Management and Measurement
Earlier this week I was in a supplier review meeting with a key customer along with a number of other suppliers – all delivering training or related products and services. It was a great meeting and all conducted in the spirit of true partnership and collaboration.
What struck me in particular was the transparency of the information shared, which resulted in an atmosphere of trust and openness. As well as an update on what was happening in the customer’s business we spent some time as a group analysing and discussing the detailed evaluation report on all the training delivered so far this year.
The report (produced by an external body) had ‘scores’ benchmarked against thousands of other management and leadership course delegates’ from a range of other companies and industries. We were all fascinated by the information provided and the trends shown by the stats. The trends were all showing improvement on the previous quarter and were overall good news, but there were some interesting anomalies.
My point, and I’m getting there ; ) is that because the meeting was set up in such a collaborative way all participants were open to discussing the messages from the measures. There was no defensiveness, only seeking understanding type questions; no competitiveness, only ‘how can we do even better’ type comments.
I was very impressed by the productive nature of the discussion. I have seen the opposite in many internal situations where teams have used such measures as sticks to beat other teams with and create an unhealthy competitive and political atmosphere.
How are measures used in your organisation – are they a help or a hindrance?
This is a guest post by Margaret Burnside from the Centre for People Development, a CMI approved centre. Margaret is a founding Ambassador of the CMI, you can follow her on Twitter
- Login or register to post comments
Printer-friendly version
Comments
Great post Margaret.
I think that the key thing is how the facilitator/leader of the session sets it up and manages it. Announcing the objectives and setting clear ground rules can help as can quickly curbing any backsliding into the wrong behaviours.
Research shows that the quality of course feedback in particular improves greatly when you move away from the 'happy sheet' or 'lie sheet' system. People are not as honest when they are handing sheets back to the person who has just delivered the course, where they have to put their name on it and, in partcular, when it is a more senior manager or colleague.
By contrast, moving to anonymous feedback changes this quite dramatically. People are much more willing to be honest. The first time a major financial institution (who shall remain nameless) moved to this system the had to phone up to ask if they were reading the results correctly! That's how different the scores were.
As a result they changed a lot of things about their training and the marks - and their business results - have improved.
Another advantage of this system is that it is all automated in that it is web based (with appropriate controls). This makes it easy to use, easy to chase outstanding responses, simple to produce reports (automated) and provides the ability to track trends all without compromising anyones anonymity. Oh, and by the way - it's cheap too! (well our one is anyway!!).
I agree Ray. I have used on-line/confidential feedback forms to good effect.