How to create a scoreboard for monitoring progress towards reaching your company vision
This video and the article is part of a series of exercises taken from the ResultMaps workshop, “How to Accelerate Results with Accountability + Ownership." This exercise works best when preceded by the memory hooks exercise, which you can find here.
It’s crucial to think about KPIs in terms of your overall company vision. Your KPIs serve as the health indicator of the business as it stands today. While it maybe not as aspirational as the bigger picture, it's a key element in bringing our strategy and our day-to-day health into focus, and helping everyone stay focused on what they need to do.
The concept of keeping score using KPIs is vital for engendering accountability and ownership in your teams, and ensuring everyone comprehends what the business is trying to achieve. It prevents falling into a process trap, knowledge gap, or any execution gap. Knowing how success is measured enables better decision-making, accountability, and engagement.
To get there, we need to answer some questions.
Craft your scoreboard using health indicators
Identify your business’ top 3 lagging indicators and top 3-5 leading indicators. These could include aggregate revenue numbers, revenue for different products, acquisition metrics, or other relevant factors. The goal is to have clear indicators, ideally no more than half a dozen, to measure success. Take about four minutes to brainstorm and jot down your thoughts.
The scoreboard allows for a game plan, and your team can start dealing with contingency plans and systems for executing and adapting. Adaptation is crucial in a high-change, disruptive environment.
Choose numbers that represent the health of the business. Think about numbers that can reflect wins on a weekly basis, and will resonate for your employees in a way that prompts changes and adjustments.
Define what a win would be for your scoreboard. Set targets and ensure they encompass what you're aiming for. The right target creates some discomfort without total freak-out; it should energize people to make changes and iterate until the numbers align with the objectives.
Determine how to know if you’re winning each week. Set target numbers and iterate on everything, learning fast - a core value crucial in a VUCA environment.
Once you have a way to keep score, you can build a gameplan.