You Can’t Manage What You Don’t Measure

You’ve likely heard the business adage, “you can’t manage what you don’t measure,” more than once in your career. If business leaders such as Peter Drucker are right, success happens only after you define and track goals, after you have accomplished some result. Not being able to measure the effect of an action would make it impossible to know if we should be doing more or less of that action – or if we should be doing it at all. Assessing individual and team performance is no different. We need to know what metrics to measure.

In a world teeming with data and a million technologies to capture and slice it, today we have more ways to measure more things, and faster, than ever before.

Customer service and success professionals can analyze calls or chats for sentiment, revealing real-time customer satisfaction levels. HR teams can quickly send and gather pulse surveys, getting fast insight into employee engagement. With tools like these, managers can course-correct to avoid costly events like contract loss or high employee turnover.

Measuring Team Performance

What’s especially exciting today is the emergence of technologies and tools to measure once-invisible team dynamics. As more and more work is carried out collaboratively – some studies estimate that today’s workers are on twice as many teams as they were five years ago, and spend 80 percent of their time on on collaborative tasks – assessing team strengths and vulnerabilities becomes even more important to bottom-line results. Essentially, whatever your role at work, the activity of building better teams is likely very important to your organization’s success.

So what are the most important metrics to know when you’re assessing the strength and well-being of your team? At RallyBright we believe there are five essential dimensions for the collaborative success of a team. They are direction, connection, alignment, performance and attitude. Through our research and analysis on more than 600 high-performing executive teams, we’ve discovered that the levels of these five attributes make or break team success.

What do high-performing teams look like?

When teams are hitting on all five cylinders, they have a lot going for them. They’re clear and unified on their purpose as a team. They’re connected and committed to one other, and identify as team players who put the team first. And they’re sensitive and responsive to customer needs. They consistently meet or exceed performance goals. They look at their work with energy, optimism, and an eagerness to grow and learn transparently. Together these are powerful behaviors, and high-performance teams regularly demonstrate them.

We’ve leveraged our years of research into leadership teams at leading Fortune 500 companies to build an online toolkit to measure, diagnose and improve these team dynamics. Given the impact we’ve seen with our early clients, we’re excited about the impact we’re having on business performance. If you’re interested in improving performance by improving team dynamics, take a quick look at our explainer video and send us an email (hello@rallybright.com) to set up a time to see our full demo.

Learn more about the skills of team resilience and how to build them in our free download, The Resilient Teams Handbook