Every Metric Weakens Your Strategy

Part 2: The Human Cost of Over Metricking

“The most painful part of toxicity is that it is often caused by alleged best practices in leadership, management, Lean, Agile, etc. The environment we are deploying simply doesn't match the needs of the team, the individual professionals on the team, and the work being done". This is from our in-progress book on Toxic Waste in the office.

Toxicity happens when human relationships break down. When we over-value bureaucracy, process, or positions over people, the information they need, and the value they can bring.

When metrics become the primary lens through which performance is evaluated, metrics create disconnects between real human professional needs and fetid, unrealistic organizational expectations.

When this happens, people get sick, they get frustrated, they slow down (because they literally can’t make decisions or act in the company’s best interest), and they can’t grow.

Right now I’m in Omaha, Nebraska. This morning I had a conversation with Jesse DePriest over coffee. The conversation mirrored conversations I have had across the midwest (the rustbelt to great plains section of the United States). Jesse said that one of the biggest problems the employers had that he’d worked with was retention.

The same thing I heard in Indiana, Michigan, Iowa, Wisconsin…small town America.

We discussed the whys behind that and something quickly became apparent.

HR could track percentage turnover day and night, but the biggest problem for these employers is that people simply stop coming to work. You can track their race, their section of town, their ages, their level of education, etc. all day, and that will provide tons of correlation and no root causation.

Then you get people saying derpatory things like “People just don’t want to work any more.”

But what if, just saying, that in the corporate strategy, retention was part of the strategy and “metrics” were more than “turnover” but were “evidence” like “employee satisfaction is increasing”. What if that evidence was supported by projects that said, “What can we do to keep people in this small town?”

Suddenly the actions are both internal (Upskilling, clear career paths, ensuring people can pay their rent, mental health services) and external (Does Cozad, Nebraska have a coffee shop? Is the grade school supported? Are there other new businesses to make sure other people in the family have opportunities?)

I, Measured

Now, let’s get even more frightening. Since projects are ignoring strategy and upper management are more interested in performance measures than humane understanding, HR naturally becomes the primary weapon to “achieve” strategic goals.

Corporate strategy ceases to be doing things for a clear purpose, and instead becomes a series of poorly communicated demands for more “productivity” or “effectiveness” (which yes means even more activity at cross purposes with the strategy).

Again, this is a result of strategy and execution being siloed. Strategy is created by leadership who have no idea what or who they are “leading” (and therefore are not leading anyone). Execution is created by the “leaderless led” who have no idea what an item of corporate importance would even look like.

This toxicity compounds when individuals "are judged by metrics and use metrics alone as a personal baseline (because it's all they have)." We all (C-Level on down) lose connection to meaningful professional purpose and instead anchor self-worth and career progression to numerical targets that have little bearing on actual value creation or strategic contribution.

In the end, everyone gets fired. The only difference is that “leadership” had better severance packages.

Yay?

(Part 3 Gets a bit more hopeful!)

Toxic Waste Class | Modus Institute | The Collaboration Equation Book