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Chapter 9
Measuring Caverns Measureless to Man
I'm at least six feet tall . . . would you believe five feet eight?
All of the errors involved in stalls described in Part One can be overcome by having measurements in place that your organization understands, pays attention to, and knows how to respond to. This chapter explains how to create a universal understanding of how to use measurements to eliminate stalls and to point the way to faster progress. The main reason most of us overlook opportunities to improve is that we have no relevant measures in place to help identify the opportunities. Without measurement, would-be stallbusters are mostly up the creek without a canoe. Read on to see if you recognize yourself or your organization and to learn the importance of measuring performance as part of a 2,000 percent solution for fostering more growth. Don't Tell Me, I Examined It Myself! The story of the three blind men asked to describe an elephant suggests how hard it is to find the right measurement for a given situation. The first blind man felt the leg and said the elephant was like a tree. The second felt the trunk and said the elephant was like a snake. The third felt the tail and said the elephant was like a worm. Many conclude from the story that using many perceptions and measurements is not as good as one solid overview. In fact, the tale points to the need for many more measurements. If each blind person had gone all around the elephant, each would have done better in trying to understand what an elephant was. If a sighted person had been around, that person could have described the elephant for the three blind men in order to provide an overview. Understanding would have grown. Unfortunately, organizations often operate like the individual blind man, using one incomplete measure to provide an overview. For example, it may be that the quality problems in the U.S. automobile industry during the 1970s related in part to the marked tendency to pay too much attention to one measure--cost--and not enough to measuring how poor quality was affecting profits by driving customers to foreign builders of higher-quality cars. Like U.S. auto builders, most people view the measuring process too narrowly. A young corporate planner once went to a seminar given by famed corporate strategist Peter Drucker. The young man knew that everyone in his company admired Peter Drucker. He thought Drucker would agree about the importance of his own pet measurement. Then he could beat everybody over the head with Drucker's answer and get his own way. The young man asked Drucker to pick the best single measure of corporate performance. Drucker paused. Then, with irritation in his deep, gruff voice, he said "My dear sir, you obviously know nothing. There is no single measure of corporate performance that is any good. Use them all and try to develop new ones and each will teach you something you need to know." Drucker's point is that measurements are highly subjective and also highly imperfect. Would-be stallbusters are going to need lots of measures. Unless you get carried away, the more measurements you do, the better. For each time you measure, you create the potential to learn something new. You will know that you have gone too far when new insights and opportunities worth far more than the cost of measuring fail to be exposed by the newest measures. I'd Rather Not Know That! Drucker's name and his approach to measurements came up at a recent management meeting. One CEO had been an officer in the Air Force in the 1950s. He told the others that Peter Drucker had presented a seminar on personal improvement for his Air Force group years earlier. Drucker told each man to measure in great detail how he spent his time for one week. This CEO said he had done just that. He then explained that this encounter was a life-changing experience. He has never had to measure his time since because the exercise revealed all his bad habits. It told him how much of his time was productive and how much was not. The CEO also knew what his good and bad habits were so that he could be on guard in the future. But this CEO's example is rarely followed. Few write down how their job time is being spent. Few care to measure their own output. And employers who try to get cooperation in such measurements may face resistance, particularly when young people are involved. Workers can feel it is somehow unfair to do this or feel they are being picked on, even when they are allowed to come up with their own measurements. Try this experiment yourself and you will see what we mean: Measure how much time you spend on the phone, how much doing routine tasks, and how much you accomplish overall. You will see that measurements can help redirect your efforts into more productive activities. Be sure to take action based on what you have learned. Otherwise, your new measurements could merely contribute to a bureaucratic stall. A Perpetual Measuring Machine Even asking people to think about using more measurements to identify stalls causes concern that this will create confusion or won't be worth the effort. Here's a story that shows it is worthwhile. On first impression, you may think that the measuring was overdone, but clearly that isn't so. Some consultants and executives from other companies visiting the top division of a major firm stopped by the finance and data processing units. The visitors looked in each person's work area and saw cubicles brimming with daily personal performance measurements. The measurements covered the walls. In most cases, the employee had personally created several dozen measurements directly related to results from his or her job and how the worker set about performing tasks (where results were difficult to measure). The concept was that by making the measures of performance visible, workers would themselves be encouraged to focus on improving personal output. Workers could also see whether they were increasing their output as well as how they were doing relative to other workers. The measures let everyone measure each other's performances. If a worker had a problem in a given area, the other workers quickly became aware of it, and those who were doing better in that same area would often stop by and make suggestions that could help. Since much compensation rested on department performance, there was an incentive for workers to help each other. Did everyone perform well initially? In some cases they did, but in others they did not. When they did not, it was soon apparent, and coaching and self-measurement helped them make rapid progress. These workers also derived a sense of the relevance of their measurements because each experienced improvement. By seeing each other's measurements, the workers also got more ideas to improve their own performance. These workers made enormous strides. Personal productivity gains of 25 percent a year were not uncommon. (Compare this percentage with the standard benchmark for such gains. Those who study productivity will tell you that if a worker can manage 2 to 3 percent gains in a single year in an office environment, he or she is doing exceptionally well.) Furthermore, corporate productivity in these functions grew by a similar amount because of the measures. Some corporations are unwilling to consider that they can do better, and they commonly settle for 2 to 3 percent annual productivity gains when this level is clearly not the limit. Limited expectations are telegraphed to workers, and thus lower productivity follows predictably. Let's look at another example of how expectation measures can affect performance. Consider a student who, many years ago, worked for two different managers at the Fuller Brush Company. Fuller recruited its managers from the ranks of its successful door-to-door brush salespeople. Like the salespeople, the managers were given considerable latitude. The bosses could run their areas as they saw fit, so long as they did a reasonably good job of meeting Fuller's modest sales targets. It is worth noting that neither sales manager the student worked for was college trained. And actually the one who got the better results was functionally illiterate, barely able to read and write, though he had a lively mind, and, as his wife said, "could talk the hind leg off a billy goat." This man developed the better intuitive measure of a salesperson's ability to produce results if he or she was willing to work hard. Both managers had districts in industrial towns peopled by blue-collar men whose wives stayed home. The student first worked for the less effective manager in Martin's Ferry, Ohio, a steel mill community next to the Ohio River near Wheeling, West Virginia. The manager told the student he could make $75 a week by giving away thirty of Fuller's familiar vegetable brushes a day as a small gift to gain entry. Then he would have a chance to sell as much of the Fuller line as he could. Each successful sales encounter using this technique led to the sale of two to three items, and the student did make $75 a week. The student later spent a summer in Pontiac, Michigan, a car-building town, and again sold Fuller Brush. The savvy manager in this area told the student instead, "I don't want you to knock off until you have sold $100 worth of Fuller each day." This manager had already inspired two other salesmen to reach national prominence at Fuller, including the company's top salesman who carried three product cases. With the contents of the three cases spread out, they made a home look like a retail store. So the young salesman, inspired by what the manager said and by the example of the older men, did not always sell $100 worth of Fuller a day, but he almost always did and, as a result, earned $200 a week, more than double what he earned before. This was big money in preinflation times. Where tangible results are less clear, measurement can still help. Many experts will argue that you cannot measure the output of many kinds of white-collar work such as financial analysis. But one company did find that it was helpful to measure the time spent on various tasks, such as time doing financial analysis, as opposed to the time needed to put the data together for the financial analysis. By measuring time allocations, people became more aware when they were spending time on low-output activities, such as assembling the data for the financial analysis, that could be done by others whose time was less costly, in wages, to the company. Behavior rapidly changed as a result, leading to much more delegation of simpler tasks. End Results vs. Causes As you can imagine, the best measures start with causes rather than outcomes. However, the smart way to look at measurements is to assume that you are probably only measuring outcomes as opposed to causes. For example, a passing automobile is highly polished. But is this because it is just out of the new car showroom or because the owner is a car buff, figuratively and literally? We really do not know without more information. The quality you are observing, in this case a highly polished car, is the result of unknowns. Experts tell us that we will have to ask "why" a number of times--try five to ten times--before we will reach causes. Financial measures that most companies rely on to assess performance mostly describe outcomes. Earnings per share measures what a company earned in the last period, whether a quarter or a year. It tells you where you have been. It is a result of things that you did earlier, some of them good and some not good. What you need to do is to begin to replace end-results measures with measures of the causes that create the end results. For example, if your customers think what you are doing is great for them, then presumably they will be loyal and buy more things from you. That can mean your company will post higher earnings per share or have more equity when the next period ends. As you understand more about the causes, you increase your understanding of what actually brings you the good or bad end results. If your sales go up, what were the things that changed before your sales went up that might have helped? Consider factors such as more distribution, better quality, price reductions, new products, and changed promotions. If profit margins got wider, what elements in the picture improved first? Consider factors such as price increases, cost reductions, economies-of-scale effects, and new ways of operating. The more systematic you are in tracking these measurements, the better. At this point, if you are fortunate enough to know statistics, you have a wonderful additional tool. But even if you do not have a knowledge of statistics, you can draw graphs to find performance-measure trend lines that seem to move together among factors that could be connected. If two or more do match, these may be linked by cause and effect. But be careful. To understand the trend lines better, the next step is to get a person trained in statistics to help you with the statistical analysis. People usually learn enough in statistics to figure that if you run two sets of data through a computer and the computer indicates some kind of a match, it may mean something. Some forget the statistical rule that there must be a logical reason for the match, a cause and an effect. So it is important to get verification of a connection by talking to those who understand the situation to see if logical cause-and-effect conclusions can be drawn about the paired data. Another approach to determining cause and effect is that you can also run experiments, observe reactions, and make judgments about probable causes and results. What will happen over time is that, hopefully, you can eliminate or reduce your focus on measures that are probably not the causes of the end results you are looking for. You will be on the verge of busting a stall caused by looking in the wrong direction. And you will be on the track of moving to a superfast-growth 2,000 percent solution. When Almost Perfect Isn't Good Enough After the Japanese skunked U.S. manufacturers on quality issues, some American firms may have overreacted. They created new management systems focused excessively on quality improvement programs to the exclusion of sufficiently developing other important processes. Manufacturers measured the number of defects per million parts. Motorola's Six Sigma system was among the most notable quality processes. Under it, Motorola strove for no more than three defective parts per million. The Malcolm Baldrige Award went to Motorola for some of this work in 1988. However, the quality program often became all consuming, which led to other problems. Executives for companies that use such measures may tell you they seldom make mistakes anymore--almost no defects. But you may also find that they do not grow as fast as other companies do, and, even more important, that their profits lag as well. How can this be? Isn't product quality the key to customer satisfaction? Well, yes, product quality is important to customers. But it is not the only thing. They will undoubtedly have to add a number of other measures before they take into account all of the potential causes of customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction. Examples include how swiftly goods are delivered and how well they operate and are serviced once they are in the customers' hands. Mighty Motorola had a profit stumble in the late 1990s that some in the press have attributed in part to delays in developing new-generation digital pagers and cellular telephones. Motorola had relied on analog designs too long, even if those analog products were almost perfect according to the measured number of defects. In response, Motorola notes that profit problems in 1997 and 1998 primarily relate instead to a weak Asian economy, a recession in the semiconductor industry, and a recession in the paging industry. Solving Yesterday's Problem
The moving finger writes; and having writ, moves on . . .
One of the key lessons in business is that excellence is a moving target. When you satisfy the customer in one area, you need to determine other wellsprings of customer dissatisfaction. It's like Maslow's needs hierarchy: We have physiological needs first. We need to breathe. We also need food. And we need water. When those needs are satisfied, we look for safety and the avoidance of danger. And so forth in ascending hierarchies of need. Customers have similar needs hierarchies. Which comes first? When you first offer an innovative new product, the customer just wants to be on the list of those who will, in fact, get the new product. The question at that point is whether the customer can get the item at all. But once that need is satisfied, the customer's need shifts. The customer is likely to focus on the product's dependability. Or she may seek a competing product that does more work at a similar price. Xerox provides a classic case. Before Xerography, Eastman Kodak offered copiers that used photosensitive paper and liquid hypo solutions. The operator played darkroom developer. The user of the copier dipped the paper into a developer solution. The Kodak system was not only expensive, but the damp copy was messy. No wonder everyone welcomed the dry copies introduced with Xerography from the Xerox Corporation. Xerox was on top of the world with its invention for years. But in time, as its patent exclusivity ended, Xerox faced tough competition from Japan, and its dominant share of market began to erode. Finally, however, Xerox staged a strong offensive with simpler, cheaper models of copiers. In fact, Xerox won the Baldrige Award for one of these new copier machines a decade ago. The machine was created because Xerox management believed the company's primary problem concerned the way their machines were designed. They concluded, quite correctly, that their copiers were, by and large, too expensive to make and sell, too unreliable, and too costly to repair. But having devoted its full attention to these important issues, Xerox did not initially consider whether the level of service the sales force was providing its customers was affecting company performance. Since the sales department wasn't yet being measured for quality of service, the new machines, outstanding though they were, did not produce all of the rise in market share Xerox had expected. Part of the problem was that the sales force was poorly motivated to call on smaller accounts, the area where Japanese competitors were strongest. The salespeople were indifferent to accounts that would not buy many expensive machines and wouldn't call on customers if they didn't feel like it. One unserved customer knew an officer of the company. He was forced to call the officer to arrange for a simple sales call to have an opportunity to spend over $20,000. Eventually this issue was addressed and Xerox snapped back. Xerox now, in the late 1990s, can be considered a progressive company. While most companies measure elements that used to be important for the customers, by learning that customer concerns change over time, Xerox now correctly focuses on the customers' current issues. Continuing, multidimensional measures keep Xerox agile in focusing attention on the most productive areas.
Measure Yourself in Your Customers' Eyes . . . One consumer products firm measured fifty elements in the order process so that orders would be correctly processed and correctly delivered. The company was error-free 99 percent of the time on each element of the order. It had been quite smug, but, in fact, one order out of every five went out improperly. Several times a year, each individual customer experienced an error. Doesn't seem possible? Well, do the math. The company overlooked the fact that a 1 percent or less mistake rate for each element of a fifty-element order led to botched-up orders 20 percent of the time. The 1 percent or less error rate is compounded. The company went from being complacent to realizing it was really annoying the heck out of its customers. It had made no effort to create measures relevant to the customers. Every company needs to address each constituency it serves to avoid stalls: the customers, the suppliers, the employees, the shareholders, even the towns and countries in which it operates. Measurements of effectiveness should include how employees' ability to perform is affected by the company's actions and policies. The company needs input from suppliers to learn how to work more effectively with them. The company needs to measure how its decisions impact the people in the community. With all these constituents plugged in, the ability to focus on potential progress and make effective decisions soars. The Mismeasure of Man Companies that pioneer a new product or technology are often overconfident at the beginning concerning their production efficiency. The reason is that their productivity per worker rises rapidly. What they may fail to appreciate is how very much productivity should soar. If your productivity rose by 15 percent this year, but you had the potential for 50 percent gains, you may have actually lost ground against current and future competitors. Always ask yourself if what you are measuring can tell you what you really need to know. It is a fact that, historically, measures have been adopted and fervently pursued that made no sense at all. Stephen Jay Gould, in his book The Mismeasure of Man (W. W. Norton 1981), talks of the time when pseudoscientists measured skulls to determine intelligence levels. They assumed that the bigger the skull, the brighter the person. We now know this assumption was clearly incorrect. A different pseudoscience, phrenology, was in vogue at the turn of the nineteenth century. Researchers had no reliable measure of intelligence, but the phrenologists believed that certain mental faculties and character traits were determined by the configuration of the skull. In the Middle Ages, thinkers lavished time on how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. It seems we human beings have always had a penchant for coming up with nonsensical or, certainly, noncausal measures. Rose-Colored Glasses One of the best early studies of productivity was conducted at Western Electric's Hawthorne Works in Chicago, Illinois (see Elton Mayo's The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization [Macmillan 1933]). It was done by a careful researcher, Professor Elton Mayo of the Harvard Business School. Mayo was attempting to determine ways to improve productivity in factories. This work grew in part out of his preliminary studies of the impact of illumination on productivity in 1924. He followed up this research with his Hawthorne Effect Studies from 1927 through 1932. This research exercise by Mayo shows how easy it is to get offtrack when measuring the causes of productivity. It turned out that following changes in factory illumination, productivity grew. (A substantial number of other elements of the work-related environment we won't touch on also seemed to help.) At first, it seemed that added light increased productivity. But the productivity gains were not lasting. Other seeming improvements to the work environment were added one at a time and evaluated. Each time, productivity rose and stayed up for a period of time. Then it would fade out. Perplexed, Mayo and his colleagues restored lighting conditions to the original level. Productivity promptly rose, then faded again. Mayo soon learned that merely varying the lighting brought immediate but temporary productivity gains. Mayo and his people decided lighting levels were irrelevant to productivity gains. Style of management and how change itself was handled led to the improvement. Later experimenters trying to measure productivity gains realized they had to normalize measurements for the Hawthorne "placebo effect" of improved performance after making any change before concluding that productivity gains arising out of specific changes were lasting ones. At Hawthorne, employees and their managers responded to the latest superficial change but soon reverted to form. Variety was merely "the flavor of the month," as it were. Before long, no one paid as much attention to illumination or similar ostensible change. Even so, many executives draw false conclusions about the widely reported Hawthorne experiments, noticing only that if they put in new programs, they initially get better results. There were even efforts to institutionalize the Hawthorne effect, literally change for the sake of change. The problem with this idea is that the small improvements that might result from these types of change are often not worth the resources they would consume. Causal Measurement in Days Gone By: Rocket Into the Space Age Anyone searching for reliable measures of cause and effect can learn from some of our clever ancestors. Isolating one key relationship that could easily be tracked often made all the difference. Napoleon reportedly measured his soldiers' tooth decay and surmised that certain regions of France produced stronger teeth than others. He preferred to recruit from areas of France where the populace had strong teeth. It was one of several attributes Napoleon believed would make a man a better soldier. Until Napoleon made the mistake of invading Russia, his armies dominated Europe. In feudal times, pride was a factor in farming success. Freeholders, unlike the serfs, were by definition landowners, though their plots were mostly quite small. Since they were freemen and not part of the feudal lord's estate, they took pride in the fact that they could grow what they pleased. They often planted badly. Crops were relatively poor. By contrast, the estate managers, who were working for the lord of the manor, not only measured the seed they planted, they also measured how much grain it yielded. They were able to isolate better seed and optimum quantities of seed per planting. Theirs was a more systematic approach. It brought superior results. The soil the managers farmed brought far bigger harvests than the freeholders' land. The wheat goes on. Here's an example of crop measurements from the space age. Farmers today use satellite technology to determine which parts of their vast acreages need which fertilizers and in what quantities. The farmer fertilizes appropriately based on what the crops actually need. Growing conditions are different, depending on the amounts of sun each plot gets and depending on the different slopes and altitudes at which the land lies. Measurements, in this case, are related to causes. The measures based on satellite data have raised productivity markedly. This increased productivity saves time and resources and is good for the environment. Farmers also earn more. Obviously, farmers are dedicated to growing bigger crops. If the farmer sells more grain, he earns more money. The farmer using satellite technology is the modern-day equivalent of the feudal estate manager. As these farming examples suggest, the more things you measure, the more you can learn and the better you can do. Nevertheless, organizations sometimes grow so accustomed to a single measure that they may not realize the measure's limitations. Farm tractors cost a lot more now than they did in the 1930s, but they also do a lot more. If we measure by the rising cost of tractors relative to the thirties, a time when tractors were much simpler, we come to a discouraging conclusion. But measure by constant dollar cost of the tractor per acre plowed, and the results look great for the modern version. Feedback Nourishes Learning Although most people use measurements to improve their performance and that of their organizations, some people will draw incorrect conclusions from those measurements, especially if the initial feedback is negative. Instead of continuing to try to improve, they are defeated and give up. Instead, what you want to do is use measurements to isolate what is holding you back, change that factor, and get ready to enjoy exponential success. Michael Dell of Dell Computer Corporation has racked up sales of well over $10 billion a year--breathlessly--with impressive help from mail-order and telephone sales of Dell's superb personal computers. By being the innovator in direct sales over the telephone, Dell has had an advantage in understanding what personal computer users really want. Through this access, measurement of customer desires has driven a strategy years ahead of competitors in a highly competitive market so that Dell has emerged as the worldwide leader in personal computers in late 1998. But Andrew Grove, chairman of Intel, Dell, Bill Gates, and every other player fear the impact of that imponderable juggernaut, the Internet. For his part, Michael Dell is working to turn the Internet into a major part of the company's business. Dell and his team are spending a substantial amount of time figuring how to use the Internet to keep Dell Computer ahead of its telephone and mail-order rivals. Many believe malls will shrink in time as the Internet becomes the primary shopping center. That is not the only hazard in the high-tech world. Inventory can become obsolete overnight and cost the manufacturer millions of dollars, even threaten survival. Compaq, formerly the world's largest personal computer builder, is restructuring to build business computers only as they are ordered. Dell used this approach long before Compaq thought to copy the idea. As for IBM, its resellers are customizing individual machines for their customers. Stallbusters Becoming an effective stallbuster is greatly helped by becoming more productive in the most important things you do now. That will free up time to work on more productive areas and give you the personal experience to be an effective coach to others in your organization. Then, using the personal improvement measurements that you have succeeded with, you can help your organization transform itself. Use Measurements to Improve Your Own Effectiveness You need to apply the 2,000 percent solution of utilizing measurement in your own life before you can hope to do the same for an entire organization. Write down how you spend all of your time for a week. As you jot down what you are doing, put an assessment next to the time period stating how effective and productive you think the time spent was. At the end of the week, summarize where you were effective and where you were not. Ask yourself the following questions: How could I avoid having to do the least productive tasks at all in the future and get better results? Let us assume that you find you are checking up a lot on the work done by people who work with you. Are you doing this because you feel more comfortable doing this, because you find many errors, or because a procedure requires that you do this? If the problem is that there are a lot of errors, how can the errors be reduced so that you do not have to do this error checking? For example, can the work be done in a way where it will be automatically checked by a computer program before it arrives at your desk? Or, are the mistakes due to inadequate training or equipment? In either case, sit down with the people who are making the errors to find out how the errors can be eliminated while reducing the work involved. Better yet, first ask if the task needs to be done at all. If the answer is yes, can the task be simplified in ways that will make it easier to do in an accurate way? Then you should consider how the remaining work can be automated using standard software solutions. George Reiswig, former CFO at Perdue Farms, has reported great success with this approach. How else could I have gotten these tasks done to get better results in less time? In the meantime, perhaps you could have grouped all the checking together and done it at one time so you were more efficient. Or, alternatively, if the mistakes tend to be repeated ones, you could have checked the work in the beginning stages and corrected the errors then so that some repetitions could have been avoided. How could I delegate these tasks to others for better results? Who is better at error checking than you are? Who is better at finding ways to avoid errors in the first place than you are? How could I automate these tasks and achieve my purpose? If you are taking the information and simply putting it into another report, how could the report be generated automatically by the receipt of the information? What error-checking questions could be in the software? Why was I ineffective when that occurred? What are the lessons? Why was I effective when that occurred? What are the lessons? Time-Wasters
After you select the areas in which you want to improve, you need to begin regularly measuring what you do in these areas so that you can see how you are doing at improving. The following questions will help focus your improvements: How much time am I spending on these activities? As a rule of thumb, you should be trying to eliminate the least productive 25 percent of how you spend your time. As you repeat the process, you will actually be eliminating different activities each time. For most of us, less than a third of how we spend our time delivers almost all of our business effectiveness. The ratio may be even more skewed in your personal life. How am I spending the time I free up from this activity? It is terribly important that you swap the newly available time for a more productive activity, or you are fated to have to remove this new activity as well from your weekly schedule. Be sure to examine your activities overall to find important areas where you are spending either no time or too little time. A good example is time spent on furthering your own knowledge and education so that you can be more effective in your future work. What are the benefits from the shift in time application? The answer to this question is the acid test of the new time allocation. It will help you avoid the potential waste in shifting time that was discussed in conjunction with the previous question. What is the benefit to me from the activities I am measuring? This is a critical question. Only if you feel that you are benefiting from the changes will you find this process to be worthwhile enough to spend time on it. For example, a good personal benefit can be to reduce the number of times you have to stay late unexpectedly to work in the office. Having your workload more under control, more predictable, and potentially more portable are all benefits that can result from measuring your activities. What is the benefit to others from the activities that I am measuring? Be sure to include your family and friends in your answer, as well as those you work with. You may be surprised to see how much low-value activities are stealing time from those you care about. Use Measurements to Improve the Effectiveness of Others After you have finished your personal measurement exercises, you will be prepared to be a helpful coach to others. You need to have walked the talk before talking the walk to others will do any good. How can you get other people interested in measurements? Describe your own experiences with personal measurement to a few people you work with who are interested in improving personal effectiveness. Be sure to explain how large the benefits have been for you compared to the effort required so that a reasonable expectation will be established to pique curiosity. Many people find that this can be an important life-changing experience. You may even develop deeper, lasting friendships with those coworkers. A great way to open a discussion of measurement exercises is to explain how you felt when you were first asked to do them and what your concerns were, and then candidly describe what happened during and after you did the exercises. Ideally, the exercises have helped you so much that people who know you have already noticed a difference. Perhaps they have even asked you what caused you to make so many changes. If that happens, you have a great opportunity to tell them about your experience and encourage them to follow your example. How can you help other people through the measurement process? Encourage the individuals to follow the same process you used. Remind them of the idea from time to time, and update your experience for them. If you notice that they seem to be having trouble getting started, ask them what problems they are encountering. Then ask how you can help. Some people may simply need a "buddy" to help them. In that case, you could simply suggest that they drop by daily and work on the exercise with you for a while until they get the hang of it. Applaud those who do pursue the process, and encourage them to share the results with you. Give them lots of praise that you genuinely feel. In praising them, be sure to praise the goodwill being shown by trying, the effort they are expending, and the things they are doing well. If something is not to your liking, be sure not to criticize in that area. Instead, you can ask them questions they can answer themselves that might lead to improvements in that area. A good way to do this is to say, "That's an interesting idea you have there for saving time. I often find that the more ideas I come up with to save time, the more likely I am to find a really big time-saver. How many ideas can you think of?" How can the measurement message be spread even further? At whatever point colleagues have found this exercise to be valuable, begin to encourage them to pick some colleagues to coach, as well. Share with them your experiences in doing this type of measurement work with colleagues. If each person takes the time to help just a few others, these benefits can quickly be transferred to many people. If everyone made it a practice to follow this process over the course of a month, and then began to share it with one other person each month thereafter, the number of people who would be helped would grow rapidly because the number of people involved would double monthly:
Think how good it would feel to help that many people make large, important changes in their lives as a result of starting your measurement activity. And it would take less than two years to accomplish!
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