Use lead measures to realise your strategy

For a start you need a rudder large enough. And then you need to be able to move the rudder from one side to the other. I am not a marine engineer but I am told that there are no hydraulic or mechanical devices powerful enough to push such a large surface area against the flow of water of such a vessel moving at speed. Fortunately someone very smart saw that it was possible to manage a rudder big enough to steer the rudder yet small enough to manage with a mechanical or hydraulic system.

This is called a trim-tab and this is how it works:

How turning is affected

Or

Environmental damage notwithstanding I think it is awesome technology.

Lead Measures are critical for change

But more to the point. If you have had any experience leading a change in behaviour you will know how hard it is to get anyone to alter course. None of us are really that keen on change. And as we know, strategy is about change. First we were told there would be change. Then we heard that the only constant is change (till we felt a bit sick of the cliché). Now John Kotter is telling us if we are not changing faster than the environment around us we are getting left behind. Strategy is about change. Now wouldn’t it be nice to have a trim-tab in our teams.

Well here is one.

It’s about what you measure. If you are working in a team of any kind it is likely that you work to team and individual targets. Of course the most effective teams negotiate their targets with the organisation as a team and negotiate and track individual performance amongst themselves. But let me not digress into self-managed teams country again. The clichéd point is about how what you measure governs what get’s done. Or does it? I have been working with a sales team who held daily meetings to agree sales targets. Each person had monthly and weekly targets. And the daily meetings were full of energy. But their performance remained unpredictable.

Lead Measures don’t happen by default

Imagine our oil tanker setting off from Bahrain or wherever to deliver to Durban. Imagine the captain saying “OOOh I hope we get to Durban!” Nobody is at the wheel, but still there is great hope. Then let’s say they decide that they need to have some more detail. They plot the course more carefully so that they know exactly where they should be at least once a day. Or once an hour. Once a minute! Go as small as you like but if the captain does not have a helmsman (or computer I guess) correcting for heading on a constant basis, they can hope as much as they like but there is not even a small chance they will get there.

The example is ridiculously obvious isn’t it? But why then do we drive our teams on outcomes-based measures instead of managing the leading activities that we know will deliver the outcomes? Peter Drucker called this ‘driving by looking in the rear-view mirror’. All the metaphors highlight the error. Yet we do it.

Are you ready to focus on Lead Measures?

Managing lead activities is critical for delivering strategy. But identifying these activities and the lead measures we can use to track progress in these activities is the single most difficult aspect of executing strategy. And here are some reasons why:

• Lead measures can be counter-intuitive. Stanford’s Kelly Mcgonigal gets the most pushback when she says “forgiving ourselves for willpower failures is more effective than berating ourselves in guilt”.
• Lead measures take creativity and often intense research to define. It i much easier to scream and crack the whip.
• Lead measures are hard to measure and track. The measures are new. Tracking behaviour is much harder than tracking results. You may have to create the tracking system from scratch.
• Lead measures often look too simple. The lead activities they measure may look insignificant.
• The lead activities may also look too obvious. We all know that calling more people brings in more sales. BUT! Are you doing it? Are you measuring it? Measuring lead measures bridges the divide between knowing and doing.

Well-chosen lead measures:

• Tell you if you are likely to achieve your goal. They are predictive.
• Point to activities that you can influence.
• Managing against lead activities takes the randomness out of your day.
• Remove the element of surprise from your results. If the results are not what you want, you can do more research to find out if you are managing the right measures.

In contrast, Lag measures, those that we use to measure outcomes are:

• Easy to measure (usually from an accounting report).
• Obvious.
• Not able to drive results.

In fact if luck plays a large part in whether you hit your targets or not, you are probably fixating on Lag measures.

Here are some examples of lead measures: