What do you use to measure your success in your business? Is it income? Is it sales? Is it the number of projects accomplished? If you answered yes to these, you are like many business owners who use goals to measure success. This session will introduce to you another technique that will help you deliver stronger, more consistent results.
Terms you should know:
- Lag Measures
- Lead Measures
- Compelling Scoreboard
Objective:
- Identify a short-term lag measure
- Identify an enabling lead measure
- Create a scoreboard to track what’s important
Group Discussion:
- What is your experience with goal setting?
- Do you have lead measures that align with your goals?
- Do you have a “compelling scoreboard”?
- What does your scoreboard track?
- How often does your team review the scoreboard?
- Does it compel you and your team to action?
Muscle you are building:
- Creating, communicating and sharing goals with others
- Isolating and targeting strategic actions and behaviors
- Experimenting, tracking and learning thru research
- Creating a culture of continuous improvement
- Using data to drive decision making and change in your business
Article:
Lag measures are considered a result. It is something you measure after the work is done. Annual sales if a lag measure. Total number of google reviews for July is also a lag measure. Completing 80% of projects on time is a lag measure. Lag measures are typically backward looking data points. It is the result of what was done. If you are thinking, it’s the same as a goal, you’re right.
Lead measure on the other hand are forward looking. They are predictive data point. They can be used to predict the likelihood of achieving an objective or a lag measure. Effective lead measures focus on aspects that are actionable.
For example, if my lag measure is 10 google reviews this month., then your lead measure might be “to ask 1 customer a day for a google review”. The idea of this lead measure is to identify a behavior or action where the outcome is 100% in your control. It is completely realistic to say that you will ask for one google review everyday.
Now, lead measures are usually based on assumptions. The assumption is that asking 1 customer every day will in fact help us reach our goal of 10 google reviews per month. What if it doesn’t? Then what? Even if your activity doesn’t produce the result you thought it would, you now have a baseline for which to start adapting and experimenting. Do we get a better response if we ask in person or by text? Do we get a better response when we give them a coffee card and ask for a review? Does time of day matter?
Understanding, tracking and tweaking your lead measures over time, can allow you to understand what works better for you and your goals. Lead measures are fundamentally about reaching your goals, however being able to learn, adapt and pivot quickly is certainly a by product of tracking lead measures.
After you have your lag measure and lead measures identified, you need to communicate and track this with a “compelling scoreboard”.
Your strategies, your goals, and your plans should move you and your teams to action. A scoreboard to track and celebrate your lead measures can bring your strategies to life and motivate your team to action. It can be as simple as a number on a whiteboard or marbles in a jar. See the deep dive below for an example on how to create a strategic plan to increase the number of google reviews and how to create a scoreboard that highlights the target activity that we are tracking.
Resources: The Four Disciplines of Execution by Chris McChesney, Jim Huling, and Sean Covey.
Deep Dive Example:
Lag Measure: 20% of customers give us Google reviews
How can we increase the number and percentage of google reviews?
| What do we want (Lag measure / goal) | Increase the rate of google reviews. |
| What do we want to maintain (Hold variable) | Maintain average customer satisfaction score of 4 or greater. |
| Timeframe for iniative | 3 months |
| What do we want to track | Total count of new reviews. Percentage of new reviews compared to customers served. Average rating of all new Google reviews within the specified time period. |
Lead Measure: Ask For Customer Feedback Within 24 Hours
Follow Up Plan (FUP): Upon work complete, call the customer to ask for feedback and thank them. Immediately follow up with text asking for a google review.
| What are we focused on (Target Activity) | Execute FUP within 24 hours. |
| What are we tracking (Target Activity Metric) | Percentage Rate of executing asking for feedback using the FUP |
| What is expected | 100% (all served customers should receive FUP) |
Scoreboard: Google Reviews
Here are some data points that I would want to review regularly. This example shows that that we are in the second week of this 3 months plan. We are below our goal at 17% but our Target Activity is at 100%. So I wonder what we should do? Do we have a measurement problem? Are reviews coming later and we are not counting them? What can we tweak in our language or time of day to improve our results?
I recommend that you convert this to a visual or graphic and make the presentation more fun. Tables are boring.
| Where we are now | Plan & Objectives | |
|---|---|---|
| Time Period | Week 2 | 3 Month |
| New Reviews | 2 | 3 – 4 per week |
| Follow Up Rate (FUP) (Target Activity & Lead Measure) |
100% | 100% |
| Customers Served | 12 | 12 – 20 customers per week |
| Average Satisfaction Rating | 4.2 | 4.0 |
| Rate of review (Lag Measure) |
17% | 20% |