“I’m batting 0.100”
One of my favorite TV shoes is Beat Bobby Flay. I love the blend of creativity, expertise, competition and good-natured trash talk. On a recent episode, Chef Jet Tila and his wife, Allison, were the celebrity judges trying to beat Bobby. Allison had appeared on the show once before where they actually beat Bobby (which doesn’t happen often). As part of her trash talk in the opening, she declared this about her undefeated record…
“I’m batting a hundred.”
Jet cringed and replied graciously…
“Honey, you’re batting a thousand.”
Bobby’s response was a bit more direct…
“If you’re batting a hundred, you’re on the bench.”
The banter finished with her defense…
“I don’t know baseball!”
It was a funny exchange that brought to mind a few recent conversations I’m having with clients:
An organization working through its strategic planning process and some difficulty in identifying the appropriate, relevant measures to track as indicators of whether their strategy is having its intended effect.
A company in high-growth mode trying to put in a meaningful performance tracking and feedback process for its team members.
An operations manager who clearly knows his business and how things are going in his head but can’t point to any scorecard that he uses, much less shares with his employees to communicate how they’re doing.
I will confess that I tend to be one of those guys that believes if you do the right things in the right way, results tend to take care of themselves. Because of that, early in my career, I tended to minimize the need to set goals and track performance against them. I also have a bias toward leading indicators over trailing indicators. Still, experience has taught me that it is essential to have a scorecard that provides objective evidence of how things are actually going. More so, it’s essential that your people know, understand and are recognized for the scorecard. The risk otherwise is that people in the organization declare they’re “batting 0.100” with no understanding of what means and whether it’s any good.
Here are a few points I’d offer…
From The Great Game of Business, people want to know what winning looks like and once they do, they will work to win. That may not be 100% true but if we’re attracting the right people, I do think that people in general want to be successful if they only knew what that actually looked like.
Winners want to keep score. They want accountability and the rewards that go with it. My friend Greg Bustin says that “Accountability is a support system for winners.” Cultures that shy away from this risk becoming puddles of complacency for the unmotivated while winners go find someplace else where they can excel.
It’s on the organization and its leadership to explain the scorecard and each team member’s line of sight to how they contribute to putting runs the board. For some roles, it’s pretty easy but even support roles that may not have a clear cause/effect position, they need to understand their value and contribution. If you’re cringing because of peoples’ lack of understanding of your business and its KPIs, take a look in the mirror as a first step.
What score would you give yourself? Hopefully it’s somewhere north of 0.100.