How Am I Doing?
How Do I Know How I’m Doing?
When clients ask me about performance I usually turn the question back on them—of course—and we look at what they’re measuring and how they know how they’re doing. What usually front of mind for the are the external measures, what other people do or say, the reading on the gauges, so to speak, even though they know, in the deepest part of themselves there is something more than this.
Although I’m pretty clear that the true measure of,
How am I doing?
is answered in the heart, it can also be helpful, and fun, to monitor and measure “in the real world”. It isn’t that one’s right and one’s wrong—not at all—but it’s important to know what to make of answers to questions like,
How many new contracts did we get this year? How does that compare to last? Did we earn more money?
Where did the project spend go and what difference did it make?
Does my department get asked to feed into decisions? Do people read our stuff? And do we know how it’s received and whether anyone acts on it? How would we know?
How is my investment portfolio doing? Is it going up as I head into retirement, or down?
How is team performance? Did we achieve, or exceed, what we were aiming for in this year's plan?
What do the numbers say…?
Conversations become interesting when we pick apart what ‘the job’ is about, what we want the job to be about, and how, or indeed whether, there is a relationship between what we measure and what we do. If we can’t see the difference between these things, then it can be very hard to orient ourselves and to make sense of the signals we’re picking up—which, not surprisingly, can result in feel lost or ‘off-course’ somehow.
What Do the Numbers Say?
It can look as if the numbers are the indicator of how well we’re doing (or how badly), but what if they’re an independent, unrelated variable and no indication of whether what we’re doing is working and we’re doing a good job or having a good life. Sure, they tell us something, but is it always what we think…?
I was out in the car earlier this week and the petrol was quite low, so I flicked the dashboard measurement over to ‘miles per gallon’ to see if I could get to my destination without stopping to re-fuel. It meant driving a little slower than usual, and checking in with the reading was on the gauge—trying to keep it above 50mpg, both as an average, and as a moving indicator—looks like a pretty simple performance measure, right?
I find it fun sometimes to have these mini-competitions with myself, to bring something into my awareness to put my attention on and race around chasing a metaphoric tail for a while. If I was another kind of person I might even get caught up, I might track a long-term average, set targets and celebrate wins, sell my family and friends into how cool it is to be ‘winning’ the mpg game… (and living with a statistician, although this isn’t me, I might know someone to whom it does apply!)
What’s obvious to me (and, to be fair, also to him), is that no matter how caught we might get (not often, I admit), both of these things remain true:
The numbers only mean what I make them mean. There is no ‘magic’ perfect or absolute efficiency, and the measurement of mpg tells me nothing at all about the potential efficiency of cars in general, or what might be possible with a blank page, a good knowledge of mechanics (and, probably, very deep pockets.) What I’m watching on the dashboard is simple a little variability around the baseline of my normal driving in my usual car. Just because I can see a trend and make it mean ‘better', that doesn’t mean it actually is ‘better’ in any real sense.
The numbers are no measure of where I’m going, or why. Relative driving efficiency might be interesting in the abstract, but watching that gauge tells me nothing about whether I’m heading to Bristol or Oxford, whether I like the route I’ve chosen, and why I’m going in the first place. These decisions are decided and measured in a different dimension altogether. I might even extend that inquiry in the direction of why I’m travelling and what I’m hoping to find when I arrive.
That last question is likely to get me, or you, closer to the stuff of purpose and meaning and, while we don’t want to live in those questions—that could be stifling—it’s good to know they exist.
Dimensions of Performance
When we forget the difference between these two dimensions, we can get diverted from enjoying what’s in front of us. Yes, I too like to watch the scorecard, it’s fun, but I’m pretty clear that I can have a good life and have fun, and one is not a result of or the cause of the other.
This becomes especially important when we get entangled with other people’s ideas, and other people’s measurements, and run the risk of taking them on as our own, or taking on what someone else is making the numbers mean to them.
Setting targets is usually a function of where we start from, rather than what might be possible, and bears little or no relationship to what our heart wants to pull us towards.
And, yes, keeping score can have relevance, but it probably doesn’t mean what you think it does.
With love,
Cathy