“Does Your Business Have a Scoreboard”?

Rockefeller Habits # 9 9.

All employees can answer quantitatively whether they had a good day or week

Scale up or not, this is one of those golden questions that every boss should ask and know the answer to. I ask it a lot ‘tell me, when your team go home on an evening do they know whether they have had a good day or not?’ What answer do I get most frequently? ‘Well they know whether they have been busy or not’. the boss will often say with a satisfied smile. But that doesn’t answer the question I asked which was do they know whether they have had a good day or not. They may have been busy because their systems and processes arent adequate for the work that was needed to be done. They may have been busy fools and made a whacking loss while being very active. There may have been many many reasons why they have been busy few of which might be linked with a good day. If your team don’t know whether they have had a good day or not why would they care? It is a bit like playing cricket, which is a very complex game with no one keeping the score. Cricket is pretty unfathomable at the best of times. Without a scoreboard it is a nonsense and yet we ask our teams to play the great game of business which is even more complex than cricket and we don’t tell them what the score is and whether we are winning or not. It doesn’t make sense. For the team to be able to answer the question they need to know how we win and what their part in those winning moves is. They need line of sight from their individual goals to the goals, purpose and results of the business. Does this mean you will have to share some of the numbers, some of the ambitions and some of the scores with the team? You bet it does. Unless you are prepared to accept members who are either not engaged or even actively disengaged on your team, which incidentally is estimated by the Gallup organisation to be as much as 85% of them! That wise old philosopher Homer Simpson is once believed to have said “If adults don’t like their jobs they don’t go on strike. They just go in every day and do it really half-arsed” If your business can afford its employees to go in every day and do it really half arsed, I would love to know what business you are in. For the rest of us we need our team to be not only engaged but committed to the goal, to help us get there and to do that they need to know whether they have had a good day every day.