and Goodwill Ambassador for CMI