Are You Measuring What Matters Most…or Just What’s Required?
Of all the measures you review each month and quarter as a senior leadership group, which ones did you choose?
Not the ones your funders require. Not the ones your regulators or accreditors ask for. Not the ones everyone else in your sector reports. I mean the measures you selected because they provide direct evidence that you are achieving your strategic direction.
If you’re like many leadership teams, the answer may be: “not many.”
Healthcare and human services organizations carry a heavy reporting load. Contracts, grants, and accreditation each come with their own set of metrics. Over time, those metrics fill our dashboards and even our board reports. And quietly, they become the measures we manage by.
Yet, the measures others require of us were not designed to tell us whether our strategy is working.
Reporting Measures Have Their Place
They keep us in compliance with funders and regulators. They sometimes even allow comparison across organizations. They protect our existence. If your team collects and reports them accurately and on time, that is very important.
We go astray when we assume our compliance and reporting metrics are also our strategic measures. Often, they’re not.
Not Every Measure Has the Same Job
My colleague Stacey Barr offers a helpful lens in her article How to Navigate and Reduce KPI Overload. She describes the many measures in an organization as a universe, and sorts them by how important and how urgent they are to improve:
- Performance measures: direct evidence of the results prioritized in your current strategic direction. These belong on your strategic dashboard.
- Business-as-usual measures: important to day-to-day operations and worth watching, but not current priorities for improvement.
- Regulatory and benchmark measures: tied to compliance or peer comparison. Sometimes they overlap with performance measures; often they don’t.
- Measures external stakeholders need: important to a funder’s or partner’s priorities, though not necessarily to yours.
- Legacy measures: lingering because the data was there, long after anyone had a clear use for them.
Each category (except perhaps the last!) serves a purpose. Problems arise when they all crowd onto the same strategic performance dashboard, competing for the same attention of senior leadership.
Why This Happens
A few common reasons:
- The data is already being collected, so it feels efficient to use it.
- Sector-standard measures feel credible, because “everyone measures this.”
- Defining our own measures takes more thought and time (we feel we don’t have).
- Our strategic goals aren’t yet articulated as results, so we’re not sure what evidence we’re looking for.
That last one is often the root problem. As I shared in The Question Many Leaders Avoid, it is hard to know whether you are achieving what you want to achieve until you can say, in plain language, what will be different when you succeed.
What Would Be Different?
Consider a strategic goal: “improve access to behavioral health services.”
What result are we seeking?
Perhaps: new patients start services quickly. Or patients can get care close to their home. Or more people across our service area who need our services receive them.
Each of these more clearly expresses the strategic goal as a result.
And that clearer result can be measured.
Performance on that direct measure can guide our strategic work, and monitoring it over time tells us whether our strategies are having the desired impact.
But first we have to be clear on which result(s) we intend.
Start With the Result…Then Look for Measures
Try this sequence:
- Articulate the result you are seeking in your strategic direction in plain language.
- Ask what you would see if that result were truly occurring. What would be different from today?
- Then look for measures, including what you already measure. Which measures provide direct evidence of that result? Which are doing a different job?
Sometimes a regulatory or benchmark measure is your best evidence.
Sometimes an existing measure is close, but not quite spot on with our intended result.
And sometimes nothing you currently collect speaks to the result at all.
As we explored in Are You Delivering What Matters Most?, this clarity in intent belongs early, right after setting your strategic direction and before finalizing your strategies and action plans.
Using Your Strategic KPIs Well
Once you have meaningful strategic KPIs, put them to work:
- Look at performance graphed over time, rather than reacting to a single month’s number.
- Distinguish real change from normal ups and downs (more on this in Vision Accomplished: How Will You Know?).
- Use your KPIs to prioritize, learn, and adjust your strategies.
So, how much of your dashboard did you choose with your strategic intent front and center?
The measures others ask of us keep us accountable to their priorities.
Meaningful strategic measures tell us whether we are achieving what matters most to our strategic direction (our mission, our vision, and our strategic priorities).
Questions for Creating Your Excellence Advantage
✳️ Do your strategic goals include a clear articulation of the results you are seeking?
✳️ If you sorted the measures on your current senior leadership dashboard, how many would be (strategic) performance measures?
✳️ Are you relying on solely compliance or reporting metrics as a stand-in for strategic evidence?
If you’d like to receive these Inspirations in your inbox every other week, you can subscribe to Kathy’s Excellence Advantage Inspirations Newsletter.
Kathy Letendre, President and Founder of Letendre & Associates, advises organizations and leaders to create their excellence advantage.
Contact Kathy by phone or text at 802-779-4315 or via email.